By his early 20s, Nick Wakim had already been thrust into the highs and lows of business. He knew his family were relatively well-to-do, describing his upbringing as “cushy”. Yet it was not until his father Farid’s sudden death, when Wakim was 20, that he learnt of the scale of his dad’s dairy business.

“It was a shock, we didn’t know he was sick,” Wakim tells The Australian Financial Review Magazine from his home in Toorak. “Dad was quite old-school, no one really knew much about what he was doing … and I had to try to decipher legals and contracts and agreements and trusts – all this stuff we had no idea about. We were out of the frying pan and into the fire.”