Sue Bhatia
Rose International, Chesterfield
Sue Bhatia has packed more of the American Dream into two decades than most of us experience in a lifetime. Three years after arriving in Missouri from her native New Delhi in India, she completed a master’s degree in management information systems at Mizzou and went to work in the information technology sector. It didn’t take long for the vision thing to kick in, and by 1993, she was ready to launch Rose International, along with her husband. They pooled their own money and a Small Business Administration loan, then began providing contract IT services and work-force solutions to large companies. St. Louis, as it turns out, is a target-rich environment if you’re going after Fortune 1000 companies: The region boasts a score of them, with nearly half ranking in the Fortune 500. Within three years, Rose had 100 employees, and was on its way; it’s been repeatedly recognized by various local and national business publications as among the fastest-growing women-owned businesses in the nation. The company is celebrating 20 years in business, has 21 branches throughout the U.S., more than 6,000 employees, and annual revenues have soared past the $300 million mark.
Michael Quimby
Quimby Pipe Organs, Warrensburg
Fourth-grader Michael Quimby gazed at the pipe organ playing along with his boys choir in Stillwater, Okla., and the hook was set. “That’s what started it all,” says the founder of Quimby Pipe Organs. “That, and an insatiable desire to get my hands on as many books about organs as I could. People in this line of work were born with orange shellac in their blood, as we like to say.” Not many say it, though: The American Institute of Organbuilders, comprising owners and technicians, numbers fewer than 500. But within their ranks, Quimby is highly respected; he’s been president of the AIO, as well as president of the smaller Association of Pipe Organ Builders.
His work is the antithesis of high-volume output: Major restoration projects can take up to three years and run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The most challenging project in his 40 years of business was restoring the organ at St. John the Devine in New York, after a fire there. The methodical, deliberate pace of organ restoration isn’t for everyone, and Quimby’s staff of nine has demonstrated uncanny longevity for a small business: His longest-serving employee has been with him for 30 years; even the “new guys” are into their sixth year.
The process of organ-building is essentially unchanged after 500 years, Quimby says. “It’s an anomaly in the 21st century, for sure, but there is still demand for the product.”
Doug Clements
Wings of Hope , St. Louis
Doug Clements thinks highly of anyone who holds a Ph.D. Really. But when it comes to easing the world’s suffering, too many of the best and brightest overthink things, he says. Example: You’re in a tropical zone. You need fresh water. You can engineered high-dollar infrastructure to get it—or you can hang a tarp between trees, filter the runoff with sand and have 1,000 gallons of fresh water a day. “No Ph.D. on the planet would ever recommend that for a water system,” Clements says, “but it’s simple to do, it’s easy to maintain. It’s very basic common sense.” Leadership like that has made Wings of Hope a global player in humanitarian efforts—and the rare non-profit that works to see its services are, eventually, no longer required. “Giving things away may be noble,” says Clements, a former manufacturing executive, “but giving merely perpetuates the problem. You have to teach people how to do for themselves.” Wings of Hope does that applying both common sense and a Midwestern work ethic, he says. “When you want to travel to the Congo or Zambia, it’s more difficult” from St. Louis, he says, “but not impossible. But other than the geography, the volunteer capabilities in the Midwest are a much larger benefit than that downside.” The organization, nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, boasts a star-studded lineup of supporters: Actors, politicians, executives, athletes, educators and more.
Morris Burger
Burger's Smokehouse, California
Talk about timing: E.M. Burger started curing country hams to supplement a farm income in 1927, just ahead of the Great Depression. That skill would come in handy. With the nation’s farm economy in shambles, the elder Burger decided to make a business of it right about the time his son was charting his course in life, and young Morris didn’t stray far from the curing barn. After Harry Truman handed him the State Fair trophy for Grand Champion Ham in 1955, Burger finished his agriculture degree at Mizzou, did a stint in Europe for the Army on a 280-millimeter atomic cannon unit in Europe, then came back to California. Missouri’s appetite for ham would never be the same.
Almost immediately, he was drawn into planning for an expansion of the plant and securing the nation’s first certification as federally inspected ham plant. That opened up business channels nationwide, and soon production capacity soared from 1,000 hams a year to nearly 15,000. In the decades that followed, Burger oversaw expansions, process improvements, technological changes and an embrace of mail order—and eventually, Internet-based sales. “We just continued to find new ways of selling the product,” Burger says. “Sliced, diced, center cut, biscuit cut, bean meat, then we started cooking,” adding to a product line that today includes desserts, seasonings, buffalo, poultry, seafood and steaks.
Today, Burger’s has devout fans across the nation, with a third and fourth generation following Morris’ business philosophy. “There’s no such thing as mature markets, just mature marketers,” is one gem; “Ego gets you in trouble, pride keeps you there,” is another.
Jim Everett
Former CIA Agent, Independence
In general, Jim Everett will tell you, espionage work is not dangerous. It’s more like the life of an airline pilot or a Jurassic-era herbivore: “Fairly boring, with moments of great terror,” he says. Of course, your heart always beats faster when you’re in possession of compromising documents, he notes, “knowing that if they are discovered, it would have serious negative consequences, including possible execution.” But for 11 years, that feeling was just another day at the office while he was on assignment for the CIA in Sweden and the Netherlands, with occasional stops in 35 other nations. His “day” job? Working as an import/export professional, peddling Korean sweaters, Japanese watches and Norwegian cheese. But he also met foreign agents, including Soviet spies during the Cold War, to secure information for his bosses and colleagues in Langley, Va.
All of that came to a screeching halt when the Watergate hearings of 1974 disclosed his identity—his company had been affiliated with burglar/conspirator E. Howard Hunt. At that point, Everett was of no further use to the CIA. He ended up in Independence, where relatives and friends were living, and bought an interest in a public-relations and advertising firm, working that gig until retiring in 1995. For 20 years, he jousted with agency censors before publishing “The Making and Breaking of an American Spy” in 2010. Everett has also launched two foundations to benefit Ethiopian nationals and immigrants to the U.S., and to build a museum in the city of Axum there. Those experiences have affirmed his belief in the generosity of Kansas City residents, who, he says, “are loving, caring and supportive of human needs in far-away places.”
William Peck
Washington University, St. Louis
Perhaps this explains what might be the most impressive resume you’ll ever see: “I’ve had the opportunity to live two lives,” says William Peck. And he’s packed each with stellar achievements, most recently at the helm of the Center for Health Policy at Washington University in St. Louis. The center explores what ails the nation’s health-care system itself: Disparate care and access to insurance, high costs, organizational complexities, a health-care work-force shortage and a generally inefficient system.
A Connecticut native and the son of a general practitioner, Peck first came to St. Louis for his medical residency and a research fellowship in endocrinology. He worked in various medical roles in New York state before answering Washington University’s call to co-chair its Department of Medicine in 1976. From 1989 to 2003, he was dean of the school of medicine, vice chancellor of medical affairs and president of the university’s medical center. “The greatest privilege I’ve had is to lead one of the world’s greatest medical schools for 14 years,” Peck says. In addition to addressing health policy concerns, he has been involved with a burgeoning entrepreneurial movement as founding chair of Innovate St. Louis. It has mentored more than 500 startups since its inception, creating nearly 1,300 new jobs. “It’s now a part of the entre-preneurial ecosystem of our village,” he says, but the challenge in St. Louis is not unlike Kansas City’s: “Funding is a key issue,” he says.
Bob Bush
Bush & Assoc., Maryville
Bob Bush retired as an administrator at Northwest Missouri State eight years ago, but the man known around town as “Mr. Northwest” is as engaged as ever. A volunteer in multiple local causes, he’s a key booster for the city and the university, won the Chamber of Commerce’s Distinguished Service Award last year, and has served on boards of the regional economic dev-elopment and legislative-lobbying organizations. “I enjoy seeing other people being successful with their dreams, hopes and possibilities. Very few people get to do that,” he says.
He derives a special satisfaction from his work on the board of Northwest Missouri Enterprise Facilitation, a group of more than 60 volunteers from six counties who provide free and confidential business coaching. “Over the last seven years, 60-some companies were started, restructured or transitioned into some other kind of business,” through the group’s efforts, Bush said. “When you look at that, it’s a $14 million capital investment—but what if there were no facilitators? How much of that would have happened?” The model works for the rural region, but could be applied in urban areas, too, he says.
Judith Sabbert
Heartland Foundation, St. Joseph
Judith Sabbert learned long ago that a community’s collective health entails much more than a mechanism for delivering quality care. As chief operating officer for the Heartland Foundation, she’s fully immersed not just in helping find remedies for what’s ailing residents of Northwest Missouri, but ferreting out the underlying causes. “We learned early on that education and quality jobs are the biggest determinants of a person’s health,” says Sabbert, who joined the foundation two decades ago. “Major health problems in our communities are based in human behaviors with roots in basic human conditions,” she says. That’s why many of the foundation’s programs address not only illnesses—heart disease, cancer, stroke or pulmonary conditions—and not just actual causes, like tobacco use, poor diet, inactivity or alcohol abuse. They focus on the causes of the causes—conditions that lead to bad decisions, like stress, anger, poverty, poor education or depression.
Rich Ryffel
J.P. Morgan Private Bank, St. Louis
As a public-finance mogul in St. Louis, Rich Ryffel has his fingerprints all over high-visibility projects like Forest Park, the new Busch Stadium, the Gateway Arch and Metrolink. Any one of them can inspire awe in a visitor. Recently, though, the executive director for J.P. Morgan Private Bank got his hands on fulfillment of another sort. “I donated my services to help a not-for-profit, Beyond Housing, assemble a complicated package of New Markets Tax Credits and Tax Increment Financing to develop a grocery store in a ‘food Desert’ in North St. Louis County,” Ryffel said. “That project was incredibly satisfying, personally and professionally.”
A Connecticut native, he moved to St. Louis 25 years ago—his wife hails from those parts, and they’ve raised four children there. Those are four good reasons why he looks at the current state of public infrastructure spending with a measure of caution: “Most studies show that the return to the public on investments in infrastructure and education is high,” Ryffel says. “Anything that reduces those investments puts the region at a disadvantage in the longer run to those regions and countries making those investments.” The state’s ability to compete, then, depends on its financial commitment to giving people the transportation systems and technologies that will keep them productive, he says. Fostering more of that production is, in part, why he serves as an adjunct professor at both Washington University and Webster University. “I feel some sense of obligation to give back to the next generation,” Ryffel says.
Esther George
Federal Reserve Bank, Kansas City
The good old boys on the Federal Open Market Committee surely thought they’d removed the burr under their saddle when Tom Hoenig retired a year after casting a litany of “no” votes on loose monetary policy all throughout 2010. Earlier this year, when Esther George drew her first voting assignment on whether to continue the Fed’s bond-buying binge, the guys were no doubt thinking “Here we go again.” Hers, like many of Hoenig’s, was the lone dissenting vote. Think Ensign Pulver hurling the captain’s palm tree overboard. While George has her own views on what’s wrong with U.S. fiscal policy, there’s no denying the influence that her predecessor had in framing her worldview. As she told American Banker last year, she and Hoenig had both seen the ill effects of large, complex and difficult-to-monitor institutions in the run-up and fallout from the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s. A native of Faucett, Mo., she earned a business degree at Missouri Western in St. Joseph and her MBA from the University of Missouri–Kansas City. She joined the Fed in 1982, just ahead of the S&L crisis, and rose to senior vice president in the Division of Supervision and Risk Management before succeeding Hoenig as President in 2011.
