Bob Noble
Noble Associates +, Springfield
Bob Noble says he’s been in advertising long enough to remember when the “Mad Men” concept wasn’t a novelty—it was a cliché. But since founding a small ad agency with $2,000 in 1969, armed only with a commercial arts degree and an Ozarks work ethic, he’s turned it into a national leader promoting many of the largest names in the food sector. A serial entrepreneur whose other ventures include the Food Channel, on-line content generation and a behavioral research organization, Noble has leveraged all the best that southwest Missouri has to offer—low cost of living, quality of life, terrific schools—to lure the talent that made his agency a national concern. “We’re a study in focus,” he says. “When you concentrate a practice in one practice area, you can go a lot deeper, dealing with companies with common and similar problems.” The one focal lapse in his career involved an attempt to turn his food acumen into a restaurant with no signage, just a three-story stainless steel fork—which now has a new home outside the agency headquarters. “I call that,” Noble says in wistful jest, “my $2 million Ph.D.”
Ross Summers
Branson Chamber of Commerce
Anyone who’s ventured onto U.S. 76, in Branson in recent years can appreciate where Ross Summers is coming from when he says the city is always re-inventing itself. “I grew up here,” says the president and CEO of the Branson Chamber of Commerce & Convention and Visitors Bureau, “and it’s changed remarkably, from a one-lane strip with nothing out there.” That strip—Country Music Boulevard—is the spine running through Missouri’s top tourism destination, and it’s undergoing a review even now to help accommodate the crush of 7 million visitors annually.
After a 12-year-stint in Alabama with a cable television company, Summers came home in the 1990s, then worked for a start-up on-line travel site he’d invested in, eventually selling it to Hotels.com. Semi-retirement wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and when the Chamber position opened up, he jumped.
Branson’s year-round population is around 10,500, but Summers says the city is built to accommodate closer to 80,000, with amenities like the new Branson Landing, a new airport, new theaters and more. Given those, Branson can handle perhaps an additional 3 million visitors a year, he says, and his office is prepared to generate that kind of volume, having seen its marketing budget increase from $2 million a year to $8 million during his 12 years in that role. “We haven’t reached our limits yet,” Summers declares.
Kendra Neely-Martin
Astra Zeneca, St. Louis
After earning a degree at Southeast Missouri State University, Kendra Neely-Martin launched her career doing demographic analysis and research for a St. Louis health system. But something was missing. “As an analyst, you spend weeks in the field, time punching in the data, but I was missing the connection to the customer,” she says. Her network of health-care professionals in the region led to a role with AztraZeneca, the global pharmaceutical company, and she’s been there for 11 years, working now as a sales representative, addressing a patient population in St. Louis that may not understand all the health risks it faces. “With diet, exercise and lifestyle issues,” she says, “if you know better, maybe you’ll do better.”
Neely-Martin, who has a master’s in marketing from Webster University, also serves on the board of trustees of her alma mater in Cape Girardeau, and works to teach at-risk girls about how to make the right choices in life.
“As the education-development chair” she says, “I work with African-American females to help them understand the things that put them at risk, number one, but also to build self-esteem” and steer them onto an educational path that leads to college. Her service in that role, plus other board work, earned her a prestigious Jefferson Award for Public Service.
Tom Suntrup
Suntrup Automotive Group, St. Louis
When Tom Suntrup talks about being part of a family business, he means a family business: The Suntrup clan in St. Louis includes 10 separate corporations selling vehicles under different manufacturers’ flags, and at least that many children of founder Bill Suntrup, his father, and Don, his uncle.
Tom operates several of those for the third-largest vehicle-sales group in a metropolitan area of 3 million people. A graduate of Mizzou—where, after his transfer from Oklahoma, he joined an exceedingly small fraternity of athletes who played football for two Big Eight programs—Suntrup took his career in another direction at the outset, as travel director for Maritz Travel.
But the family business drew him back in 1984, when he and his father partnered on a Peugot, Alfa-Romeo and Saab dealership. Not long after, he saw the movement of dealerships into the suburbs, and went along for that ride, with acquisitions that, in some cases, came only after years of nurturing relationships with previous owners.
St. Louis, he said, is a stable market that resists sharp upswings and downturns, save for the 2008–2010 period, which spared no dealer. “Those were some really tough years,” he said. “We just had to buckle down and tighten up.”
Robbie Makinen
Jackson County Government
Throughout Robbie Makinen’s career in social work for Ozanam and Cornerstones of Care—and even with his part-time job as a casino host—building relationships was a job requisite. After cros-sing paths with Mike Sanders several times, the Jackson County executive brought Makinen on board to help firm up relationships between the county and its 19 separate muncipalies. Mission accomplished: Seven years later, representatives of those cities are meeting monthy, and their mayors are meeting regularly, as well, to forge a unified approach to economic development.In addition, the Independence native and Truman High/Northwest Missouri State grad is also chairman for the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority board. His duties require him to grasp a tremendous volume of information, a task complicated by the loss of his vision last year. But he credits technology, plus the support of Sanders, chief of staff Calivin Williford and David Westbrook of Children’s Mercy Hospital, who is also blind, for helping him adjust to the challenges and keep moving forward. “I always talked to my kids about pushing through; now I need to prove it,” he told himself last year. “You can either be an anchor or a sail. I choose to sail.”
James Nunnelly
Kansas City
He came to Kansas City in 1969 to build the former Wayne Miner Health Center. Jim “Grand-Dad” Nunnelly stayed because he found a number of social ills that he wanted to treat. Not as a doctor; “I like to think of myself as a social planner,” he says. For more than 40 years, he did just that, always with an eye to improving the lot of succeeding generations. He’s done so as program founder for COMBAT, created after voters approved a quarter-cent sales tax in 1989 to fight a growing drug-abuse epidemic; with the Jackson County Drug Court, a first-of-its kind approach to adjudicating drug cases that yielded sharply lower rates of recidivism; with mentoring of urban-core students to effectively prepare them for the academic and social rigors of university life; even with a radio show, Generation Rap, which was a No. 1 show on weekends.
“The program I’m most proud of is Fathering Court,” says Nunnelly, who retired from COMBAT last year. “It supports many fathers who themselves were not paying child support, and now each year, it collects $1 million in child-support payments, where before, there was nothing.”
Lou Brock
St. Louis Cardinals, St. Charles
In the long, sad history of Chicago Cubs baseball, the collective leadership has amassed an impressive track record of misjudgments. One of the biggest came in 1964, when the Cubs gave up on a right fielder by the name of Lou Brock. The kid had lightning speed, but a .260 batting average over his first two seasons made him trade bait. And the St. Louis Cardinals will be forever grateful for what’s considered among the worst trades in baseball history.
After joining the Cards, Brock moved to left field and started hitting (a .348 average for his first season) and perhaps more tantalizingly, stealing bases—38 in the second half of the season. That season ended with the Cardinals surging from behind seven teams—including the Cubs—to capture the National League pennant and then beat the Yankees in the World Series. Riding the bat of Brock, who ended up hitting nearly .300 for his career, they won it again in ’67, and took Detroit into a seventh game before losing the ’68 Series.
Until Ricky Henderson beat his record in the 1990s, Brock was baseball’s all-time stolen-base king, first breaking the record set by Ty Cobb, then topping the all-time mark of Billy Hamilton, who played from 1888 to 1901. After 16 seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals, Brock had more than 3,000 hits, 1,610 runs scored and six All-Star game appearances. He was voted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1985, his first year of eligibility and today lives in suburban St. Charles.
Kim Inman
Missouri Association of Manufacturers, Springfield
We hear the lament constantly in business circles: The trouble with the U.S. economy is that we don’t make anything anymore. Don’t try telling that to Kim Inman.
Last fall, the longtime Springfield businesswoman succeeded Rita Needham as CEO of the Missouri Association of Manufacturers, who hail from one of the biggest business sectors in the state. While it’s true that manufacturing—like almost every other business sector—was hammered from 2008 to 2010, it has acutally increased its role in the state’s economy during the ensuing rebound. In 2009, near the depths of the downturn, manufacturing accounted $29.4 billion in output, about 12 percent of the state’s total. Just three years later, manufacturing was up more than 10 percent, to $32.3 billion in output, and had actually increased its share of total output to 12.5 percent.
Inman brought to her current role a 17-year track record in business development, sales and marketing. She previously was a vice president of sales/marketing for the Springfield Cardinals, the minor-league affiliate of the St. Louis parent. She was also founder of Springfield’s Cattle Barons Ball, a benefit for the American Cancer Society, and chaired fund-raisers for the March of Dimes, and was on the advisory board for Female Leaders in Philanthropy.
Peter Herschend
Herschend Family Entertainment, Branson
When Hugo and Mary Herschend took out a 99-year lease on the site where Silver Dollar City stands today, they were working with a hole in the ground: Marvel Cave. Hugo Herschend’s death in 1955 left Mary and her sons, Jack and Peter, to build a business around that enterprise; Jack became CEO, while Peter had a perhaps more daunting challenge—he was responsible for marketing everything built up around the cave. That included the 1960 opening of what would become Silver Dollar City, the Branson theme park known as much for its seasonal festivals as its arts, crafts and thrill rides.
It also included breaking out of southwest Missouri into theme parks and entertainment venues nationwide. Peter and his brother run the nation’s largest family-owned themed attractions company, with more than 10,000 employees working at 26 locations in 10 states, including Dollywood, the theme park in Tennessee that they co-own with country singer Dolly Parton.
Hal Higdon
Ozarks Technical Community College, Springfield
When Hal Higdon became chancellor of Ozarks Tech in 2006, he immediately set out to do two things: increase the college’s profile with upgraded programming related to key employment sectors, and infuse himself into civic life in the Springfield area. Let the record show that Higdon, the second president in the nearly 25-year history of OTC, gets things done.
On the first score, he aligned the leadership at OTC to focus on work-force training, increasing the college’s reach with on-line offerings, and adding new programs in allied health. As a result, OTC has taken on a new significance for Springfield–area employers, and as a consequence, enrollment has soared by more than 44 percent since the year before he set foot on the campus. He also oversaw physical expansions with new sites in Richwood Valley in 2007, a new Table Rock campus in Hollister, and OTC centers in Lebanon and Waynesville.
As for the civic engagement, the Alabama native has immersed himself in a wide range of philanthropic and community-development initiatives. His service roster includes seats as director or member on boards for the United Way of the Ozarks, the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, the Missouri Communtiy College Association, the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce, CoxHealth Systems and the Springfield Business Development Corp.
