If Your Assets Disappeared Tomorrow, Could Your People Rebuild?

My family's business story began in 1938.

The founders, including my father, started from almost nothing. They were not university graduates. Their formal education was limited, but they had intelligence, instinct, discipline and an extraordinary ability to learn by doing.

Then one decision changed the family's direction.

One member of the next generation wanted to study abroad.

At the time, this was a major step. The family was conservative, nobody had done it before, and sending a young member overseas for years was not an easy decision.

Eventually, they agreed.

He returned years later with more than a degree. He returned with a broader view of what the business could become.

He helped drive the move into manufacturing, including our own biscuit factory. He helped establish an international trading operation in London for machinery and raw-material procurement. Later came expansion into the Gulf and businesses in Saudi Arabia.

Looking back, education did not replace the founders' business instinct. It amplified it.

The founders proved capability can be built without degrees. The next generation proved education can multiply it.

Years later, my father gave me the same opportunity. I studied at the University of Southern California, then spent 28 years across manufacturing, international business and entrepreneurship.

My father also left us financial security.

But life taught me that financial security is never guaranteed.

I left the family group and became an entrepreneur. Later, the Yemen war and its consequences caused me to lose much of what I had built.

Much of the wealth disappeared.

My education did not.

My experience did not.

Neither did the judgment developed through responsibility, mistakes, negotiations, crises and losses.

For my children, the question is no longer simply:

How much can I leave them?

It is:

How capable can I make them if one day what I leave them disappears?

I believe every CEO should ask the same question about their organization.

Companies invest heavily in factories, technology, brands, systems and expansion. All are important.

But how much are we investing in the capability of the people responsible for protecting—and rebuilding—those assets?

Capability is not built through training courses alone.

It comes from education combined with responsibility, exposure, difficult assignments, decision-making, mistakes and accountability.

That applies at every level—from the operator and supervisor to the plant manager, department head and director.

Every person can become more capable—if someone deliberately invests in them.

Because resilience is not only what sits on the balance sheet.

It is also what remains in your people when circumstances take something else away.