The Daughter Who Owned It All

What none of those people knew, and what I did not fully understand myself until six weeks later, was what he had actually done with the company in the two years before he died.

My father had never taken Wabash Valley Plastics public, and he’d never sold a controlling piece of it to outside investors, though he had, over the decades, brought in a small group of minority partners to help fund two plant expansions. What he had done, quietly, working with the trust department at Cedar Fork State Bank where my sister Tina had worked for eleven years, was restructure his own majority stake into a family trust two full years before his death, naming me as the trust’s primary beneficiary and, upon his death, its trustee.

Seventy one percent. Of the company, and of the land underneath it, which he had always owned separately from the operating business and leased back to it, the same way a lot of family operations around here keep the dirt and the machine shed under different names for tax and liability reasons nobody thinks twice about until it matters.

He had also, in the same set of documents, instructed the bank to hold the transfer confidential for eighteen months after his death before formally recording it and reading it into the company’s ownership ledger at a members’ meeting. He wrote a letter to go with it, which Tina did not show me until much later, in which he explained why. He did not want me stepping onto that floor for the first time after his death as the boss. He wanted the interim board, and the plant, and me, to have a period where nobody was managing around who I might someday be, so that whatever I built with the people on that floor in those eighteen months, I would have built it as Danielle, quality control, not as the owner’s daughter waiting in the wings.

It was, I understood later, both a gift and a test. He trusted me to keep doing the work without the title. He also, I think, wanted to see what kind of company would be run in the meantime by people who did not know they were being watched.