“I want to learn what all this really means. I didn’t start this company to just make money. If I wanted to do that, I would have simply hired someone to invest my funds. I asked you all to help me find a way to do more than that. We’ve built a business that employs a lot of people. People who’ll be looking for a job shortly if we decide to sell,” David said.
“If you go, you have to promise me something,” Rob said.
Rob had been the driving force behind the scenes for David from the start. While he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day, he was David’s eyes and ears, so to speak.
“What?” David asked.
“Just promise me,” Rob fired back.
David gave his dad a disgusted look because this was so like a parent. He knew there had to be some trick that he would regret later.
“Promise …” Rob said.
“Fine! I promise! I’ll do whatever you’re going to ask me to do,” David relented.
“Go into the meeting with an open mind. Do not let your feeling of losing control stop you from giving them a fair hearing. Allow them to present what they plan and don’t comment. Once you leave, come back, and we will all discuss it,” Rob pressed.
David saw that his dad was afraid he would act like his mother. She would have walked in and told the owner of Morgan Fletcher precisely what she was thinking. His dad was reminding David to slow down when an important decision had to be made.
The ‘losing control’ comment was also spot on. David had sold his business to Grace, and if it had been almost anyone else, he wouldn’t have done it. She had wisely shown him that he wasn’t in a place in his life where he could devote the time or energy needed to successfully run a company. She also had experience growing businesses.
It didn’t hurt that Grace had given him a piece of the new company, so he still felt like it was his. His dad knew that David could become stubborn, especially if he considered something his. He knew that David’s actions had brought everyone together to form the core of the business. Since David had done that, it was only natural for him to try to protect them.
“I promise,” David said to confirm what he’d said earlier.
“Talk to Grace and arrange for David to attend the lunch,” Rob told Brook.
Brook got up to go talk to her grandmother. When the door closed, David turned to his dad.
“How long have you known about this?”
When everyone looked away, David knew that Rob was on his own.
“A couple of months, but I had a good reason for not telling you.”
“I’m listening.”
“The reason you sold the business in the first place was that you didn’t want to manage it,” Rob started, but when he saw David’s look, he stopped before trying another approach. “Honestly, when this first was brought to us, I didn’t think it would go anywhere. We’ve had others sniffing around, but Grace quickly shot them all down.”
“I agree. She basically told Morgan Fletcher that they would have to pay a premium to make it happen,” Bev said to support his dad.
“You had just finished filming, then football took a left turn and you ended up at USC, and then school kept you busy. Since it didn’t look like it was happening, I decided not to tell you,” Rob said.
“Thanks for the explanation, Dad. I’m seriously not mad; I just wanted to understand where and how this originated and how it got so big and involved so fast. The question I need the answer to is, what do all of you want to have happen? I need the abridged version before Brook comes back to tell me that I’ve been invited to lunch,” David said.
“What is it you’re about to do?” Kent asked.
“This is what David does,” Frank said. “Trust him to hold his own in the upcoming lunch. So, for me, what I want is …”
David could tell that none of them had talked about this yet. He discovered that all was not rosy with the new venture. What he didn’t understand was why they hadn’t been talking to Grace about some of the issues they were having. That made it harder for a couple of them to avoid saying they just wanted to take the money and leave.
As David expected, his dad kept everyone on track. He would interrupt if anyone went too deep into the weeds or ask for clarification when he saw that David was confused. The goal wasn’t to feed David all the information he needed to run the business. Grace had described his leadership role as the overall management type who had to understand just enough to grasp the big picture.
◊◊◊
When Brook came back to get David, his dad walked him out.
“Okay, the trick is to forget everything you just heard and really listen to what everyone is saying. When you come back, we can discuss the merits of what you learned,” Rob said.
“Why aren’t you going with me?” David asked.
“Simple: it’s your money.”
That was his dad’s way of saying that David didn’t need him to hold his hand anymore. David felt himself becoming emotional because this felt like one of those moments he would never forget. Not only had his father shown his faith in him, so had everyone else in that room.
He felt the weight of the responsibility. Maybe it was a responsibility that wasn’t meant to be carried by someone so young and inexperienced, but it was there, and it was his. David honestly was surprised that its weight never entered his mind when he took that responsibility on.
In a way, it also confirmed what his uncle had always said: David was a natural leader. That did not necessarily mean he was one who had to have an iron grip on every decision made. Rather, he realized that he was the person they knew would never let them fail. That knowledge, in fact, was freeing.
Well, that, and knowing that Grace Davenport would be there with him. Maybe it wasn’t as big of a deal as he’d just made it out to be in his mind, and that was why they’d let him go into the lunch meeting, but he didn’t think so.
“Lead the way,” David said to Brook.
◊◊◊
Chapter 7
Grace
It didn’t take Grace long to decide to allow David to join her for lunch with the CEO of Morgan Fletcher Investments and her counsel. Grace felt that the young man had real potential and wanted to encourage it.
She’d made her living finding diamonds in the rough and polishing them into top-flight corporate executives. Her granddaughter, Brook, was the only one in her generation of the family that Grace felt had that potential. It was why she had Brook’s mother, Ava, approach Brook about working with them this summer. Grace wanted Brook to get exposure to the ins and outs of running a business.
The main attributes Grace looked for in her prodigies were a drive to succeed and a tangible demonstration that they could successfully complete the projects she set them to.
Though that wasn’t entirely true. There were different types of driven, especially in high school and college-age kids. Most were the sort who worked diligently to try to mold themselves into what they thought others wanted. These kids focused on grades, extracurriculars, placement scores, and padding either their college applications or résumé.
The problem with this type was that many of them, once they graduated, either turned into elitist snobs who looked down on the vast unwashed or became a wild child. New York was teeming with them. They were Ivy League types who were still trying to measure themselves against everyone else. Their typical metric was either how much money they were making or the number of notches on their bedposts. Many times, they tried to do both.
The perfect examples were Brook’s sorority sisters and her current boyfriend, Bastian.
As a side note, Grace wouldn’t be opposed to David deciding to kick the crap out of the boy for his pretentious name alone. She hadn’t felt that way until her investigators reported that he was cheating on her granddaughter while he was back home. Meanwhile, he was repeatedly telling Brook how much he missed her.