My grandfather, Lucian Shepherd, is one of the most formidable businessmen in the world.
He started out helping his father - my great grandfather - in the small publishing company he owned, moving paper from the printers to the binding machines. He spent two hours there every day after school, and three hours each weekend for an entire year while he was finishing his studies, before going to work full time as a manager.
It took him twelve years to turn it into the number one publishing house, globally.
While he was doing that, he started investing. He invested in anything he could get his hands on – failing businesses, start-ups, property, tech, healthcare, food and beverage companies, textiles, aerospace and automotive – you name it, and my grandfather will likely own it.
And any company he doesn’t wholly own, he probably owns part of.
By the time my father died, Shepherd Holdings Inc. was number one on the Fortune 500 list, and my grandfather was one of the richest businessmen in the world, worth circa one hundred and fifty billion dollars.
Neither has lost their spot since.
It had always been the plan that my father would take over the company when my grandfather turned sixty-five, except him dying unexpectedly put a wrench in the works. As a result, my grandfather postponed his decision to step down, and instead declared that he would hand over the reins when he turned eighty.
Hand them over to me.
Overnight, I went from being a kid who dreamed of playing ball to a kid whose destiny was laid out. A kid who would become the head of his family business - whether he wanted to or not.
But I did it, because it’s what my dad was going to do.
Because it took me one step closer to buying The Yankees – my father’s dream.
This sounds amazing, I hear you cry.
It’s not.
Owning a conglomerate… Is. So. Fucking. Boring.
Like I’d rather be anywhere else boring.
Like I’d rather stick rusty nails in my eyes boring.
I was not built to sit in board meetings and discuss quarterly report fluctuations.
Board meetings lived up to their name, and were always timed with a much-needed nap. I’d rock up when I had to, sign what I had to sign, then be on my merry way – usually to meet Murray and Rafe for a drink and see what mischief we could get into, because my freedom was finite. The less I stuck around the office the better, because I knew that one day I wouldn’t beable to leave. That one day the company would be the Albatross around my neck, with all eyes on me to lead it into the next generation.
But I behaved, sort of.
I towed the line, within reason.
I went to Harvard and studied for my MBA, even when I’d rather have had my fingernails pulled out. My only saving grace at school were my two best friends – Murray Williams and Rafe Latham. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work, or that the course was hard; quite the opposite. I have been cursed with a genius level IQ, and graduated top of my class with very little effort and a relatively poor attendance record. It didn’t matter, because I can pretty much do anything.
(Except cook, but I have a chef so it’s irrelevant.)
Given my future had been mapped out for the last twenty years, imagine my surprise when I get wind of a coup a few months ago. Well, not exactly a coup when I wasn’t yet in power, but suffice it to say my eldest sister, Nancy – the family brown-nose – was doing everything she could to stop me from taking Gramps’ leadership.
A pre-coup if you will.
I should have known it would happen, seeing as Nancy has had her eyes on it since she started working there. She had planned to go to law school, but instead, when dad died, she went straight into the company and learned from the ground up. And she’s been doing awesome work.
She’s become my grandfather’s right-hand woman.
If you ask me, I don’t know why she couldn’t have been given the role in the first place.
But point is she wasn’t, and I was.
You might wonder why I care about not having a job I didn’t want anyway. The answer is, I don’t. I don’t care that I don’t havethe job. Icarethat I’ve wasted my entire adult life preparing for it when I could have been doing literally anything else.
