This is how you build a second engine for your wealth
Mats Kramer
7 augustus 2026
6 min read
This is how you build a second engine for your wealth
How to Turn One Successful Business into Wealth That Stands on Multiple Legs, Inspired by the World’s Wealthiest Families
Open your net worth statement. You’ll see your shares, bonds, savings, and perhaps some real estate. What you won’t see is your largest position. Because it’s not listed there: your own business.
And that position is fully concentrated, difficult to sell on any given day, and directly tied to your income. Three characteristics you would never advise a client to combine in a single investment. Yet that’s exactly how it works for most entrepreneurs.
Your business is not just an investment. It’s your identity. And that’s precisely where the risk lies.
The position you can’t rebalance
For an entrepreneur, a business is more than just wealth. It is also your human capital: your time, your income, your network, often your pension, and not infrequently the property you operate from. Your financial capital and your human capital are concentrated in the same sector and on the same square of the board.
When your industry faces headwinds, everything tends to move in the wrong direction at once. Your revenue declines, the value of your business falls, and your largest asset drops alongside it. And unlike a listed stock, you can’t simply reduce that position. A private company cannot be sold within a trading day. You remain invested until you decide otherwise, and the market rarely chooses that moment with you.
What appears on your net worth statement is often only the tip of the iceberg.
The only free lunch in the financial world
Harry Markowitz showed in 1952 what the way out is. Part of the risk in a portfolio can be eliminated through diversification at no cost, as long as your assets do not all decline at the same time. That idiosyncratic risk, the risk tied to a single position, disappears. Systematic market risk remains.
That is why diversification is often called the only free lunch in investing: less risk without having to give up a proportional amount of return. And the key is not the number of investments you own. It is whether they move together. Ten positions that are all tied to your industry are not diversification. They are the same bet made ten times.
Why concentration feels so logical
You backed yourself, and for good reason. That conviction to invest everything in your own business is exactly what enabled it to grow. It is not a weakness; it is the driving force behind every successful company. Investing in what you know best, control directly, and truly believe in is entirely logical.
The only caveat is structural, not personal. That same drive keeps your wealth pointed in a single direction. And it reinforces itself quietly over time. Every successful year added more wealth to the same bucket, not because of a poor decision, but simply because that is where the returns accumulated.
Concentration is therefore not a mistake you made. It is the natural result of doing something exceptionally well.
“My business is the best investment I know” is, in many cases, simply true from a return perspective. The only thing that statement leaves open is what happens when the unexpected occurs. And that is not a judgment about your business. It is a question about your diversification.
“A wealth that lasts for generations never stands on one leg.”
Investor Relations Manager
The insider who voted with his portfolio
Look at those who understood this better than anyone else. Bill Gates built one of the most valuable companies in history. His portfolio evolved from being 100% invested in Microsoft stock in 1994 to a diversified mix that included hotels, railroads, and more than 270,000 hectares of farmland by 2021. Today, only about 1% of his wealth remains invested in Microsoft, with the rest spread across a wide range of assets. His land holdings are so extensive that he has become the largest private landowner in the United States. That real estate was deliberately retained as a way to diversify a portfolio that had become too heavily concentrated in technology.
If even the ultimate insider does not translate conviction into complete concentration, then diversification is not a sign of lacking faith in your own business. It is simply good business sense.
The Dutch dynasty that saw it in time
Then came the internet. C&A’s growth slowed. A family whose wealth was entirely tied to textiles could have been pulled down along with the chain. That didn’t happen. The rise of e-commerce pushed the Brenninkmeijers further down the path of diversification, with the real estate company Redevco emerging from C&A’s property division. Together with the investment firm Bregal, the clothing business became just one of several sources of income.
When the core business was disrupted, the other pillars supported the dynasty. Their real estate holdings did not move in lockstep with the challenges facing the retail sector. That was the whole point. They built their second pillar before it became necessary, and that is precisely why it worked.
Why real estate, and why only one leg
Real estate plays a leading role in both of these stories, and that is no coincidence. It is tangible, it generates rental income, and that income follows its own logic, independent of your order book.
How real estate value is determined
The valuation formula is simple. A property’s value is determined by dividing its annual rental income by its required rate of return.
Example of a real estate valuation calculation
| Annual rental income | € 100.000 |
| Market yield | 7,25% |
| Value | Approximately € 1.380.000 |
That value comes from rental income, not from your quarterly results. Financing can amplify that effect, although leverage works just as strongly in the opposite direction when conditions turn against you. Fair is fair.
But pay attention, because this is not a minor detail: real estate is an answer, not the answer. A wealth portfolio that lasts for generations never stands on one leg. Real estate alongside equities, alongside fixed-income investments, alongside your business for as long as it continues to perform.
From entrepreneur to wealth manager
There comes a point when your most important job is no longer entrepreneurship, but capital allocation. Gates did it through his investment vehicle, the Brenninkmeijers through theirs. Two completely different fortunes, the same transition: from builder to steward of a diversified architecture of income streams.
An open-ended fund fits that philosophy because it never stands still. Throughout its lifetime, it continues to acquire, improve, and enhance properties, with trading windows approximately every six weeks that allow investors to enter and exit. Every acquisition and every rental increase contributes to the overall value of the portfolio. Beneath that real estate, Benkey also builds multiple layers of protection, from diversification across property types and locations to a deliberately conservative level of leverage. Not a guarantee, but a buffer.
You have already proven that you can build. The more difficult question is whether you are structuring that wealth in a way that can outlive you.
An entrepreneur thinks in projects. A wealth manager thinks in decades. And that transition begins with the position that appears on no balance sheet.
The transition begins with understanding what is not yet visible on your balance sheet. Curious about how you can structure your wealth across multiple pillars? We would be happy to show you how we approach this within the Benkey Real Estate Fund. Would you like to discuss it further? Feel free to contact us or schedule a no-obligation appointment.
