Segment: Money in Your Bank Account is NOT Wealth - Watch This

What if the biggest difference between families who build wealth that lasts for generations and those who watch fortunes disappear within a single lifetime isn't how much money they accumulate, but understanding that wealth held in your personal name is far harder to transfer than wealth held in structures, that wealth unstructured will naturally get depleted, and that even major Nigerian banks that look like corporate giants today started as family businesses whose founders still hold significant stakes because they understood early that institutionalizing a business doesn't mean losing it? In this powerful and deeply insightful episode of Konnected Minds, we sit down with a wealth structuring expert who works across the African continent, and she reveals the uncomfortable truth about why you're only able to say let me just share my properties to everybody because we're talking a few properties here and how much do you have at stake really, why when you've built businesses that are institutionalized and have become so successful that you are a public interest entity even if not publicly listed you can't afford to just say you will that kind of business to a child, and why many major banks in Nigeria are family businesses at the core even though they've now taken those businesses public because those founders still have significant stakes in businesses that are so significant to the economy they should not go down. She breaks down why when you build wealth that has gotten to a certain level you will begin to think about sophisticated ways to ensure that thing perpetuates and is sustainable 100 years to come irrespective of who the owners are, why sometimes when you sell businesses there's so much money you can't chop it up before you die, why there's the opportunity of deciding to sell some of these things if you want but we're talking about transgenerational wealth here and if that is your goal then there is no shortcuts, and why you have to follow through the system and put the structures in place because wealth that is unstructured will naturally get depleted. But she also confronts the brutal reality of succession when children aren't interested. Why there's this family where none of the children is interested and they're all almost like a complete mess so the father is now grooming his nephew to try to see whether he'll be interested, why this problem is at the core of our culture and tradition and it's a huge problem for us, why Africans need to begin to take their minds away from this idea that family must run the business because it's not compulsory, and why we limit ourselves a lot if we fixate on the fact that my children have to run the business. She reveals the sophisticated approach that solves these problems. Why you should focus on building a business that is so structured and so well institutionalized that if you take it to any part of the world it can compete in terms of best practices, why you should bring in best in class experts to come and run the show while your children stay with ownership, why you should not allow a child that is not interested in your business to necessarily come and operate your business but give them ownership instead, and why they can be represented on the board in terms of decision making since the board is responsible for steering the direction while management is responsible to the board. She explains why if you have a governance system at the family level like a family council there is opportunity for the family during their meetings to have the businesses present the state of the business so they get to know what is going on, why this is a good structure for perpetrating wealth that does not necessarily put a chain on the children's neck that you must necessarily work in it, why if someone says all I want is just give me one million so that I can go and do my own project and then you can do your thing then it is what it is and let's not kill ourselves over the fact that children must be a part of it, and why if you find any of your children that is absolutely interested and willing to go through whatever they need to be schooled and experienced and they have the skill to grow the business then fantastic but if you don't have it then it is what it is but it doesn't mean the end of the business. But she also shares the fundamental truth about wealth and values. Why people should not think that because they have money today they're going to have money tomorrow because there's nothing sacrosanct in the fact that you have lots of money today, why the fact that you have a lot of money in your bank account is not automatically wealth because there are different types of wealth and what a lot of people focus on is financial wealth, why what really holds that wealth is the values, and why if you don't give your children the values that created that wealth in the first place that wealth is bound to be depleted it's just a matter of time. She reveals why wealth.