What Sets Missouri Apart
Here are 10 things you probably didn’t know about Missouri and the people who live here:.
• In a looming era of unprecedented need, Missouri researchers are going to help feed the world.
• Scientists in the state are at the forefront of technologies to detect airborne bioterror threats.
• An aerospace supply-chain consultancy in O’Fallon went from start-up to $80 million in revenues in just 10 years.
• The state’s best known champion for tax reform is also an accomplished chess player.
• Fewer than 50 people nationwide have doctoral degrees in sign-language interpretation and instruction, and one of them is based at William Woods University in Fulton.
• An executive with the state’s largest home-grown bank is also a former pro athlete whose first catch in the NFL went 69 yards for a touchdown.
• The president of the University of Missouri system earned his stripes as an IT company executive, not in academia.
• A St. Louis lawyer who graduated first in his journalism class at MU has also helped free a man who served 16 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.
• Only one non-native has ever been elected mayor of Cape Girardeau—and he did it twice.
• The top executive at United Way of Greater St. Louis was also a benefiicary of program funding, growing up in the state’s foster-care system.
Welcome to the world of 50 Missourians You Should Know, Ingram’s annual tribute to the people whose careers, companies and core values are changing not just their communities, but the state—and, in some cases, the world.
On the following pages, you’ll see profiles on those 10 individuals and 40 more who give the Show-Me State its unique flavor as a place to live, raise a family or to work or operate a business. Their individual stories reflect the passion, hard work and integrity that are hallmarks of successful businesses in the state.
Sam Fiorello
Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis
For Missouri’s agricultural sector—and for the world—the statistic is both heavy with opportunity and fraught with challenge: “In the next 35 years, the world must create as much food as we’ve done in the past 8,000 years of the history of agriculture, with fewer inputs, less water and less fertile soil—it’s a daunting task,” says Sam Fiorello. But as chief operating officer for the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, he’s focused on the potential for feeding 9 billion people. “The only way to get there is to excel in plant research, and that translates into innovative plants, products, services and technologies. It’s as simple as that.”
Fiorello has been a key to the center’s growth since before it opened its doors in 2001. The Wisconsin native is in the thick of a regional research effort involving plant scientists and researchers in animal and human health, uniquely positioning Missouri for advances on all fronts. With the center’s focus on food, feed, fuel and fiber, he says, “we’ve created a plant and animal corridor that is second to none in the world.”
Dave Alburty
AlburtyLab/INNOVAPREP, Drexel
Growing up in suburban St. Louis, Dave Alburty watched as America put a man on the moon in 1969 and felt a swell of family pride in knowing his father’s work at McDonnell Douglas had contributed to that team effort. With a mother who was a teacher, science came naturally to the youngster, as did entrepreneurship. “Dad was always starting some side venture or other, and he always encouraged me to be entrepreneurial,” says Alburty, whose two technology companies are in Drexel, which straddles the Bates-Cass County line. Tech and rural may seem disconnected, but AlburtyLab and InnovaPrep are doing just fine there. The latter performs biological sample collection and analysis; the lab is a contract research organization.
Alburty accrued an impressive 276 credit hours from the University of Kanas over 13 years, interspersed with work at Midwest Research Institute, now MRIGlobal. There, he says, “I think I did a little bit of work in almost every department there.” Armed with education, experience and courses in entrepreneurship from Johnson County Community College, he founded AlburtyLab in 2005.
“I think that most small communities are receptive to biotech startups,” he says, but stresses the need for rural employers to be involved in the community “and help in as many ways as possible. … It’s easy to be a little scared of science, if you don’t understand it, so being part of the community allows people to feel more comfortable about welcoming science-based startups.”
Sam Hamra
Hamra Enterprises, Springfield
The son of a Lebanese immigrant who came to Steele, Mo., in 1913, Sam Hamra has been at various times a lawyer, protégé to a presidential confidante, restaurateur, hotelier, art lover, philanthropist and more. Hamra’s father, who operated a small clothing store, hired a young Roy Harper, who would go on to become close friend of Harry Truman, and would repay his employer by advising young Sam to go to law school. Thus began a lifelong series of connections with figures from politics and business that would serve Hamra well in both his law practice and, later, as founder of Hamra Enterprises, the nearly 40-year-old parent of six companies with more than 3,000 employees in four states. A testament to his ability to navigate political divisions, Hamra came to conservative Springfield in the 1960s. “I was almost a lone Democrat,” he says, “but I learned quickly that I could have good friends on both sides.” He’s leveraged those relationships into civic causes that included the electrical distribution system for nearby Nixa, where he served as city attorney, and road projects that included expansion of U.S. 65 from two lanes to four down to Branson. His business success has allowed him to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of art to various universities in southern Missouri. At 82, he isn’t remotely interested in thinking about retirement. “I enjoy working,” he says. “My real pleasure comes from being with peole and watching the organization grow.”
Alaina Macia
MTM, Inc., Lake St. Louis
Health-care policy savvy and business sense. That’s what makes Alaina Macia a force for growth as CEO of Medical Transportation Management. Since moving into that role in 2005, annual revenues of this non-emergency transportation services company have surged from $60 million to an anticipated $279 million this year, largely by taking advantage of opportunities created by waves of newly insured following passage of federal health-insurance reforms. The company founded by her father and stepmother has grown from 200 employees to more than 1,500, with plans to keep hiring.
“I grew up with MTM and knew that I would become a part of the company in some capacity,” says Macia, whose husband and sisters hold leadership roles there. After earning a degree in biological engineering, she worked as a research engineer to maintain and program robotic arms used to produce radio pharmaceuticals, then earned an MBA at the Olin School of Business. She also worked in marketing for Maritz, Inc., then rejoined the family business in 2003.
Tim Wolfe
University of Missouri system, Columbia
A Missouri native who grew up in Columbia—he even won a state football title at Rock Bridge High, playing quarterback—Tim Wolfe is relishing a different kind of homecoming. “It’s really special to get acquainted with old friends, make new friends, and to be giving back to an institution that gave me so much,” says the president of the University of Missouri system. Since taking the helm in 2012 after years in leadership roles with IT firms like IBM, Novansys and Novell Americas, (he’s the second straight president, succeeding Gary Forsee, to hail from business, not academia) Wolfe is working to weave business innovation and urgency into a system grounded in longstanding traditions and norms.
But he’s starting from a good spot, he says. “The change since I left MU in 1980 is not just one of size, but the beauty on all four campuses and the caliber of students we’re attracting,” Wolfe says. As with all publicly funded higher education, though, Wolfe knows the challenge is keeping sufficient state dollars flowing to ensure relevance. “What we still need are more resources, prioritization and research,” he says. The four-campus system accounts for 90 percent of public-institution research in Missouri, “and we’re solving serious problems like diabetes, Alzheimer’s and cancer, creating new products to take to market to spawn new companies and jobs.” For the state’s continuing development, he says, “we need investment for research and attracting faculty researchers across the globe.”
Gil Bickel
St. Louis Arch Angels
“I am,” Gil Bickel declares, “a St. Louis guy.” What sets him apart from roughly 2.8 million other souls in that metropolitan area is what he does with the hometown inspiration. “I’m in the innovation and entrepreneurship business,” says the founder of the St. Louis Arch Angels, a group of private investors bent on increasing the numbers of promising start-up businesses in their region. “I don’t care where the money comes from, we need to finance these companies.” After earning degrees from both Washington University and Saint Louis University, he’s spent a career in the financial services sector with Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and now Wells Fargo Advisors. Bickel has seen, lived and breathed the concepts of investing and capital formation. He got into startup-financing because his own investing successes was spawning time-killing inquiries from friends who wanted to do the same. “It was affecting my business where I made my living, so five of us got together and decided to formalize the investment process so people who had ideas could go to a central location instead of jumping from angel to angel.” Founded in 2005, the Arch Angels invested close to $20 million in start-ups within five years. Today, Bickel says, the quality of entrepreneurial talent, and of businesses proposals, are higher than ever. “We have some smart people with great ideas,” he says. “All they need is the funding.”
Rick Braun
Wood Merchant, Lampe
Meet a man who literally carved a business out of what nature throws away: Rick Braun, whose Lampe-based company, Wood Merchant, salvages old-growth timber and turns it into eye-catching furniture and accessories. “Our niche is taking a tree that’s dead or dying, or has to be taken out for new construction of roads or power lines,” says Braun, a Wisconsin transplant who fell in love with the Ozarks and gave up a postal-service career to live here. “Everything we use is salvaged lumber.” His small company—just Braun, his wife and stepson—seeks out historical wood from venues like national battlefields and old cemeteries.
“Not that we’re looking to harvest it,” he says, “but every old tree at some point dies, whether from lighting, ice or fires. There’s a lot of history in those, and we try to get those with no commercial value to the logging industry.” A welder by training and mail carrier for seven years, he took a job at Dogwood Canyon near Lampe after visiting in 1980, becoming, in his words, “maintenance manager, hillbilly farmer and trout guide,” then came across the idea for harvesting and finding new life for doomed trees after visiting a museum in Colorado Springs. “We live on Table Rock Lake and had access to all kinds of wood washing up on the shorelines—seeing what they could do, I was thinking that’s what I could do,” he says. “I was basically self-taught.”
Lisa Nichols
Technology Partners, Chesterfield
It didn’t take Lisa Nichols long to figure out the barriers to entry for newcomers to St. Louis. “We did have a bit of a hurdle to overcome,” says the CEO and co-founder of Technology Partners, Inc., the city’s largest IT solutions and staffing company. “If you’re from St. Louis, the question you get asked all the time is where went to high school.” The girl from Paducah, Ky., didn’t have the right answer to that question, but she sure had the right stuff: The company she started with her husband, Greg, nearly 20 years ago now counts among its corporate clients big-time companies like Monsanto, MasterCard International and Express Scripts, and finished 2013 with nearly $41 million in revenue. The key to that success, she says, is doing right by their consultants, which necessarily means operating on a lower margin. That works if you’re operating at a higher volume, and expanding not just the client roster, but the service lines. Three years ago, the company founded as a staffing agency expanded into a full-service solutions provider, driving current growth. She is deeply engaged in civic and charitable causes, earning a reputation for philanthropy for efforts on behalf of Junior Achievement, Orphan Helpers, the American Heart Association, Toys for Tots and many others: “My motto both in running my business and my personal life is ‘leave every individual I encounter better than I found them.’ ”
Rex Sinquefield
Show-Me Institute, St. Louis
You may know the name, but do you know the real Rex Sinquefield? The one who has helped thousands of young Missourians develop critical-thinking and strategic skills with the scholastic chess club he founded in St. Louis? The one whose youth in an orphanage instilled the discipline that helped make him a global figure in the investment sector? The one with board service for St. Louis University, the city’s symphony, art museums and botanical garden?
Since retiring from his Texas-based Dimensional Fund Advisors nearly a decade ago and returning to Missouri, Sinquefield has exposed himself to what he calls “the long knives” of those who cringe at his calls for elimination of state individual and corporate income taxes, as well as earnings taxes in St. Louis and Kansas City. “Missouri has had lackluster growth for a very long time,” he says, “and is near the bottom in gross state product for 10 to 12 years.” The personal criticism, he says, “is absolutely unavoidable. Some people just don’t share these views or are just instinctively against free-market solutions.” But the irony, he believes, is that a growth economy fueled by a better tax system would yield the very revenues needed to sustain social programming.
Eddie Delahunt
Musician, Kansas City
He came here from Ireland in 1989, and by chance had a giddy taste of Kansas City on St. Patrick’s Day. Then he headed back to the east, for New York. What aspiring musician doesn’t? But the Big Apple, he says, “was a bittersweet experience as I had been spoiled by the celebrity reception in Kansas City.” In New York, he was just another guy playing Irish music with gigs starting at 11 p.m. “So back to Kansas City and beyond, where I met my lovely wife Betsy, who helped me carve a little niche starting at two nights, extending to 4-5 nights a week performing Irish music, including weddings, reunions, corporate functions, etc.”
You have to be steeped in the musical lore of Ireland to recognize the names he counts as career influences, but “even though most of this music was written in a previous century, it still resonates as we sing it anew,” Delahunt says. More than just a performance musician, Delahunt is a writer as well, addressing universal topics of longing, loneliness, lust and love, he says, as well as traveling, drinking and debauchery. “I suspect the same influence lies in country and bluegrass as I hear it sung here in Missouri,” he says.
