In 169 the Roman treasury was empty, the plague was in its third year, and Marcus Aurelius had an army on the Danube to pay. He auctioned the imperial property rather than raise the tax. The historian Michael Kulikowski calls it the only alternative he had, which is another way of saying he chose who would pay.
Dikaiosyne, the Stoic word for justice, is a ledger rather than a feeling. It records what you owe, to whom, and in what order.
Nobody keeps that ledger in a good year.
On 19 August, UOB, RHB Bank and Genesis Alternative Ventures put up a S$60 million delayed-drawdown facility so that Timah Partners can buy Singapore SMEs, one after another, from founders who have no successor. Kroll acts as facility and security agent.
In July the firm made its first acquisition inside a specialised waste platform, a sector that turns over close to S$400 million a year in Singapore and is made almost entirely of small owner-operated firms.
Here is the sentence you will reach for first, and it is close enough to true to sting. Three lenders will underwrite sixty million to buy the business you built, and your own bank will make you argue for a working-capital line to grow it.
That sentence is true, and it is a claim about what you are owed.
That sentence is true, and it is a claim about what you are owed.
The Stoic ledger opens further up the page. Its first entries are people.
The people who have been on your payroll for eighteen years are the first entry. Their employment currently depends on a business whose ordering, pricing and key customer relationships route through your phone, which is a fact about your habits rather than about them.
The second entry is the person who takes over. Timah runs a CEO Succession Programme to train mid-career professionals to lead the businesses it buys, which is worth reading twice. Somebody has built a training pipeline for the successor you did not name.
The third entry is the customer who assumed you would always be there. Timah’s founder, Dennis Chua, described the sector as essential businesses that keep Singapore clean and safe, run by founders whose customers depend on them. That dependence is a debt, whether or not it appears anywhere in your accounts.
So the work is specific, and none of it is interesting.
Books a stranger can read in a week without calling you. Written procedures for the three things only you know how to do.
Revenue that arrives when your phone is off. A named second who has already made a decision you did not countersign.
The buyer’s checklist and the successor’s checklist are the same document, and only one of them is optional.
You do this whether or not you ever sell. That is the whole point. The buyer’s checklist and the successor’s checklist are the same document, and only one of them is optional.1
Marcus sold the palace furniture because the alternative put the cost of his war on provinces that had not chosen it, and he could see the invoice going out with his name on it.
The banks owe you nothing. Ask instead what your name is still holding up, and who is standing underneath it.
Footnotes
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A permanent holder never faces a fund clock, which is the pitch. It also never faces the discipline of having to sell, which is the objection nobody raises in the room. ↩