Chapter 9 - The Company Nobody Asked If I Wanted
That question changed everything.
Everyone kept talking about Mercer Industrial as my future.
My responsibility.
My inheritance.
Nobody had asked if I wanted it.
I wanted to study engineering.
Maybe environmental design.
Maybe something else entirely.
I was seventeen.
I barely knew how to cook anything that didn’t come from a box.
Why was everyone talking like a thirty-one-percent manufacturing stake defined the rest of my life?
Susan showed me the trust.
Grandpa had included sale rights.
Once I turned eighteen, I could sell some or all of my shares subject to certain company agreements.
Keep them.
Sell them.
Put them into a foundation.
Hire a professional manager.
Grandpa’s final gift wasn’t the company.
It was choice.
For the next month, I started visiting Mercer Industrial after school.
Not because Mark asked.
Because I wanted facts.
I met line workers.
Engineers.
Accountants.
People who had been there longer than I had been alive.
A machinist named Teresa showed me a photograph of Grandpa opening the first plant.
“He was difficult,” she said.
“Everybody talks like he was a genius.”
“He was.”
She shrugged.
“Geniuses can still be jerks.”
I laughed.
Mark joined me once.
He knew employees’ names.
More of them than I expected.
He understood equipment.
He asked good questions.
For several hours, I saw the man he might have become if he hadn’t spent so much of his life running from himself.
Then we visited the Texas site.
Huge.
Half finished.
Expensive.
But real.
Hundreds of jobs depended on what happened next.
The easy story disappeared.
Selling everything might protect my money.
It might also hurt people who had nothing to do with my family problems.
Keeping everything might preserve jobs.
It could also trap me in Mark’s debt crisis.
So I did something neither Mark nor Grandpa had planned.
I hired my own adviser.
Not one Susan chose.
Not one Mark chose.
Not one Mercer Industrial chose.
A woman named Jasmine Patel who specialized in family-business transitions.
The first thing she told me:
“Never confuse preserving a company with preserving a family.”
I liked her immediately.
Her analysis found a path Mark hated.
An outside investor could fund the Texas factory.
The Mercer family would lose some voting control.
My stake would drop from thirty-one percent to around twenty-four.
Mark’s would fall below twenty.
But the company’s debt risk would improve dramatically.
“What do you think?” I asked Mark.
He hated it.
“That company has been Mercer-controlled for forty years.”
“So?”
“It matters.”
“To who?”
He had no good answer.
Three days later, the investor submitted a formal proposal.
Then Jasmine called me at school.
“Eli, don’t discuss the offer with anyone yet.”
“Why?”
“We found a competing bid.”
“From who?”
She paused.
“A private equity firm.”
“Why is that strange?”
“Because one of the minority owners secretly gave them confidential company information.”
My stomach tightened.
“Mark?”
“No.”
That surprised me.
“Then who?”
She sent me the name.
May you like
Rebecca Mercer.
My aunt.
