I still remember the taste of the ice tea at our retirement centers. Starting at 7, I spent summers at Westlake Realty Group shadowing my grandfather. Property tours were always my favorite day of the week.
I wasn't working in any meaningful capacity. I was filing papers. Making copies. Tagging along on property tours and pretending to understand what the adults were talking about.
But here is what I know now: I was learning.
Not the curriculum I would get at Stanford GSB. Not frameworks or financial models. Something else. Something that has no name in any syllabus I have ever seen.
I was learning what it feels like when a business is real. Not a simulation. Not a case study. A real thing that real people depend on, that can fail, that requires someone to show up for it every single day or it starts to come apart.
I learned what my father's face looked like when a deal was hard. I learned that some conversations only happen between adults in another room. I learned that the people who worked for my family had names and kids and bills and were counting on us.
None of this was taught to me. I absorbed it the way children absorb language. Before I had words for it. Before I could explain what I was learning or why it mattered.
When people ask whether I felt pressure coming back to lead a third generation business, the honest answer is that the pressure was never the hard part. I already knew what the business was. The transition from observer to owner was less a leap than a slow, long walk I had been on my whole life without knowing it.
What the business does changes. We used to run retirement centers. Now we own two, and they are not core to what we do anymore. But the ownership mentality and the leadership instincts I learned from my father and grandfather never left. Those endured.
What did you absorb about work and money before you were old enough to understand it?
From Observer to Owner
