Vijaypath Singhania passed away last week at 87. He built Raymond into one of India’s most iconic brands, a name synonymous with quality, craft, and quiet pride for generations. He deserves to be remembered with deep respect and gratitude for what he created.
But his passing has brought back into public conversation a painful reality that many business families quietly live with – and very few talk about openly.
Succession Planning Is Not the Signing of a Will
Most founders believe they have planned well when they have decided who gets what. Shares distributed. Properties listed. Legal documents in place. Yet, something breaks. Something no legal document can protect.
True succession planning is a long, patient, deeply human process. It is about building – deliberately and consistently – a common value system in the next generation. It is not a transaction. Rather, it is a transfer of culture that gets carried into generations.
A balance sheet can be handed over in a boardroom. However, a legacy cannot.
A Legacy Is Built Through Values
A legacy is built over years through conversations at the dinner table, through the values a founder demonstrates every single day, and through the kind of human being the next generation watches and learns from. Therefore, if that foundation is not laid early, no amount of wealth transfer will hold the family or the institution together.
Succession Planning Is Not Tax Planning
And on this point, I want to be very direct. I say this not as commentary, but as a serious and considered observation drawn from decades of practice.
Succession planning is not tax planning. It is not about deciding which vehicle to park properties in, whether a trust in India or a holding structure overseas. Nor is it about asset allocation, infrastructure distribution, or the most efficient legal mechanism to transfer wealth across generations. Those are necessary conversations, yes. Nevertheless, they are the scaffolding, not the building.
What is truly being passed on, or tragically lost, is the goodwill built over generations. In addition, it includes the reputation earned through decades of trust with customers, employees, communities, and institutions. It also includes the invisible but irreplaceable value of a family name that stands for something. No trust deed protects that. Likewise, no shareholder agreement preserves it. Only people do. And only the right people, carrying the right values, can carry it forward.
The Patriarchal Assumption That Damages Businesses
Here lies one of the most serious and least discussed failings of Indian business families, the grip of a deeply patriarchal mindset that has, for far too long, gone unquestioned. The assumption, often unspoken and sometimes brutally explicit, that the eldest son inherits the power and control. Not the most capable son. Not the most prepared daughter. Not the one who has demonstrated judgment, humility, and genuine commitment to the enterprise. Simply the eldest son. By birth. By tradition. By default.
I have seen this play out, in family after family, with deeply damaging consequences. Younger sons of far greater ability, sidelined. Daughters of remarkable intelligence and drive overlooked entirely, as though they carry no claim to the institutions their families built.
The outcome is not merely personal tragedy. Instead, it is institutional failure. Businesses that took three generations to build have unravelled within a decade, not because of market forces or competition, but because the wrong person was handed the wheel, for entirely the wrong reasons.
India’s courtrooms, arbitration chambers, and unfortunately, its newspaper front pages, carry the evidence of this. The examples are recent. The lessons remain largely unlearnt.
What Successful Families Do Differently
Over three decades of advising some of India’s most respected business families on succession, I have observed one clear pattern. The families that navigate it well share a common thread. They started early, involved trusted advisors not merely for legal structuring but for honest, sometimes uncomfortable conversations, and kept the human being at the centre of the process.
Capability was assessed honestly. Merit mattered more than sentiment. As a result, the family held.
By contrast, the families that struggle almost always started too late or reduced the entire exercise to a legal and tax transaction. Sometimes, they simply assumed that tradition would serve as strategy. It never does.
Begin the Conversation Today
If you are a founder or a business leader reading this, do not wait for a trigger.
Instead, begin the conversation today. Involve your family. Involve people you trust. Most importantly, look honestly at who among the next generation carries the values, the temperament, and the vision to lead, regardless of birth order and regardless of gender. Build the values before you build the will.
The Only Legacy Worth Building
An empire built on wealth but not on shared values will crack, sooner or later. Ultimately, the greatest thing you can leave behind is not a company. It is a family that holds together after you are gone, and a business that continues to stand for something beyond profit.
That is the only legacy worth building.
The author is a senior corporate lawyer with over three decades of experience in M&A, JVs, and business succession planning. Author of GPS Paradigm for Successful Mergers, Acquisitions and Joint Ventures.