Run, Girl (If You Can)

Jeremy Ward had been fascinated with business since he was a kid with a lemonade stand growing up in a poor neighborhood in a suburb of Washington D.C. The cops showed up and shut him and his friends down, gruffly saying they needed a business permit.

He had no idea you needed a permit for such a thing. He was only trying to make enough money to afford to go to summer camp like all the other kids from school.

It was his first taste of the realities of the business world but it was far from his last. His high school offered a few correspondence courses through the community college across the street and he took as many business related ones as he possibly could from the time he was a sophomore.

Jeremy read every article he possibly could from magazines like Forbes and Time trying to learn more about the business world. That was how he had first heard of Aaron Hale.

Not only was he the youngest Fortune 500 CEO to date, he had taken his family's business from a Fortune 15 company to a Fortune 10 company in only a few years. That was no small feat; Jeremy knew how difficult it was for any company to move up in the rankings, especially once they got higher up.

He had no doubt that Hale Investments would make it into the Fortune 5 someday and he wanted to be part of it. Unfortunately, this was easier said than done. A little research into the company told him that almost all of the employees were graduates from Ivy League schools and it generally took a minimum of five years of work experience to even get into any of the lower departments.

His mother told him he would never make it in. Hale Investments' main office was nearly impossible to get a job in. He would be lucky to get a job as a teller or financial advisor in one of the branch offices scattered throughout the country.

But Jeremy was determined. He wanted to make it to the top and meet Aaron Hale to ask him how he did it.

In addition to his community college classes, he spent countless hours studying or volunteering to make his resume look better. He needed to go Ivy League, or at the very least get into a top 20 university.

Everyone—especially his mother—told Jeremy how difficult it would be to get into an Ivy League school considering his background. He had been thrilled to prove them wrong by getting into Yale. It wasn't Harvard, where Aaron Hale went, but it was close enough. It was still Ivy League.

Jeremy chose to major in Economics and Mathematics, figuring it would be his best bet to eventually make it into Hale Investments' coveted analyst department. Cameron Singleton, the current vice president of the company, had started out there according to his LinkedIn profile.

From there he became the head of the analyst department in only five years and became the VP a few short years later. That was practically unheard of based on everything else Jeremy had read about the company.

He couldn't help but wonder how Singleton had done it. He had skyrocketed farther than the average person was capable of in the business world. Jeremy was nearly certain it was because of his close proximity to Aaron Hale.

If he could just get the man to give him a tiny bit of advice he was sure he would be able to build his own empire someday. So he worked hard in college, forgoing things like dating and socializing unless it somehow benefitted his studies. All of his friends were people he had met in study groups.

Though there were a few girls interested in him because of his classic blonde, blue-eyed "All American" look, Jeremy didn't have time for such things. Love got in the way of ambition. He had seen it in his mother.

She fell in love with a truck driver of all people and dropped out of law school to move across the country and be with him. In the end, he left her alone hauling things cross country for weeks at a time and she ended up working as a paralegal. She could have been a lawyer and made more than three times her current salary.

Sometimes Jeremy resented his mother for her lack of forethought. His father was gone so much that he hardly knew the man. Carl Ward was not a man worth looking up to.

Aaron Hale on the other hand…he apparently had four children. They were all still living at home but according to an interview he read they were highly accomplished.

His only daughter was a ballerina who had already danced with the New York City ballet many times over the years. His sons had won various awards for sports and robotics. Not to mention, his wife was a groundbreaking scientist in the field of gene therapy.

That entire family was outstanding! Nothing like his. Jeremy was determined to leave his roots behind and make something of himself in New York.

Toward the end of his junior year of college he attended a career fair. He would need to start applying for jobs within the next six months after all, since he wanted to have a job straight out of school.

There were plenty of financial institutions dotted up and down the east coast that could work as a resume builder but Jeremy wished it was easier to get footing in New York. If he was already there it would be simpler to get a job at Hale Investments' main office when the time came.

Unfortunately, Wall Street was not a place one could get a job straight out of college. Even the brightest of minds needed more work experience.

To his surprise, someone from Hale Investments had set up a booth at the career fair. It was advertising careers working in the branch offices that helped keep it the most trusted financial institution in America. Jeremy wasn't interested in being buried in a branch office but headed over anyway.