The Ninety Days Nobody Talks About
A Jaipur manufacturing family sells the business their grandfather built — and learns that the first ninety days after a liquidity event are decided by the boring risks they close before deploying a rupee, not by the deals they chase.
Charlie Munger liked to say that if he knew where he was going to die, he'd just never go there. Most of what he taught over sixty years was some version of that joke stated seriously: figure out the ways this goes wrong, and spend your energy avoiding those, rather than chasing the ways it might go spectacularly right.
This family sold a manufacturing business their grandfather had started. The deal closed in early 2025, in the middle of an oil price spike, with the rupee under real pressure. One day they were running a company. The next, three generations of operating discipline had turned into a single large number in a bank account, and every relationship banker in the country had a very confident idea of where it should go next.
What's the stupidest, most avoidable way this family could lose a meaningful chunk of what they just built, in the next eighteen months? Write that list first. Everything else comes after.
The instinct in the room was to deploy fast. I understand the instinct — cash sitting still feels like a mistake to people who've spent their careers compounding a business. But Munger's whole method was to run the instinct backward before acting on it. Instead of asking where this capital should go, we asked a blunter question: what's the stupidest, most avoidable way this family could lose a meaningful chunk of what they just built, in the next eighteen months? Write that list first. Everything else comes after.
The boring list
The list wasn't complicated. Deploying in a rush, before anyone had agreed who actually had authority to decide. Sitting in a single currency at a genuinely volatile moment because nobody got around to addressing it. Having no liquidity buffer wide enough to survive a bad quarter without becoming a forced seller. None of these are exotic risks. They're the ordinary, boring ways that families with real wealth end up with meaningfully less of it — not through some dramatic error, but through simple sequencing mistakes made while everyone was excited.
Close the risks, then deploy
So before a rupee moved, we closed each one. Settled decision authority across the next generation, in writing, before anyone needed it settled under pressure. Addressed the currency concentration directly rather than assuming it would sort itself out. Built a liquidity ladder wide enough that no oil shock or rate move could put a gun to the family's head. Only once those were closed did we deploy — in tranches, across geographies, with a modest allocation to gold and real assets held deliberately as ballast.
The lower bar most families don't clear
Munger used to point out that it's remarkable how much advantage comes simply from not being stupid, rather than from being especially brilliant. Nothing about what we did here was clever. Eighteen months later, the capital is fully deployed, the governance structure has already survived one real disagreement over a follow-on investment without anyone needing to raise their voice, and the family didn't lose anything to the ordinary mistakes that catch almost everyone else in the first year after a sale. That's a lower bar than it sounds. Most families don't clear it.