The next chapter for self-made women

Women are increasingly becoming the first generation in their families to create significant wealth, say Leigh Crossman and Nichole Maroun, Portfolio Management, Anchor Capital.

Globally and in South Africa (SA), more women are building substantial wealth through businesses, careers and investments, becoming active creators of both personal and generational prosperity. This represents a significant shift in the global wealth landscape. It also raises an important question: once you have built significant wealth, how do you protect it, grow it and make it last? The skills and mindset that create wealth are not always the same as those required to manage it.

In SA, the entrepreneurial appetite among women is particularly notable. According to Mastercard EEMEA Research, SA women display an intensely proactive drive toward self-made wealth. Around 57% of SA women identify as entrepreneurs, comfortably outperforming the broader regional average of 51% across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Globally, the numbers tell a similar story. The Hurun Richest Self-Made

Women in the World 2026 report identified 150 self-made women billionaires, the highest number in the ranking’s 15-year history and twice as many as a decade ago. Collectively, they hold US$470bn in wealth, up 52% since 2023.

However, these data are about more than billionaires. They reflect a broader shift towards women becoming the first generation in their families to build meaningful wealth and increasingly having to navigate what comes next.

Being first can bring a particular challenge: there is no established playbook for what comes next. There is no one at the family dinner table who has done this before. No relative who has sold a business, no one who can say what the week after the money lands actually feels like, or which decisions you will wish you had made more slowly. The structures that families with generations of money take for granted, from investment portfolios and estate planning to succession structures, intergenerational wealth transfer and a relationship with an advisor that spans decades, have to be built from scratch, usually while still running that which generated the wealth in the first place.

This is why the most useful conversations tend to be sideways rather than upwards. Not with the generation before you, but with women a few steps ahead on the same path: someone who has sold a business, managed a sudden influx of liquidity, or worked out how to talk to her children about money. Sharing those experiences and asking the questions that feel too basic to ask in a boardroom can be as valuable as having the right investment strategy.

Creating and managing wealth are different disciplines

Building significant wealth often requires a particular mindset: taking risks when others hesitate, concentrating capital behind conviction, reinvesting rather than cashing out, working hard and having the conviction to back yourself when there is no established playbook to follow.

These qualities can be powerful drivers of wealth creation. They are not, on their own, the qualities that protect it. Once meaningful wealth exists, the question quietly shifts from “how do I build more?” to “how do I make sure what I have built can support me, protect my family, and potentially benefit future generations?” That is a different mindset, and it does not arrive automatically just because the first one worked.

Concentrated wealth

For many successful women, a significant proportion of their net worth may remain concentrated in the business or investments that created it. This is entirely understandable. Concentration makes sense while a business is growing, particularly with real conviction in its prospects and hands-on involvement in its success. The risk is not concentration itself. It is concentration that continues by default simply because there has never been a deliberate conversation about whether it is still appropriate.

There is a well-documented behavioural driver here too: people who build something tend to value it above its objective market worth simply because they made it, which is part of why concentration quietly becomes permanent even for financially sophisticated founders, not just first-time investors.

Markets shift. Customers leave. Competitors emerge. Regulations evolve. And sometimes, the next generation simply has no interest in taking over. One useful question is therefore: If I never sold my business, could my investment portfolio fund the life I want in retirement? If the answer is no, there may be an opportunity to start deliberately converting business wealth into independent personal wealth.

Turning business success into personal wealth

For entrepreneurs, wealth tends to stay tied to the business by default. Profits are reinvested, distributions may fund lifestyle spending, and personal financial security quietly becomes dependent on the company’s continued success.

A different (and deliberate) approach is to systematically transfer a portion of the business-generated wealth into a separate, diversified investment portfolio. Over time, that portfolio can compound independently of the business, provide liquidity the business cannot, and spread risk across companies, currencies and asset classes the business alone never could.

The objective is not necessarily to extract as much as possible from the business. It is to create financial independence alongside it. Ideally, the entrepreneur can reach a point where she can say: My business remains an important asset, but my family’s financial future does not depend entirely on it.

Diversification

Owning several assets is not the same as being diversified. Someone whose wealth is concentrated in a SA business, domestic property and local investments may own multiple assets but still have near-identical exposure to the same economy, currency and regulatory environment. Genuine diversification stretches across asset classes, countries, regions, currencies, and investment strategies. The objective is not to eliminate risk (that is impossible) but to make sure that no single event can determine the financial outcome of everything you have built.

Protecting your wealth

As wealth grows, investment performance becomes only part of the equation. For a first-generation wealth creator, new questions emerge: Who owns the business, formally? Who can make decisions if you cannot? Where would liquidity come from if your family suddenly needed cash? Are your wills, trusts, insurance arrangements and investment structures aligned with each other? And, perhaps most importantly, does your family understand the succession plan?

Wealth protection is about ensuring that the structures around your wealth work when they are needed most. The bigger the asset base, the more important it becomes to consider liquidity, tax, estate planning, succession and intergenerational transfer alongside investment returns.

The liquidity event

The transition can be particularly significant when wealth moves from being concentrated and illiquid to liquid and investable. A business sale, listing, dividend, inheritance or other liquidity event can transform a balance sheet almost overnight. There can be a natural temptation to make immediate decisions, to reinvest, spend, settle liabilities or leave the proceeds in cash while deciding what to do next. This is a recognised pattern with sudden capital: money that arrives all at once tends to get treated as fundamentally different from money earned gradually, even though it spends the same. That distinction is worth naming, because it is what drives both the urge to act immediately and, just as often, the urge to freeze completely.

However, a better instinct is to pause and reconsider the broader financial architecture: How much capital is required for lifestyle and future goals? How much liquidity do you need? What level of investment risk remains appropriate? How should your wealth be diversified across asset classes, geographies and strategies?

Wealth stewardship

The definition of financial success can change as wealth grows. The concentration, conviction and risk appetite that built your wealth may have been exactly the right characteristics at that stage of your life. As wealth accumulates, however, your priorities may shift. The transition from wealth creator to wealth steward is not about stepping back from ambition. It is what makes the wealth built through that ambition more resilient and purposeful.

Building wealth required backing yourself. Preserving it requires a financial structure that can withstand change: one where the business can succeed without the family’s entire financial future depending on it; where investments can compound on their own; where liquidity exists when needed; where risks are appropriately diversified; and where the next generation understands what has been created and how it is intended to support them.

This Women’s Month, for women who have built their own wealth, the next chapter is therefore not about becoming less ambitious. It is about making deliberate decisions about what that wealth should make possible for you, your family and future generations.