For Twenty Years My Father Told Everyone the Company Was His — Grandpa’s Box Revealed Who Secretly Owned the Controlling Sixty-Two Percent

Chapter 17 — Chairwoman

A full year after that Christmas, Palmer Construction reported its strongest financial quarter in six years.

I want to tell you what I did with the company, because it is the part I am proudest of, and the part that would have made my grandfather proudest too.

I did not make myself the chief executive.

It would have been easy, and shallowly satisfying, to install myself at the top of the thing my father had told everyone was his, to take his office and his title and rule it.

But I had never run a construction firm, and I knew it, and running it out of ego rather than competence would have been the very mistake my father and sister had made — treating a firm built by other people’s work as a personal trophy.