My first two and a half years were devoted to getting a four year degree so I could take over my dad's business. Then the stock market crash. Oops, didn't see that one coming. From there, I devoted the last year and a half to finishing school for the fun of learning.
That giant kick in the teeth (since family business had been around for 35 years) was what I needed to perceive school as a job requirement to being an exercise in broadening one's mind.
Ironically, a good friend, my age, of mine took over the lease of the same reatail space, worked the space with his own merchancdise 16 hours a day (never, ever less) and seven days a week.
The store is in a high traffic tourist area, most of the year, and there is no time to order goods, clean the store or the outside of the store as the city code enforces, or do the mountains of paperwork that come with owning a business in such a town in those circumstances. My buddy almost died working that hard for five years straight since his rental lease on the building for his store was that long.
He went to a business school just like me, bachelor's degree and all, and made the mistake that taking a few classes in retail, management, supply chains, etc would get him ready for what he only expected to reasonably be a 60 hour week, not a 100 hour week.
I met a 19 year old girl who had a family with an extremely successful local restaurant and she was getting her business degree so she could take over as sole owner in two years. She had been a waitress, hostess, asst. chef, and chef there, and now she was going to take the entire business over with parents helping for maybe a year, and then leaving the rest to her. She said this was her destiny, then I told her my story, and that she should enjoy university for the sake of it, because it may be the last remaining two years of her life that she would actually be able to have any free time off. But she loved the idea of expanding and probably, trying to be the next Rachel Ray, who works even more than those successful 80-100 hour a week retail store owners. She said some people own restaurants/stores, and the building, work downstairs and live upstairs and basically NEVER stop working.
If that were my family, I would study education and become a K-12 teacher or become an archeologist and travel far, far away from the family business.
