Adam found everything in Genoa City to be much more daunting and full of surprises than he'd anticipated. He had come to this town with a lot of prejudice about midwestern suburbia. He never expected to meet with such a cosmopolitan, worldly-wise set of people as those who lunched and dined at the Athletic Club and attended board meetings at the town's corporate trifecta - - Norman Enterprises, Chancellor Industries, and Jabot Cosmetics. He found himself feeling dazed at the fact that this was the world to which he had been born. Were it not for his mother taking him away to Kansas and changing his surname, he, as Victor Adam Newman, would have been just another one of Genoa City's spoiled trust fund babies. As it was, he now observed his estranged half-sister and half-brother with a mixture of disgust, envy, and fascination. Victoria was especially interesting to him. Nick was kind to Adam, even sympathetic, and it struck Adam that Nick even pitied him. Nick seemed to be trying to distance himself from the Newman legacy and from Victor's clutches, while Adam was just getting started... Victoria, on the other hand, struck Adam as a female version of the old man himself. She relished her position at Newman Enterprises. She had power and wanted more. With Victoria, Adam knew he could never be really friendly. They were too much alike. They wanted the same thing, to be daddy's right hand.
Victor put Adam to work right away in the review of all of Newman's accounts. Adam enjoyed this work. He knew it there was no better way to get acquainted with the corporation than to delve in the deep end of its contracts. Adam found a lot of surprises. For one thing, he had expected to find that Newman's best known brand, Beauty of Nature, Victoria's brainchild, was the most profitable in the entire conglomerate. Not so, it turned out. Beauty of Nature was saddled with debt. The entire company was in the red. There hadn't been a hit product in years. Victoria had a vision of "going green" and basing all of its manufacturing on alternative sources of energy. But the goal of converting its laboratories to solar power seemed far off indeed, given that the existing leases were far beyond its financial means. Adam wanted to advise his father that the best course of action was simply to cut the losses: break up the company and sell the scraps. They might barely break even and they'd be free to invest in other more profitable branches of the conglomerate.
Easier said than done. How could Adam do it without declaring an all-out war on a sibling he had only just become aware of, let alone met? Did Adam really want to go to war with Victoria Newman?
No. Of course not. That would be insane. Besides, how could be sure his father would even have his back? Victoria was the one Victor had raised. Adam was just the long-lost son. No matter that Adam was the Harvard-educated Newman. Victoria was the apple of Victor's eye. If Adam were to go to Victor now and recommend cutting the branch of Beauty of Nature, he'd likely be expelled from the family and run out of town faster than he could say "father."
No. Better keep his mouth shut and hope the company could somehow, miraculously start turning a profit. Maybe Victoria's new idea for a line of no-animal-testing, all-organic facial cream would pan out and become the saving grace.
With these kind of thoughts, Adam worked out in the gym at the athletic club every night. It was here that he first met Heather Stevens, the corporate lawyer for Jabot Cosmetics. He didn't know why he just introduced himself to her as Adam Wilson, not mentioning who his father was. All he knew was that he wasn't quite used to being Victor Newman's son and he didn't know how people would react to him in that capacity. So he started having after-work drinks with Heather and just pretending he had simply come out of Harvard Business School to work for the famous, legendary, great Victor Newman, no relation.
Such a secret can't hold for long in an insular place like Genoa City. A corporate settlement meeting presided over by Heather and attended by the father and son, at which Victor proudly referred to Adam as his son, blasted the fact out of the bag. Heather was shocked, but after hearing Adam's honest explanation, she could not stay angry. Heather also knew firsthand what it was like to discover a father (in her case, Genoa City's leading private investigator Paul Williams) as an adult. Adam and Heather enjoyed only a short time in their relationship before it became known to Victor. Victor had very personal reasons for disliking his long lost and found son's choice of girlfriend.