The day I sold my company, I thought I was free. Then I found I had only started learning

JMarc,

I promised you this letter a long time ago.

You never pushed me whenever we met. You just smiled and said to write it when I could, because this kind of thing can’t be hurried.

This morning I made a pot of tea in my study. For the first time I wasn’t thinking about the company, the children or the next meeting. I just thought: all right, today I can write.

That year, I thought I had “made it”

The company was acquired that year. On the day I signed, I neither cried nor laughed. I expected some powerful emotion: more than twenty years of work, hundreds of sleepless nights, countless cash flow crises I thought I wouldn’t survive. All of it, under one stroke of a pen, became a number.

That number was more than RM 80,000,000.

But strangely, when I got home that night my wife was already asleep. I sat alone on the sofa and opened a bottle of red I had kept for ten years. At the first sip, a very unfamiliar feeling came over me:

“What now?”

For twenty years I had been used to solving problems: finding customers, hiring, chasing orders, cutting costs, carrying the cash flow. Every day I woke up with a hundred things to do.

But that night, for the first time, I had more money in my account than I could spend. And then I found that I didn’t know what to do next.

I thought money meant freedom. I was wrong

In the first three months, I did everything people do when they suddenly have money.

• Bought a very expensive car, drove it for two weeks, and felt nothing much
• Someone introduced me to a mining project, “30% a year”
• Someone introduced me to Hong Kong property, “absolutely inflation-proof”
• A bank relationship manager asked me to dinner three times in one week
• Certain relatives suddenly took a great interest in me

JMarc, I’ll be honest. During that time, inside, I was panicking.

Everyone told me it was a rare opportunity, and every project looked professional. But I didn’t know who to trust, or what I myself truly wanted.

In business, my judgement is sharp. But facing my own money, I had suddenly become a beginner.

The day Old Zhou introduced you to me

Old Zhou (you know him) asked me out for tea one day.

He listened to me complain for half an hour, and then said just one thing:

What you need isn’t someone selling you products. You need someone who first hears out all your questions, and then helps you work out the order.

And he gave me your number.

At our first meeting you didn’t open any PowerPoint or talk about any product. You just asked me three questions:

• Who do you want this money to support?
• In ten or twenty years, what kind of life do you want your family to have?
• If you could make no more decisions from tomorrow, who should decide about this money, and by what standard?

On the drive home that day, I had to stop at the side of the road.

Because I realised I could not answer a single one of those three questions.

We spent three months without buying a policy or investing a cent

For the next three months, you didn’t talk to me about “products” at all.

What we did sounded rather “soft”:

• Laid out every asset on one sheet: liquid, illiquid, overseas, in trust, in my wife’s name
• Listed the family’s real risks: my parents’ medical care, the children’s education, my wife’s retirement, my own health
• Wrote down what I wanted to do over the next 20 years: start another business? Philanthropy? Where should the children study?
• Planned, item by item, for “what if I were gone tomorrow”

In the third month, you handed me a document.

You said this was my Investment Policy Statement. From then on, every decision had to be checked against it.

Only then did I understand: what you gave me wasn’t a portfolio. It was a mirror.

That document saved me twice

The first time, someone came to sell me a “can’t-lose” private placement at 22% a year. The old me might well have gone in.

But I held it up against the document. It didn’t fit my liquidity principle, it didn’t fit my risk budget, and it didn’t fit my rule of “no investing in industries I don’t understand”.

I didn’t invest. Six months later, that project ran into trouble.

The second time, my eldest son said he wanted to start his own business, and asked to borrow RM 3 million from me.

In the past, something like this would have turned into a heated family argument.

But that time, my wife, my son and I sat down together and opened the document.

We weren’t discussing “should a father lend money to his son”. We were discussing which part this money should come from, whether it should be a loan or equity, and how to structure it so he takes responsibility without turning the family into a matter of favours.

As my son left that day, he said to me:

Dad, I never thought our family could talk about money like this.

Only later did I understand what you said

You once told me something I didn’t quite understand at the time:

The more money you have, the fewer decisions you need to make, but each one weighs more.

I thought you were telling me not to invest recklessly.

Now I understand. You were talking about restraint.

A truly mature holder of wealth is not someone hunting for new opportunities every day. It is someone who says “no” to 99% of opportunities every day, and does the remaining 1% as well as it can be done.

Now

Now we have coffee once a quarter. You open the investment committee report, updated each quarter, and what we discuss isn’t what went up or down.

We discuss whether this quarter has drifted from the original route, whether there are new family circumstances to take in, whether anything has changed in the children’s plans.

JMarc, let me say something from the heart:

What I am most grateful for isn’t how much that money later grew.

It is that from the year I met you, I stopped losing sleep over this money every night.

After twenty years in business I thought I understood “management”. But you made me see that managing a company and managing a family’s wealth are two completely different things.

The first takes “attack”. The second takes “quiet”.

— A founder who has only just learned to make peace with money
[Name withheld · Shared with the client’s consent · Translated from the Chinese original]