Building Female Legacies for the Modern Woman.
I believe women should learn to get their female children involved in the careers or businesses they do. Not the typical helping you out in your shop with sales, deliveries and stockkeeping.
I’m talking about the way men plan and build empires, raising sons to inherit them, women should do likewise.
It’s not enough to build a legacy, hiding behind a husband, the man retires or dies, your son rises and thinks the father is the owner of the business, retires you and pays you salary. It’s even worse when the home they grew up in was built through your sweat and now you are a prisoner in your own home to your own son.
That shouldn’t be your end.
My mother was a lecturer, passed on while in service. She loved education and desired it to the core.
As my siblings and I were entering those terrifying teenage years, those years you actually dared to challenge what your mother told you to do, I remember a sad occasion that transpired between one of my siblings and my mother.
I can’t remember the details of what my mother said to this my sibling but, it was obvious she demanded my sibling should do something my sibling didn’t want to do. The next thing I heard my sibling reply was “You cannot tell me what to do. Only Daddy can. After all, you are a housewife.”
My mother stood there in shock. I was shocked too. I saw the sadness sweep over her face, and she immediately walked off to her room.
I immediately told my sibling, “Mummy is not a housewife. She is a lecturer with other side businesses.”
In primary 3, if you read any of those Macmillian English textbooks with those essays that starts with “Edet lives in Calabar, he is eight years old…”, I wrote essays like that spelling out my mother as a housewife.
I don’t blame this my sibling, I myself didn’t know initially. As the oldest one, I was quick to observe things that showed me what she does which my sibling hadn’t paid attention to before this incident.
Our primary school started assembly by 7:30 a.m. every school day. My father fixed most of his lectures to take advantage of the morning school runs, while my mother fixed hers much later in the day. So, we never saw her hurry and worry, nor scurry and flurry us to school because she had to meet her lecture times. We didn’t even know about her lecturing job.
How some of us found out was deeply unsettling and that experience has stayed with me.
It taught me that it is not enough for a woman to build something. The people who come after her must know that she built it.
Your daughter should know what you do. She should know what you own. She should know what you are building.
She should understand the work, the decisions, the sacrifices, the money, the people and the systems behind it.
You are not building for just your life, you are building to transcend generations and if she doesn’t know, someone else will tell your story to her.
How Do You Build this Legacy I speak of.
→ Sit down and design the careers or businesses you want to build. State the important roles your successor needs to hold to ensure the legacy stands and does not leave the family.
→ Document what you know. Create a family/business legacy manual. Write down the history of the business, important relationships, suppliers, clients, investments, properties, proper secure-access systems and access procedures, financial principles, mistakes you have made, lessons you have learnt and the decisions your successor may one day have to make. Don’t leave the next generation to reconstruct your life’s work from scraps after you are gone.
→ Create a curriculum for succession. Map out the education, training and practical experiences, at appropriate ages, that your successor needs to go through to be prepared to take over and succeed you in that business. Don’t just depend on your country’s educational system.
→ Get your children involved early in what you do. Tell them. Don’t assume they are too young to know. They understand things faster than you think.
→ On holidays or breaks, take them to your office or site or wherever your business or career is located. If you are the owner of the business, build a “bring-your-child-to-work” day into your business operations. This is not a day-care centre. It is a day where you and your staff can bring your teenage children to work and show them how the office or business operates.
→ Give them responsibility. Give each of them a task or role to fulfil. Pick the successor for each of your businesses and groom that person all the way. Don’t wait until they are old and foist your idea or business down their throat.
→ They are still at liberty to set up other businesses of their own as they please, but your legacy business should be able to stand beyond your life.
→ Teach them the difference between working in the business and owning the business. Let them understand how ownership is structured, what assets belong to the business, what assets belong to you personally, and how those assets are meant to pass to the next generation.
→ And succession does not necessarily mean giving your business to the eldest child. Choose based on capability, character, interest and preparation. Someone can inherit ownership without necessarily being the person who manages the business.
→ Plan your retirement effectively. Know exactly how much it costs you to care for yourself, travel, feed and clothe yourself annually, and set that amount aside. Your retirement should not depend on the next generation having to sell or dismantle what you spent your life building.
→ Protect the legacy with proper estate planning. Don’t think only about writing a Will. Depending on your circumstances, a properly structured trust, Will and other ownership arrangements can help determine who controls your assets, who benefits from them and how they are managed after you are gone. Get proper legal and tax advice before setting this up.
→ Finally, teach them how to create wealth of their own. Legacy should not become a dependency programme. Your daughter should be capable of building her own wealth while understanding and preserving what you built before her.
A legacy is not just what you leave behind. It is what continues because you prepared someone to carry it. Like a relay race, you don’t just run your lap. You prepare the next person to take the baton.
You feel me?
