Niles Howard Private inquiry

Ghostwriter for founders and enterprising families

Documents transfer leadership. Narrative transfers judgment.

The practice

Succession plans answer every question except the ones your family will ask.

Ownership, taxes, timing, control — the plan accounts for all of it. Your family’s questions are different: why her and not me, why the company was kept or sold, what the work was for, what you intended for the people who helped you build it. The answers are not legal. They are a story.

The engagements are private, tailored, and built to endure. The method is the same — deep listening, open-ended discovery, a narrative in your own voice. What it becomes depends on what emerges.

The succession narrative

The working papers. Founder’s letters and private narratives that travel alongside the succession and estate plans — how the decisions were made, what the enterprise stands for, what stewardship requires. The context that makes the documents make sense.

The case for this work is made at length in The Second Ledger, a privately circulated monograph. Request a copy →

The memoir

The full account. A book-length collaboration — the arc of a life and an enterprise, shaped into something that will endure. Some become published books. Most are written for an audience of a dozen: the people who will inherit what you built.

Niles Howard

The collaborator

Telling the story was never the difficulty. Seeing it clearly is.

I grew up around people who built things — family businesses I watched rise, falter, and endure. The long days and the celebrations, the health scares and the exits. I learned early that a business is a life story wearing a balance sheet.

For twenty-five years I covered founders as a senior editor at Inc. and Money, and authored and edited special sections for The New York Times and Fortune. That work taught me one discipline above all: telling the difference between what happened and what mattered.

Now I put that discipline to work for founders and enterprising families — capturing the judgment, values, and hard-won perspective that no legal document can hold. That’s how experience becomes inheritance.

Don't Look Down! by Bob Campana with Niles Howard
“You turned my ideas, journey, and insights into a far better book than I could have written alone.”

— Bob Campana, author, Don’t Look Down!

When the time is right

It begins with a conversation about intent.

Not about format or length — about what the narrative needs to accomplish, and for whom.

Begin a confidential conversation →