From Exit to Legacy

First Design the Life. Then Build the Wealth Strategy to Fund It.

In my previous article, The Post-Exit Blindspot: Why Founders Lose 30% of Their Wealth Early (and how to prevent it), I shared the five costliest investment fallacies founders fall for after selling their businesses. It addressed what not to do with your money. If you have not read it, I encourage you to do so—it can save you millions and years of regret.

Now that you know which mistakes to avoid, you may wonder: But how do I invest my wealth intelligently? This is what this article is about: What you want to do with your life—and how to build a wealth strategy that serves it.

The Missing Step

When I sold my first business at 25, I went straight from the closing table to the investment table. I never paused to ask: What do I actually want my life to look like? And what does that mean for my wealth?

I paid dearly for skipping that step. Not just in financial losses, but in years spent acting on seemingly attractive opportunities without a clear strategy.

After 25 years of consulting companies and investing—first as a portfolio manager at a Swiss asset management firm, then as the founder and investment manager of RICHTWERT CAPITAL on behalf of post-exit founders and business owners—I have come to realize that the single most important thing a founder can do after an exit is to think clearly about their life first. Then design a wealth strategy that enables and empowers it.

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Part I: The Life Strategy

Most founders never create a life strategy. It sounds abstract—even indulgent—when there are millions sitting in a bank account demanding attention. But every business you built began with a vision. You knew who it was for, why it mattered and what you were building. The strategy came from the purpose. Your post-exit life deserves the same clarity.

Without it, you are vulnerable to reacting to what is offered to you—private banking, private equity, an angel investment here, a board seat there—until you have committed your time, your capital, and your energy to a patchwork that looked impressive at first but has you locked into complex, illiquid and expensive structures that serve no deeper purpose.

In my conversations with founders over the years, the ones who navigate their exit most successfully tend to be clear about four things:

1. Purpose — What gets you out of bed?

After running a company, “retirement” is rarely the answer. The question is not “What will I do next?” but “What am I drawn to when no one is paying me and no one is watching?” If you are not sure yet, that is fine. The worst decision is to rush into something to fill the void.

I have seen founders accept board seats, invest in startups, or launch new ventures within weeks of their exit because sitting still felt unbearable. The discomfort of not having a clear next step is real. But the cost of filling it with the wrong thing is higher.

2. Freedom — How do you want to spend your time?

Think specifically: What does my ideal year, month, week look like? What am I working on and towards? How many days a week? Your time is precious! Your wealth strategy should protect and expand your freedom and not accomplish the opposite.

3. Health — The one asset you cannot compound

A founder who plans to live actively for another 40 years needs a fundamentally different strategy than one optimizing for the next 5. Your time horizon shapes everything—and your health determines your time horizon.

4. Relationships — The people who matter most

Selling a business changes every relationship. With your spouse, who may suddenly have you home all day. With your children, who may be approaching wealth with zero context for how it was created. With friends, some of whom will relate to you differently now.

The founders I admire most are deliberate about this. They invest time—not money—in the relationships they care about. They have honest conversations with their families about wealth, values, and expectations. They seek peer communities where they can speak openly without judgment. And they choose financial partners—not vendors—who treat them as partners, not asset pools to be managed.

One partner once told me something I have never forgotten: “After the exit, I had more money and less clarity than at any point in my life. The people who helped me most were not the ones with the best investment ideas. They were the ones who asked me the right questions.” That is what a life strategy does. It forces the right questions before the money forces the wrong answers. If I had to summarize it: Decide what a good life looks like for you—specifically—and write it down. Then protect it.

It does not need to be a 50-page document. It can be a single page. But it must be honest, it must be specific, and it must be yours. Not your banker’s projection, not your advisor’s recommendation, not what other successful founders are doing. Once you have this clarity, everything else follows. Including—especially—your wealth strategy.

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Part II: The Wealth Strategy

The Math Most Founders Never See

Assume you have €10 million of investable capital. Entrust it to a conventional wealth manager charging you 1–1.5% and costing you 2–3% annually once all costs are included, invested in a balanced portfolio returning 6–7% gross. Subtract fees, costs and taxes, and your net return is roughly 2–4% per year—€200,000–€400,000 depending on your tax domicile.

That is a good life. It is not the one most founders imagine when they picture €10 million. Consider what this means over two decades:

Impact of 2% annual costs on a $10M portfolio over 20 years. The grey area represents wealth consumed by costs—more than the entire original investment.

Over 20 years, the difference between compounding at 7% versus 5% is staggering: Your portfolio reaches approximately €38.7 million before costs, but only €26.5 million after costs. That is more than €12 million consumed by costs alone—more than your entire original capital. Money that would have compounded for you was extracted by managers and banks who promised you exclusive access and made you feel you had earned a seat at a table others can’t reach.

The levers for intelligent investing are clear: 1) you can compound your wealth longer, 2) you can earn higher gross returns, 3) you can lower the costs. Here is a 3-step process to achieve all three.

Step 1: Have the Right Principles for Intelligent Investing

Five principles guide every successful wealth strategy:

1. Time horizon is key

   
   

The clearer you define your purpose, what freedom means to you, how you will maintain your health, and how you will invest in your relationships, the more time you will likely have to live and invest. This is why the life strategy must come first. Attempt to lengthen your time horizon—and invest accordingly.

2. Understand risk

   
   

Volatility is not risk—it is opportunity. Real risk is the permanent loss of capital and purchasing power. It stems from not knowing what you are doing and has nothing to do with volatility.

Yet investors routinely mistake price fluctuations for danger, and they pay a very high price for the illusion of safety and comfort.

When you combine this distinction with a long time horizon, temporary price declines become exactly what they are: temporary—and often attractive moments to invest more.

3. Protect first, then grow

   
   

You do not need to take excessive risk to generate attractive returns. Benjamin Graham put it best: “An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.” This distinction matters enormously.

4. Foundation matters

   
   

Always set aside enough to cover known needs and emergencies so you are free to invest the rest well. This is the bedrock of sound wealth management—and it leads directly to the pillar architecture I will describe in step 2.

5. Make capital work

   
   

Anything not needed for living expenses and emergencies can and should be invested as productively as possible.

These proven principles are simple but not easy to implement because we are often driven by our emotions. Hope, over-confidence, envy and fear are common but dangerous emotions in investing. Even when we have set a long-term strategy, it is easy to become short-sighted with all the news and events we are bombarded with, especially when they move our investments up or down significantly. If you feel these principles will be difficult to adhere to, find a professional you trust to do that for you (see How To Spot the Exceptional Manager You Can Trust).

Step 2: The Pillar Architecture

The following pillar architecture enables you to put the principles into practice.

Pillar 1 — “Living + Rainy Days”

Set aside 18–24 months of living expenses plus known financial needs within 2-3 years. Keep it mostly in cash and partly in short-term government bonds backed by a strong country. This war chest provides security so the rest of your capital can compound without the pressure of short-term needs—preventing the single most expensive mistake: forced selling during a downturn.

Pillar 2 — “Long-Term Compounding”

Everything not needed for Pillar 1 belongs here. It comprises four components: an actively managed concentrated portfolio of attractively valued superior businesses, a passive and widely diversified portfolio, the family home you live in (not real estate that you buy solely as an investment), and short- and medium-term bonds when they offer reasonable returns.

Whether you manage this yourself or outsource depends on how you defined your life strategy. Depending on your life ambitions, managing wealth well can require a substantial amount of determination, time and effort to learn, build expertise, and maintain continuously. It is a serious commitment, not a hobby.

If your life strategy calls for freedom, or your purpose lies elsewhere than financial management, or if you have doubts that you can stick to the right investment principles, outsourcing makes sense (see How To Spot the Exceptional Manager You Can Trust).

Either way, your capital must be protected from permanent loss, compound well over time, and not cost you excessive time, effort, or money to manage.

Pillar 3 — “Opportunistic Ventures”

This is an optional, small satellite—capped at 10%—for founders who still want to build. Reserve it for your new venture or angel investments where you have deep and unique expertise to significantly increase the chance of success. One non-negotiable rule: private deals are funded only from Pillar 3. If it is empty, you pass. This prevents seemingly exciting long-shots from cannibalizing reliable long-term compounding in Pillar 2.

Step 3: The Annual Rebalancing Review

Post-Exit founders face the same core tension: they need to replace their income stream to support their new life, yet they also want their capital to compound over the long-term. As I outlined in The Post-Exit Blindspot: Why Founders Lose 30% of Their Wealth Early under “Fallacy 5: Dividends Are My New Paycheck”, the instinct to avoid selling assets often leads them to overallocate to income-distributing assets. This comes at the expense of long-term compounding, as these assets typically offer limited reinvestment opportunities and therefore lower growth potential.

A better approach to securing reliable income while compounding wealth long-term is systematic rebalancing between pillars to keep the architecture aligned with your life and remove emotion from the equation. Here is how it works in practice:

The Review

Every year, check: Has your life strategy changed? Is Pillar 1 sufficient? How have Pillar 2’s components performed?

The Harvest

If some of the components in Pillar 2 have gained, you realize a portion of the gains to replenish Pillar 1. This way you continue to sleep well and avoid forced selling.

The Shield

If nothing has gained, live off Pillar 1. That is what the war chest is for—18–24 months of runway that shields you from being forced to sell at unreasonably low prices.

The Last Resort

If after two years everything is still underwater, sell from whichever component of Pillar 2 that is least undervalued—typically bonds. This way, you avoid selling businesses even in prolonged downturns.

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How To Spot the Exceptional Manager You Can Trust

Most managers charge 1–2% regardless of performance, manage multiple strategies to maximize the assets they manage and thereby fee income, spread capital across dozens and dozens of investments to avoid deviating far from benchmarks, and have no or little personal capital at risk. The result: market-average returns before fees, below-average returns after fees.

To spot the rare manager who is different, ask four questions:

1. How many strategies does your firm manage?

More than one means they are in the business of maximizing assets and fees for themselves, but not in the business of maximizing investment success for you.

2. How much of your own money is invested in the same strategy?

Less than 50% of their private capital means they do not believe in it themselves. Why should you?

3. What do you charge if performance is low, zero, or negative?

Fixed fees, regardless of performance, mean they make money off of you, not with you.

4. Who makes the decisions—and how?

Above-average returns require decisions that are both correct and different. Teams/committees produce lukewarm consensus, not conviction. Look elsewhere.

If they cannot explain to you simply how they decide, or if their answer is macro-analysis or vague, rest assured, they do not have a competitive edge and look elsewhere.

It is remarkable how rarely these questions are asked—and how revealing the answers are.

Why RICHTWERT Is Different

I designed RICHTWERT as the opposite of the conventional model because I experienced the flaws and the conflicts of interest in investment management firsthand.

Skin in the Game

I have invested and continue to invest nearly my entire personal and family net worth in the same portfolio I manage for our partners. One portfolio. My best ideas. In it together.

Win-Win Partnership

No fees. We earn 25% of annual profits exceeding 6%. If we do not deliver at least 6% per year, you do not pay us anything.

Business-Owner Mindset

I invest in 8-15 attractively valued exceptional businesses and hold them for as long as it makes business sense to let time and compounding do the work.

This is fundamentally different from what you get from other managers: By ensuring you set aside enough in Pillar 1 for living and rainy days, I deliberately reduce the capital you can entrust to me at RICHTWERT and the amount of money I can make with you in the short-term. In return I give you and me peace of mind to ignore short-term noise and the ups and downs no one can predict. I give us the freedom to invest the remainder that you can allocate to Pillar 2 for the long-term in the best businesses when they are attractively valued. This lengthens your time horizon, allows you to compound for longer, and increases your potential to earn higher gross returns.

Bringing It Together

You spent years or decades building a business. You earned your wealth the hard way. You deserve a wealth strategy that works as hard for you as you worked for it—structured to protect your life strategy, managed by someone who wins only when you win, and built on the understanding that your capital exists to serve your life, not the other way around.

That is what I built RICHTWERT to be. Not for everyone. For the few who think this way.

If you are navigating your own exit, I would be glad to hear from you.

Bahram Assadollahzadeh, CFA®