Ralph Butler
Ralph Butler Band, St. Louis
When you make a living with your musical skills, says Ralph Butler, “the business has a learning curve.” Indeed. Back in his 20s, when he was pulling down $30 a night two or three times a week, living seven in an apartment and trying to get started, his current success with the Ralph Butler Band couldn’t even be imagined. But he’s got a loyal following in St. Louis, where he’s known for his wide-ranging repertoire. “Diversity is key if you’re going to do this,” Butler says.
“It’s very important to me to have a variety of styles and music and songs,” he says, because even as big as it is, St. Louis is made up of audiences with dramatically diverse musical tastes. So Butler is as relaxed in a jazz setting as he is doing classical Top 40, with one caveat: “As long as it’s quality,” he says. “I see a narrowing of genres that sell to a younger audience, and I still see a lot of the audience in St. Louis that is older, that harkens back to the Motown days. But whatever we’re playing, it’s important to me to put out quality.”
Ed Douglas
Citizens Bancshares, Chillicothe
Banker. Financial planner. Author. Tennis coach. Mentor. Ed Douglas has, at various times, been all those and more. And he’s one reason why economic-development consultants say Chillicothe is a town blessed with more per-capita leadership than most any other town of nearly 10,000. Douglas is a true believer: In God, in family and in the power of compound interest. All three have informed his writing, most recently with “25 Truths: Life Principles of the Happiest and Most Successful Among Us.” That came after Money Marathon: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom, and his first book, “Making a Million with Only $2,000: Every Young Person Can Do It.” He’s the former CEO of Citizens Bancshares, which he assisted in its growth from a single branch to two dozen other communities—and $1 billion in assets—before retiring after 32 years, in 2006. He’s served as tennis coach at Chillicothe High, teaching life lessons as well as serve-and-volley. Much of the credit for what he’s achieved, he says, goes to his wife, Marla, who helped him raise three children.
Douglas also believes in free enterprise and the power of rural communities to excel, something frequently on display in Chillicothe, a community he calls blessed with energetic, engaged leaders.
Chuck Haney
Mayor, Chillicothe
Get Chuck Haney started on the things that Chillicothe has done to better itself, and buckle up: He’s going to take you on a whirlwind tour. From the new sports complex at the high school to the new facilities for the fire department and EMS, the 18-hole golf course, the aquatic park, the $35 million hospital under construction—and most of those built without any tax increases—Haney has a lot to talk about. And those projects just scratch the surface. The rest of rural Missouri may have its issues, but those seem to have skirted his town of fewer than 10,000 people.
“In my opinion, we have the greatest community anybody could ever want,” says the 4-term mayor, who entered public office after 40 years of working at the local newspaper and radio station. “We’re ready to do what it takes.” That kind of gung-ho sold officials at Lowe’s, who had never put a store in a market of fewer than 20,000 people before building there. Chillicothe has half that. But as Haney notes, it’s a hub for Cameron, Trenton, Brookfield and Carrollton, so it punches above its economic weight.
A member of the Missouri Press Hall of Fame, Haney turned to local politics to keep busy after his wife’s death in 2000.
He served four terms on the City Council—running unopposed three times—and was unopposed in his last three mayoral contests.
Barbara Shatto
Shatto Milk Company, Osborn
Here’s a test for those of you versed in operations management: Name a company or product that can go from raw material to a retailer’s shelf in as little as 12 hours. If you’re stumped for an answer, check in with Barbara Shatto. A decade ago, she and husband Leroy helped chart a new direction for the farm that had been in her family for nearly a century, launching a bottling and packaging line right there on the farm. Since then, Shatto has become the premier name for locally produced, hormone-free milk, delivered to grocers just like they did half a century ago—in glass bottles.
Entrepreneurship isn’t often recognized as a staple of farm life, but those who live on that link of the food chain—like their forebears in centuries past—must often draw on their own resourcefulness to keep things running; in many ways, farmers were America’s original entrepreneurs. When many small family farms were feeling the squeeze between commodity prices and what they could get for their products, Barbara and Leroy made the strategic decision to undertake the production process themselves. Result? Sales boomed, and just three years later, the U.S. Small Business Administration recognized the Shattos as Small Business Persons of the Year for Missouri.
Gale Holsman
American Sweeping, Grandview
Michael Jackson came to Kansas City for three concerts in 1984, and left behind a mess. Or at least those who flocked to see him at Arrowhead Stadium did. That’s when a friend told Gale Holsman about an opportunity to pick up a few bucks sweeping up the parking lots. “Nobody was doing it,” Holsman marvels. Vision met entrepreneurial zeal, and Holsman soon formed American Sweeping Co. “I got to eight trucks in six months; I was the Sweeper King of Kansas City,” he says.
He built not just a company, but an attractive business model. Too attractive. The bottom-feeders moved in, offering cut-rate services, substandard work and dangerous equipment. So Holsman went national, taking lead roles in industry associations to help promote quality sweeping services. He also became a mentor to aspiring competitors: “If you have good competition, it will make you competitive, too” he says. With poor competition, “the possibility of all of us losing money is pretty great.”
In 2006, Holsman sold off his parking lot division, but American still does some city streets and delivers construction roll-off units and portable toilets.
Sarah Burkemper
CPA, Troy
She operates an accounting firm and is on the board for Truman State University Foundation, president of the Lincoln County Health Foundation’s board and has a husband and three kids at home in Troy, an hour northwest of St. Louis.
How does Sarah Burkemper do it? “A lot of it is because I don’t spend time commuting.” Leave it to a CPA to get right to the bottom line. Her home for the past 17 years, population 10,000, doesn’t draw lots of folks with graduate degrees, but Burkemper has made it just that: a home. “It’s a kind community; very easy to develop relationships. I don’t know that I could do that in a larger city. It’s an easy place to build a business, but the real draw is to live in the country.”
Another key relationship, with her alma mater, began with an unexpected invitation in 2001 to sit on Truman’s board of governors. When her term ended, she still had something to offer, and eagerly agreed to join the university’s foundation board. Then “by another miracle,” she says, she was again given a seat on Truman State’s board of governors. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more vocal cheerleader. “If you want to talk about gems in Missouri, Truman State is definitely one of them.”
Stanton Shoemaker
J&S Farm, Clinton
It’s what you might call a growth-opportunity line of work: Stanton Shoemaker looks out at the average age of a Missouri farmer—pushing 60 years old—and recognizes that over the next decade or two, big changes are coming to the state’s agricultural sector. “I’m not quite 50,” he says, “but I’m one of the youngest I know in this line; a lot of older people are getting ready to retire, and somebody’s got to be there to pick up that slack.”
A fourth-generation farmer, Shoemaker operates 4,800 acres, mostly corn, soybeans and wheat. He’s been at it for 30 years, running the family farm for 20 of those, along with his wife, Janet. The family connection is no small factor in the farm’s success, he notes. “The biggest challenge a farmer faces today is getting the capital. I was fortunate to have a father willing to help me get started, but the dollars required to buy land and equipment, let along cover operating costs, suggest that only the largest operations will survive.”
Complicating that dynamic is the rampant escalation in farmland prices throughout the nation. “I’m not a mega corporation that can come in and start buying up land; it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out,” he says.
Shoemaker is known among colleagues, friends and fellow Clintonians as being a character. He and brother Scott helped establish “Beer Camp” and were instrumental in rebuilding the Elks Lodge after the building collapse in 2006.
Bobbi Bash
Bobbi Bash Realty, Lake of the Ozarks
How’d she get to be one of the premier realty figures in Missouri’s hottest vacation spot? Easy, says Bobbi Bash: “My last child headed for KU, and I headed for the lake.” Well maybe not that easy. “I was single and knew no one,” she recalls. “I needed to figure out how to eat, so I decided real estate might be a way.” Selling real estate wasn’t entirely unlike fund-raising back in Kansas City, where Bash was known for various philanthropic endeavors, including creation of the Symphony Ball. It’s a matter of matching someone’s interests with their ability to give. That’s been a little trickier for realty pros nationwide for the past five years—“Since the big downturn, I have had to work twice as hard to achieve what I had accomplished prior,” Bash says—but her determination is paying off. “It is the best January and February I have had in 23 years,” which she attributes to successful branding, client loyalty and dogged prospecting, all of which have kept her in the upper 1 percent of lake-area realty pros. Demand is up, major grocers and retailers are moving in, and home prices are starting to rise again. Life is good. And valued: A 12-year breast-cancer survivor, Bash is known for her efforts to support research and treatment. Last year, she launched “Pink Wig Week” to raise awareness for the cause and 400 pink wigs throughout Lake Ozark attested to her salesmanship. And when she’s not in Missouri’s vacation capital, she’s vaca-tioning in Kansas City, getting in as much face time as she can with her seven grandchildren.
Maryann Mugo
Physician, Branson
Anyone who’s been to Branson in the past 20 years and witnessed the explosive growth might have a hard time believing it, but the entertainment capital of the Ozarks counted among its health-care providers not a single endocrinologist as recently as 2005. Nigerian-born Maryann Mugo changed that by setting up shop in Branson, meaning patients no longer had to travel to Springfield or other locations for specialized care. That’s vital to an area where increasing numbers of people are making their post-retirement homes—and as the Baby Boom generation moves into retirement, Mugo and any peers in her area of expertise will have their hands full. The demographics are just one reason Mugo’s practice has grown over the past eight years, and she’s welcomed reinforcements in the form of a nurse practitioner and a certified diabetes education nurse at the clinic.
Mugo also has organized, and serves as chair for, the Cox Branson Inpatient Diabetes Team, and played a key role when the medical center earned the Joint Commission’s Gold Seal for inpatient care.
Peter Brown
Grassmere Partners, Kansas City
After a 10-year run as chief executive for AMC Entertainment, Peter Brown went back to his financial-services roots by founding Grassmere, a private investment firm. But entertainment has a pull all its own, and Brown is dipping his toe in it again with the planned opening of STANDEES. It’s a new spin on the traditional dinner-and-a-movie, featuring something more cosmopolitan than concession-stand fare. “The food part was always pretty important, but we’ve turned the model on its head,” says Brown. “We’re positioned first and foremost as a restaurant.” The name is, in part, a tribute to Stan Durwood, the late CEO at AMC, and to insider vernacular—the term applies both cardboard cutouts you see at theaters and the folks who used to occupy standing-room-only space in theaters. The new venue is coming together in one of the nation’s premier markets for gauging consumer tastes. “Kansas City and Columbus were always quintessential test markets,” Brown says. “We really represent the full spectrum of what the moviegoer market is.” A Kansas City native—Rockhurst High and University of Kansas graduate—Brown casts a wide shadow in business and civic affairs. He’s on the boards of four companies (three public), has prior service on half a dozen others locally and nationally, and he was a founder of Entertainment Properties Trust, a hugely successful real-estate investment trust, in 1997. He also serves on the boards of some of the region’s most prominent non-profits.
