In succeeding an entrepreneurial legend, Adam Stewart assumed control of a world-famous $1 billion resort chain and now oversees 22 properties and 8,000 employees — at the ripe old age of 27.

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The boy-wonder CEO of Sandals Resorts, promoted to the post nearly two years ago at age 25, says he was not intimidated by the prospect of assuming day-to-day responsibility for an all-inclusive Caribbean resort chain with 8,000 employees, 22 properties, 3.1 million guests per year and nearly $1 billion in annual revenue. His confidence might well stem from his name, Adam Stewart, and the legacy to which that name refers: Adam is the scion of Sandals’s legendary founder, Gordon “Butch” Stewart, who remains chairman and, by all accounts, a firm guiding force. The younger Stewart, though, was born for the job — in 1981, to be exact, the same year his father leveraged the small fortune he had made as a Kingston, Jamaica, air-conditioning entrepreneur to acquire a down-at-the-heels hotel on Montego Bay. Adam Stewart literally grew up with, and in, Sandals. “The organization has always been part of our family,” he says in an accent that suggests a Scottish brogue that’s been jerked with West Indian spices.

“It’s like a living, breathing thing, as cheesy as that sounds.”

One of his earliest chores was stuffing envelopes in the marketing office. At 15, he began working as an activities director at the company’s family-friendly Beaches resort ­(Sandals itself is couples-only). It wasn’t especially taxing: “Basically,” he says, “they pay you to have fun with the guests.” He also had some less enjoyable responsibilities, such as cleaning rooms and bussing tables. He checked in travelers and carried their luggage. He logged time as a cabana boy.

“It was very much instilled in us from a young age that you work,” says Jaime Stewart, Adam’s sister, who at 29 also holds a high position in the Sandals organization, as managing director of SRI. “Any role you have in this company, you’ll have earned it, and you’re going to have earned it from putting in the time, putting in the hours.”

Her brother echoes the sentiment: “My dad has always operated by the philosophy that he who gets the job done will be put into a ­position to make decisions.”

Through all those years and all those jobs, Stewart developed “a passion” for the art of the hotelier, he says. He never questioned the career he’d eventually pursue. For this particular son of a billionaire, there would be no four years of easeful scholarship at Oxford or Cambridge or Yale. Instead, he enrolled in the hospitality-management program at Florida International University in Miami. After graduating in 2002, his education essentially continued apace, though this time right alongside his father in the company’s management offices. He headed operations for Sandals’s on-property revenue streams, monitoring everything from the rooms’ TV movies to the resort’s retail outlets and phone systems. When Butch Stewart turned 65 in 2005, he decided to step back a bit from the daily grind, and he felt his son had been sufficiently groomed. He thus crowned Adam his successor, though the old man still signs off on every major decision.

Among those key decisions have been the ways in which the Stewart clan has redirected the company over the last several years. Instead of cheapening their brand to make it more accessible to a mass consumer market, they’ve focused their attentions on the high end. Butch Stewart, referred to as “The Chairman” or “Mr. Chairman” by almost everyone in the company (including his children), has said that Sandals has “moved beyond the all-inclusive category and the often-maligned all-inclusive connotation.” The company’s expanding Royal Plantation resort chain, for instance, is a boutique version of Sandals. Adam is also overseeing the construction of a new resort at Port Antonio, on Jamaica’s northeast coast, and he recently helped complete negotiations for the purchase of 62 acres near Negril, on the west coast, for another. The Royal Plantation Collection, he notes, has been outperforming Sandals and Beaches of late.

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