The Breakfast Club for 40-Somethings

Chapter 23 Twenty years later

The trip to the Blue Mountains was the first of many weekends away for the six of them. And boy did they do it well, thanks to Brad. ‘The Breakfast Club for 40-somethings’ never went to the same place twice. From the Hunter Valley, to the Daintree and Uluru, Brad’s EA organised the most incredible getaways, and each time was always just as good as the last. They laughed and confessed, and shared joys, sorrows and everything in between.

Josie ended up selling most of her business to her staff. She worked three months of the year in Sydney, and spent the rest of the time overseas with Brad. They’d married, and Josie ran Brad’s philanthropic trust — which was focused on sponsoring the next generation of entrepreneurial thinkers who would then go on to run socially responsible businesses. The work was incredibly rewarding, and the trust extremely well-funded. Josie no longer felt she had to keep a treadmill going for work, and she’d made enough of her own money to never have to rely on Brad. She was grateful for this, not because Brad would begrudge her having anything — he was incredibly generous — but because she’d wanted to prove to herself that she could do it, and she had. While she no longer had the burning drive she had in her younger years, in her sixties she knew where she was best placed to have an impact, and the work she did changed thousands of lives.

She’d been able to show her parents her amazing work with the trust before they died ...