Legacy Traps: Why Family Businesses Fail and How to Protect Yours

Are you afraid the business will fracture your family? …or that the family will destroy the business?

Founders and family leaders eventually face the following tensions:

• Suffering the emotional burden of resolving disputes between those they love most.
• Fearing the business and wealth meant to provide security and well-being could instead become a source of conflict.
• Worrying that what they spent a lifetime building could be damaged or squandered by the very people they built it for through lifestyle, poor decisions, or lack of preparation.

These risks are real, but they are preventable. This book shows how.

For more than two decades, Alejandro Cárdenas Villa has studied family business failures across continents. Like high-reliability industries that learn from accidents to prevent catastrophes, he has identified the breakdowns that destroy relationships and value, and how to prevent or repair them when they occur.

In Legacy Traps, he introduces two original frameworks, the Legacy Matrix and the Tanker Model, to help families identify hidden vulnerabilities and install safeguards to protect relationships, businesses, and wealth from preventable harm.