My father refuses to discuss succession. Where do we start?
Not with death, and not with documents. A founder who will not discuss wills will usually still discuss key-man risk, because that is an operating problem, not a mortality problem. The first artifact to aim for is not a trust — it is a one-page answer to the question 'who signs, if you are in hospital for a month.' In the succession research on Chinese family firms (Fan and Bennedsen; 217 listed companies in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore), roughly 60% of firm value evaporated around handovers — and the loss traced to untransferable founder capital: relationships, reputation, authority. That transfer takes years of conversation. The silence, not the spending, is what the statistics are measuring.
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Why the direct approach fails
In most of the families this site covers, raising wills reads as raising death — and raising death reads as disloyalty or greed. The refusal is cultural, not personal. Pushing harder on the same door produces the silence every disputed estate in our case files shares: everything stayed in the founder's head until probate said it out loud.
A sequence that works
One: the incapacity question — 'who signs if you are in hospital for a month' — is operational, answerable, and legitimizes everything that follows. In Singapore its formal instrument is the Lasting Power of Attorney; every jurisdiction we cover has an equivalent.
Two: the key-person audit — which licenses, credit lines, and relationships exist only in the founder's name. This surfaces the untransferable capital while the founder can still transfer it.
Three: only then, the documents — will, nominations, structures. By this point the conversation is about continuity of the business, which is a subject a builder will discuss with pride rather than dread.
What an heir may legitimately ask
You are not entitled to read the will. You are entitled to ask whether one exists, where it is held, and who the executor is — questions about the family's preparedness, not its contents. Wanting clarity about your position is stewardship, not greed; every adviser worth the name will tell the founder the same.