They were the best education of my life, and I would not trade them for any inheritance.

When you clean rooms on the overnight shift, you learn things about a hotel that no executive summary will ever tell you — which managers speak to the housekeeping staff like people and which speak to them like furniture, where the real costs hide, how a property actually runs at three in the morning when no one important is watching.

When you rebuild a failing kitchen’s supply contracts, you learn who has been skimming and who has been carrying the whole operation on their back for years without recognition.

I took the three worst coastal properties Larkhaven owned — money-losing, badly run, half-abandoned — and I did not fix them from a boardroom.

I moved into them.

I worked the desks.