Ahead of the Pack: Garvice Kincaid And His Empire: A Southern Saga

Garvice Delmar Kincaid was an iconic visionary, a man ahead of his time, indeed Ahead of the Pack. 
 
Kincaid, a Lexington, Kentucky, businessman, turned $1,500 into a $500 million empire over a 40-year period. When he died in 1975, Kincaid's holdings comprised over 175 organizations consisting of radio and television stations, banks, hotels, resorts, consumer finance companies, life insurance companies, and real estate assets.
 
Ahead of the Pack is the true story of Kincaid’s historic rise and the catastrophic fall of his organization after his death. 
 
Kincaid began as a young man with an incredible need to be respected and appreciated. As he became more successful, Kincaid tended to intimidate and offend people through brisk remarks and by his talent for knowing more about others’ business affairs than they did.
 
Born in 1912, more than fifteen years before Warren Buffett, Kincaid understood that acquiring good businesses and holding them for the long term was the path to great riches. Kincaid also preceded Michael Milken in understanding that distressed debt and real estate could provide enormous returns. Finally, he saw the importance of the media in its early years and appreciated its ability to influence our perceptions and desires.
 
In the mid-1950s and 1960s, Garvis Kincaid suffered two heart attacks, prompting him to begin a long estate planning process. He created an estate trust made of three separate accounts. His trust was administered by his own bank, Central Bank & Trust, and was overseen by a three-person advisory committee plus three alternates. He personally selected these six individuals to oversee his vast domain.
 
The people on the Committee were Kincaid’s trusted lieutenants; people he had worked with for many years. He believed they would work together to manage and further grow his empire just as he had. What he did not factor in was the role arrogance and greed would play in destroying his legacy twenty years after his death in November 1975, at age sixty-three.  
 
The collapse of Kincaid's financial kingdom started in the early 1980s. Ahead of the Pack author Robert Mucci worked in the investment department of Kincaid-owned Kentucky Central Life Insurance Company from 1981 until 1995, witnessing the ruin and later researching it. The downfall of Kentucky Central Life and its impact on the rest of Kincaid’s empire cost his estate trust hundreds of millions of dollars. The impact on families, not just in Lexington, but around the country, including employees, agents, policyholders, and shareholders, is most certainly in the millions.