Seven Domains of the Family Business: The Journey to a Multigenerational Legaacy

Your family built something extraordinary. But without a plan, everything they sacrificed could be lost in a generation.

You have seen it happen. A thriving business, a united family — and then one death, one dispute, one divorce, and the cracks appear. Within years, the business the founder poured their life into is fractured, sold, or gone entirely. The family along with it.

It does not have to end that way.

The Seven Domains of the Family Business is the essential guide for family businesses who want to break the pattern — and build something that lasts beyond the founder, beyond the second generation, beyond the third.

Written by Ria Mankee-Sookram — Attorney-at-Law, Mediator, and Family Business Advisor — this is not a textbook. It is the book she wished existed when she sat across the table from families navigating the most difficult moments of their lives: the sudden death of a patriarch with no will. The siblings who stopped speaking over a shareholders' agreement. The founder who could not let go. The divorce that threatened to unravel three generations of wealth.

Every family business faces the same seven defining events. Most are unprepared for any of them.

The Seven Domains maps each one — and shows you exactly what to do:

• Death — Estate planning and ownership succession: what happens to everything you built when you are no longer here
• Duration — Governance and life cycle: how to build a business that outlasts its founder across every generation
• Departure — Leadership succession and exit: how to hand over power without destroying the business or the family
• Disruption — Risk, resilience and entrepreneurship: how family businesses survive crises and seize what others miss
• Disputes — Communication and conflict resolution: how to stop disagreements becoming disasters
• Divorce — Asset protection and partnership breakdown: what happens to the business when a marriage ends
• Debilitation — Health and wellbeing: the dimension every family business ignores until it is too late

Around the world, a proverb says the same thing in different languages: shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. Wealth built by one generation, spent by the next, gone by the third. This book exists to prove that proverb wrong.

Whether you are the founder who has not yet planned, the next generation waiting for clarity, or the advisor sitting across the table from a family in crisis — this book gives you the framework, the tools, and the language to build a multigenerational legacy.

The best time to prepare was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.