It was the first year after the Revolution. My father, after a lifetime of a fixed hospital salary, took up driving a taxi, the first of his businesses after 1989. I was about 13. Every evening, my brother Dan, my mother, and I would not go to bed until my father came home, around eleven or twelve at night. Seated at the dining room table, we would count that day's coins together, arranging them neatly into stacks by value. It was so spectacular, so new. The idea that you could work more and earn more, on the same day, was novel to all of us.
Back then we did not call it a family business. It was just a table, money, my father's return, an order that emerged out of chaos. Thirty years later, reading Katalin Orosz, I understood that this was precisely the zero point of the trajectory she calls the double transition, and that everything my brother Dan and I began to build fifteen years later was a continuation of what had started in that living room.
The Romania of 2026 is different from the Romania of 1992, but many entrepreneurs of my generation still lead as they did then. I understand why: what worked in an economy of scarcity produces fast, visible, rewarded performance. Harder to see is the moment when the old efficiency begins to grow costly. Margins thin out. Good people leave. Decisions become ever more concentrated in one place. For a while, this is a growth story. After a while, it is a diagnosis.
Katalin Orosz calls this diagnosis the double transition, and it is the most precise formulation I have come across for what is happening now, in the 2025 to 2035 decade, in the Romanian firms built after 1989. It is a generational transition (our founders, the first generation, reach the first moment when succession can no longer be postponed) and an economic transition (from a market you conquered with the product to a market you can no longer hold without a system). In the West, the two were separated by decades. Here, they are simultaneous.
At Autonom we live this every day. We started the company in 2005, in Piatra Neamț, when I was convinced that rentals to tourists were the way forward. Two years later, my brother Dan left his consulting work in Paris and joined me in the firm. In 2009, the crisis forced us to discover that our path until then no longer worked, and we pivoted toward B2B and fleet management. In 2020 we remade the model a second time, under the pressure of a lockdown that, in seven days, cut 90% of rentals. In 2019 and 2021 we entered the capital markets through the Bucharest Stock Exchange, first with a corporate bond, then with a bond issue tied to sustainability targets, with public commitments measured out to 2030. And yet, all these decisions, compared with the ones that lie ahead: the first co-founders who will step back, the first generation of successors who will step in, the first Family Chamber we will have to build explicitly, seem like warm-up exercises.
Because that is the implicit thesis of the book you are holding, as I read it: in a mature family firm, the most difficult decision is not what we do. It is how we decide together, with clarity, without losing one another. And for that, the founder's instinct, exactly what kept us standing for twenty years, is no longer enough. It is necessary, but not sufficient. That is the difference Katalin's book explains, without saying it outright, in the pages before you.
The book made me ask myself a question I had avoided answering.
Dan and I built Autonom together, as brothers. More years have passed since our first children arrived than the years in which we wrote business plans together. The chapter on the heir, the three archetypes she describes, the guilty one, the entitled one, the one who runs away, stopped me. Not because I recognized our children in any of them. But because, among entrepreneur friends, I recognized sons and daughters I had not managed to understand until now. The question I had not asked myself until I closed the book: what financial education, what exposure to decision-making, what honest evaluation are we offering our children now, before they decide for themselves what they want to do with us?
Then there is a chapter in the part on the business, chapter nine, where Katalin describes what she calls the shadow government. The informal power that decides after the formal meeting has ended. And she proposes a solution in three separate chambers of governance: the board, the family council, the management. Most of the family firms I know, ours included, have the first and the third. The second they have in an unformalized shape, an occasional phone call with a brother, a question let slip during a break, conversations that drift, against your will, from family into business and back. Over the years I have learned to think in little boxes, when I am with my family, I am with my family. That is precisely why the Family Council Chamber is necessary: not to mix the systems, but to separate them in an orderly way. A forum in which I, Dan, our wives and, in a few years, our children explicitly make the decisions that belong to the three overlapping systems: family, wealth, business.
If you open this book and would not want to close it after the prologue, let me leave you a few suggestions from my experience as a reader. I would count this foreword a success if one or two ideas from it stay with you, ideas that you apply.
Read it with your calendar beside you. The frameworks you leave in your notes are forgotten within six months. The ones you put in your calendar, with a date and a person responsible, translate into action. I do not believe in ideas. I believe only in action. The three hats, the four steps, the three chambers of governance, all are tools that work only if you have put them in your calendar, not in your notebook.
If you are a founder, read it with your brother, with the husband or wife who has been beside you, with your building partner. The book asks questions you cannot answer alone. You can, however, pose them, even without resolving them right away, and that is half the value. The discussion this book reopens between you and your partner is more important than any conclusion you might draw from reading it in isolation.
If you are a successor, read it as an invitation to dialogue. Not as a manual telling you how to behave with the previous generation. The book takes no one's side. It lets you build your own path and gives you, along the way, the vocabulary with which to negotiate it in public, without losing those who came before you.
I, in those evenings in the first years after the Revolution, when I counted the coins from my father's taxi work with Dan and my mother on the dining room table, could never have imagined that thirty years later we would sign, for the company we were about to build together, sophisticated financial instruments worth hundreds of millions of euros. This is Katalin's double transition, for us, not in thirty theoretical years, but within a single lifetime. The question of how one remains a founder when the company becomes an institution is not resolved in a book. Katalin's book is a mirror. Now you hold it too.