THE SURVIVAL TEST
Building wealth is one challenge. Building something that survives you is another.
The Survival Test examines what happens to Black-owned businesses, wealth, intellectual property, real estate, cultural assets, and institutions when a founder dies, becomes incapacitated, retires, or simply leaves the room.
Through historical and contemporary case studies, we examine succession planning, estate structure, insurance, ownership, governance, institutional memory, family preparedness, and the mechanisms that determine whether an asset is transferred, diminished, sold—or disappears altogether.
The central BWO question is simple:
Did the wealth-producing machine survive the person who built it?
The goal isn’t merely to document what went wrong. It’s to identify what worked, what failed, what could have been done differently, and what today’s families, entrepreneurs, creators, and investors can learn from it.
Build it. Own it. Protect it. Transfer it.