He has told me that the business is on shaky ground and that he feels he has bitten off more than he can chew. Photograph: iStockUp until two years ago I lived abroad with my husband and our children. I had a part-time job
and my husband was managing a small subsidiary of the family firm. It was always the plan that we would return tofor the last five years of my father-in-law’s working life and that my husband would be trained into the full operations of the business before eventually taking over. I loved where we lived, but was always happy with this plan and confident in his ambitions. Four months after returning home, his father died suddenly and he was handed the keys to a large business, that he and generations before him had invested their lives in.