Dave Dreiling
GTM Sportswear, Manhattan
The bug bit early—and hard—when David Dreiling was growing up in north-central Kansas. His parents owned small clothing stores in Smith Center and Concordia, and “the dinner table discussion was always about business.” Dreiling says. “A lot of lessons stuck with me that I still use today” as co-founder of GTM Sportswear.
Before he’d graduated from Kansas State University, Dreiling had started four businesses, including a limousine service he sold for $2,800 upon graduation to buy a half interest in It’s Greek to Me, selling fraternity wear on college campuses right out of his van. He and business partner Dave Barnes “were wildly underfunded and trying something that had never been done before,” Dreiling recalls. “The whole goal was just to stay in existence. I never worked so hard in my entire life as I did for those first few years.”
But three years after earning his degree, Dreiling was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Small Business Administration. GTM soared to nearly $78 million in revenues by 2012, and employs more than 300 people, many of them college students. It’s been a lot harder to make the incremental gains than to sell that first $1 million worth, Dreiling says.
“As a brand new business concept, we had to just go with our gut and figure out things along the way, as opposed to relying on past experience from ourselves or others,” he says. “There was no ‘best practice’ for what we were trying to do. “
Manhattan, he says, is a strategic location, with Midwestern values and work ethic that Dreiling says “can’t be coached or trained.” Students, he says, “fill a pipeline with proven ‘GTMers’ from which to hire from when they graduate... It takes most of the “guesswork” out of the hiring equation for both sides.”
Terry Crowder
Kansas Human Rights Commission, Topeka
Terry Crowder did his hitch in Vietnam for the Marines, came back to his hometown and went to work at Goodyear Tire & Rubber, one of the city’s largest employers. And he stayed put—for 40 years, retiring in 2009. Faith—in God, in family and in the United Steelworkers—have been hallmarks of his life. The Good Lord and family are doing fine, but Crowder is less confident of where organized labor is headed today. “Even though Kansas is a right to work state, we have had strong unions in Kansas,” he says. “But over the years, the political atmosphere of union-busting has effectively weakened the unions.” Private-sector lobbyists have managed to tarnish the positive benefits of unions, he says, while at the same time sending jobs overseas for cheap labor. Those values may mark him as a Democrat in a deeply red state, but Crowder, who recently was named to the state’s Human Rights Commission, is hard to pigeon-hole. His 2012 run for a Statehouse seat, for example, produced a Kansans for Life endorsement, even though he supports abortion rights. Life is a miracle, he says, but “I also believe that a woman who has had an abortion, a man who has encouraged an abortion or even a doctor who has performed one, can all be forgiven by faith in Jesus Christ.”
Sister Diane Steele
University of Saint Mary, Leavenworth
Born and raised in a tight-knit Catholic family in Butte, Montana, Sister Diane Steele remembers her origins in a hard-rock mining community, but reveals much about herself when she says, “I learned early on to find God in the beauty and the majesty of the mountains.” The ability to connect on a spiritual level with the world around her would occasionally inspire curiosity about religious life during her high school years. She made the decision to go for it, she said, during her senior year in college. “It’s hard to describe—a bit like why you marry this person rather than that person,” says Sister Diane, now president of her alma mater, the University of Saint Mary. “It is a sense, an urge inside that you have to try it. ... I did. I liked it.”
The Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth steered her towards high-school instruction before deciding to make a theologian out of her, leading to a masters in theology and a Ph.D. in systematic theology, both from Notre Dame. After a year of teaching that followed, she became president of USM 13 years ago.
“What keeps me in Catholic higher education is my deep conviction that education is the only real and lasting solution to poverty,” she says. “Education empowers people to be self-sufficient and eventually, give back to their communities. … Further, an education, a Catholic liberal-arts education, shapes one’s mind and soul. For us, it is a sacred task.”
Dennis Hays
Unified Government, Kansas City, Kan.
Government may lack true entrepreneurs, but there’s no reason why people in public service can’t exhibit entrepreneurship, says Dennis Hays. That’s a fitting observation as he wraps up a nearly 40-year career in public administration. Hays is preparing to retire as County Administrator for the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kan.
Reflecting on the most pivotal moment since he joined the city’s community development department in 1976, Hays pointed to the successful 1997 consolidation of the city and county governments, which allowed a single political body to make tough policy decisions. “Because of the high level of trust and confidence in the mayor, County Commission and the administrator, we were able to move nimbly and act in an entrepreneurial style,” Hays says. That led to less government and more public-private partnerships.
Proof of the power behind that dynamic is Village West, the 400-acre entertainment and retail district adjacent to the Kansas Speedway, generating millions in tax revenues for a county that has long been among the poorest in the state.
Bob St. Peter
Kansas Health Institute, Topeka
Bob St. Peter left his home state after college to earn a medical degree at Duke University, then waded hip-deep into health-care policy in Washington for more than a decade. By 1998, it appeared that the next great frontier for addressing ailments in the health-care system itself would take place at the state level.
So when a mildly relentless headhunter latched onto his contact information and pitched the leadership position with a health-policy organization in Topeka, the Wichita native was almost halfway convinced. Family closed the distance on that deal: “It was going home; I grew up here, multiple generations of my family were from here. If it were Nebraska or Oklahoma, I might not have come back, but in Kansas, I thought I could do something and contribute to the health and well-being of the people.”
He made a promise to his wife, Anne, that a three-year commitment would suffice. Cue the famed Kansas City quality-of-life hooks. Sixteen years later, the St. Peters are still here. His work gives him an opportunity to engage in health-care challenges that are both nationwide in scope, and particular scourges in Kansas. “In most things, we’re close to the middle,” he says, “but in a few things, we’re not. We’re worse off compared to other states with obesity rates” as well as community and educational activities that can affect tobacco use and obesity.
Jerry Garland
Associated Wholesale Grocers, Kansas City, Kan.
“We’re blessed being in the Midwest, with all the commodities that are grown here, the cattle and the grains,” says Jerry Garland. And trust us, when Jerry Garland talks food, he knows whereof he speaks. He’s the chief executive officer for Associated Wholesale Grocers, the retailer cooperative that jumped past the $8 billion revenue mark last year.
“Independent grocers in the state of Kansas, do about $1.032 billion in sales every year, and that supports about 32,000 jobs, and we supply about 80 percent of that volume,” says Garland a native Texan. AWG’s footprint extends into Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Crunch the numbers system-wide and AWG helps keep 120,000 people employed.
That gives small, independent grocers—many of them the lifeblood of their communities—an economy of scale that allow them to compete nearly eyeball-to-eyeball with grocery giants, Garland said.
“It’s a real challenge for small-town Kansas to keep its grocery stores,” he says. “I grew up in a smaller town, and you’ve got a courthouse, post office and grocery store. If something is lost there, it feels like you’ve lost the community.”
Shelly Prichard
Wichita Community Foundation
Shelly Prichard is something of a rarity: a sixth-generation Kansan, whose relatives first descended on the Winfield area in 1876. Those who were living there before that didn’t have much regard for the people moving in from the east.
By the time Prichard was born into a cattle-farming family headed by a veterinarian, the family’s Sunflower State bona fides had been set.
A K-State journalism grad, she worked for Sosland Publishing in KC, then made the move into non-profit management, and today’s she’s director of the Wichita Community Foundation. Like in KC, she’s found that donors in Wichita are quite charitable, even as they follow a national trend toward more purposeful philanthropy. “They want to know where their dollars are going, expected outcomes, successes, etc.,” Prichard says. Statistically, she noted, Wichita ranked 111th out of 366 metro areas in charitable giving in 2012, at $283.99 million, it’s a median contribution of $3,050 for the year. “There is definitely a feeling of newness and fresh thinking in the business community.”
Mike Hamman
Lone Pine Hunting Preserve, Toronto
In 1978, Mike Hamman and his wife, Beth, decided it was time to leave Nebraska and go home, to Woodson County, Kansas, where Beth’s great-grandfather had homesteaded the family farm nearly a century before. But instead of breaking the ground, Mike Hamman was looking at another sort of harvest.
That’s how Lone Pine Hunting Preserve came into existence, offering corporate CEOs and blue-collar workers alike the opportunity to hunt pheasant, quail, and chukar or turkey and deer hunting in season. Groups as large as 24 descend on the farm near Toronto to harvest as much wildlife as their wallets will allow, Hamman says.
“We get a pretty broad range of hunters here,” Hamman said. “We get a lot of folks from close by, but just today, we have a guy coming in from Alaska.” One might wonder whether the nation’s largest state was running out of wildlife, but Hamman notes it’s the variety that draws his customers. “Up there, he hasn’t had a chance to bird hunt in several years.”
Each year, Hammon raises roughly 15,000 pheasants, which are hunted on the preserve or shipped to other preserves nationwide. He trained hunting dogs for close to 40 years, but now just works with his own, which he makes available to hunters who have none.
Jon Levin
Varney's, Manhattan
Several years ago, a long-time employee of Varney’s book store in Manhattan penned an on-line tribute to Jon Levin, owner of the iconic property in the Aggieville entertainment district just across Anderson Avenue from Kansas State University.
Levin had articulated 16 guidelines that became a blueprint for success at the store for more than 55 years. Among them were such gems as “A policy is only a poor substitute for common sense,” “We’re not here to teach anyone a lesson,” “Always use your best judgment,” “Don’t chew gum on the job,” and “Do not steal from the store.”
Now, consider this: K-State’s Bill Snyder returned from a three-year “retirement” in 2009 to resurrect the program, he brought with him his own 16-point program.
The store traces its history to 1890, when the agr college was celebrating a record enrollment of 590 students. That’s when Guy Varney, a 22-year-old businessman, opened his first bookstore downtown. After moving into Aggieville, the store has become a touchstone experience for thousands of students flocking to college to buy books, KSU sportswear and just about anything that will hold a splash of purple paint.
A family partnership controls the store now, and Levin with sons Jeff and Steve have cornered the market on the KU/K-State rivalry by purchasing the Jayhawk Bookstore in Lawrence.
Chad Gross
Grant County Feeders, Ulysses
As a kid, Chad Gross worked around cattle with his dad. But even though he grew up in the industry, “it wasn’t necessarily something that I knew I wanted to pursue” as a career, says Gross, who was originally from Hays. But he had something of an epiphany when he went off to college: “I really missed being around cattle and the feedlots,” he says, “so that brought me back to it. When it was time for a job I wanted to work for a big company that could provide opportunity long term.”
What he brought his employer JBS Five Rivers—was not just a per-sonal history in the business, but an armload of credentials. After receiving his bachelor’s in animal science at Colorado State and a master’s in ag econ from Purdue, Gross earned an MBA from Indiana University.
That has positioned him for advancement through JBS, which owns Grant County Feeders, one of the largest feedlot in Kansas, capable of handling 110,000 head of cattle at one time. “Having that many cattle on feed takes a lot of coordination and alignment from the people responsible for their care,” he said. “This is one of the challenges of the industry, but also rewarding when you positively influence the lives of people in the community.”
Knowing that the product of his work ends up on the plates of faceless millions of customers is a responsibility he takes seriously.
