Sandy Foust
S&Y Industries, Winfield
Thirty years ago, Sandy Foust decided there was more to life than just being a housewife, even if she had to stay at home. Her husband offered a suggestion: Why not get some materials together and start making circuit boards?
At home. In Winfield, Kansas. With zero experience. Foust started to bone up on the industry—this was before there was an Internet, mind you, or a YouTube to show her how—and indeed, started cranking out circuit boards. Then more. And more. Today, they’re used in medical equipment, aerospace and automotive applications and telecommunications settings.
In 1996, she formally incorporated S&Y Industries—in Web browserspeak, that’s sandyindustries.com, conveniently enough—and the chase was on. Today, she employs more than 100 people, and she’s not making circuit boards at home: She has a 50,000-square-foot facility in Winfield, and is working with two of her sons, John and Dan.
Foust has also broadened her entrepreneurial curiosity, working with her sons to redevelop a 27,000-square-foot building in downtown Winfield, dubbing it The Shops at Millington Place.
Dave LaRoche
Fort Scott
With just 2.9 million residents, Kansas doesn’t turn out many professional baseball players. Thanks to an import from California, the state beat the odds—twice. Dave LaRoche, a 14-year veteran of the major leagues, married a Fort Scott girl back in 1973. As his career wound down, he and Patty decided they wanted a small-town feel for their kids, and settled in Fort Scott in 1981. There, they raised Adam and Andy, who have gone on to their own pro baseball careers. “It was a huge change for me,” LaRoche says. “I enjoyed the small-town living, and it was a great, safe place to raise a family.” There was never a moment, he said, when extended road trips during the season inspired concerns about the family’s safety.
One pleasant development he’s witnessed is the increasing sophistication of baseball instruction, with more frequent practices and traveling teams. As a result, he says, “I think you will see more Kansas-bred, D-1 and professional baseball players in the future.” A two-time All-Star pitcher, moved from outfielder to pitcher, going from the minor leagues to The Show in less than two years. “The highlight of my career,” he says, “was finishing with the New York Yankees and playing in the 1981 World Series.”
Christal Watson
Kansas Black Chamber of Commerce, KCK
Christal Watson learned the value of civic engagement from her father, radio news personality Neil Poindexter of KMBZ. “Dad was really involved in the community, serving on boards and things like that, and I feel like the mantel was passed to me,” says Watson, who is both a member of the Kansas City, Kansas, school board and president/CEO for the Kansas Black Chamber of Commerce. “I have a heart for Kansas City, Kansas, and after watching some of the other minority leaders—I don’t see a lot of them from my generation that have stuck around. So I want to do as much as I can.” On one level, that means engaging in efforts to resurrect a long-underperforming school system. “My parents instilled in me the importance of education,” Watson says. “The real value came from experience. I didn’t get my degree until later in life and I was passed over for jobs.” And her role at the Black Chamber, where she started part-time in 2007, was just that—a job—until she had a realization a few years ago. “I went to the U.S. Black Chamber school of management con-ference, and that’s when I started to feel like I was in the right job. After that, I decided I wanted to do full-time. I feel like it’s the right fit and matches my personality.”
Jim Wiens
CVI Funeral Supply, Newton
In a business that generates zero return customers, Jim Wiens has nonetheless made a go of things with CVI Funeral Supply in Newton, where he took over the reins from the founders—his parents—and built on the family business.
“I started at a very young age and hung around the plant as a boy,” Wiens recalls. “I worked through high school and college in the family business. I made handles for the vaults on a piece-rate basis and did clean up as well. Later, I worked in the plant and drove a delivery truck. I have many memories of traveling around the country, with my father, looking at other vault plants to learn about making our plant better.”
He picked up not just a degree in business administration at the University of Kansas, but by returning to Newton with his bride. In the years since, he and Sharon have raised two daughters.
Among the biggest challenges he’s dealt with in expanding the company’s footprint to cover five states is finding the right employees. “Hiring good people to work with has always been a priority and I have been fortunate in finding many good people to help the company grow,” he says. Some of that has to do with the inherent advantages of a Kansas labor pool. “Newton offers a quality work force and relatively low overhead for operating a business,” Wiens said.
Tom Watson
Golf Pro, Stillwell
You probably know him as Kansas City’s contribution to world-class golf: Tom Watson, five-time winner of the British Open, with 34 other PGA tournament championships on his resume and 14 more on the senior circuit. The reddish hair is fading a bit, but the gap-tooth smile can still light up a golf courses, and even in his 60s, Tom Watson projects a boyish countenance.
What you may not know about him is that Tom Watson is also a highly motivated neighborhood activist, as evidenced in his Web blog protesting annexation of his Stillwell-area farm into the city of Overland Park—and his role in going to court to challenge that land grab. And, unless you went to the former Pembroke Country Day in the mid-’60s, you probably don’t know about the origins of his competitive fire. That was back in the days when the three-sport star’s coaches referred to his appearance and demeanor as “Huckleberry Dillinger.”
That competitive drive was on full display in 2009 when Watson, whose best days were well behind him, led the British Open field and finished one stroke away from winning a sixth title there.
In response, the tournament adopted age restrictions that have kept him off the course since then.
Roger Powers
Flint Hills Solutions, Augusta
It was a chance conversation with a National Guard officer after the 2005 Greensburg tornado that got Roger Powers thinking.
“If I had a fixed-wing UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] that could give us a video feed, it would tell us where to send teams out, and we would have been more effective,” the officer said.
That was all the spark needed for Powers, a veteran of Wichita’s robust aerospace industry. He founded Flint Hills Solutions with a line of unmanned helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, placing itself at the forefront of an emerging global marketplace. Aviation marketplace anal-ysts say its the fastest-growing segment of the aerospace sector will balloon to $80 billion in sales over the next decade. “A lot of countries other than the U.S. are using the technology more aggressively than we are,” Powers says. But in the next couple years, “anything under 55 pounds gross weight, the lid’s going to come off this application.”
UAVs can provide extended surveillance capability (up to six hours for an unmanned helicopter), or long-distance flight at remarkably low costs. “We have one in our possession that flew over the Atlantic on less than a gallon of gas,” Powers said, referring to a 33-pound fixed-wing plane certified to fly at altitudes to 18,000’.
Bob Taylor
Executive AirShare, Wichita
It was a simple concept, really: You can rent a car for a day—why not a corporate jet? From that seedling planted in 2000, Bob Taylor founded Executive AirShare Corp., where he served as chief executive officer until turning the reins over to Keith Plumb last year.
The concept struck a financial nerve with business owners, which Taylor might have suspected, given his background as a certified public accountant. He started in accounting in 1971, then made the leap to aviation in 1998 by joining Executive Aircraft as president.
Executive AirShare introduced the concept of fractional ownership, and also offers share leasing and equity-building jet card programs that allow businesses to increase the efficiency of their air transportation dollar, since the company maintains, insures and stores the planes, as well as preps them for each flight.
In addition to a degree in math an economics from KU, Taylor earned his MBA at Michigan. His other business experience includes service as chairman and CEO of Railroad Savings Bank and chief financial officer of Rent-A-Center, the consumer rental company founded in Wichita by Tom Devlin. He also has served on the boards for Olathe-based Elecsys, a contract manufacturer of electronic products and components, and on the board for Inergy LP.
Bob Timmons
Kansas Corn Growers Association, Fredonia
Kansas corn growers cranked out 520 million bushels of corn last year, part of a record national harvest that drove prices to nearly half the levels that farmers enjoyed in 2012. Bob Timmons was along for that ride, and he feels both the satisfaction of his compatriots in corn production—and, when prices go south, their pain.
Timmons, now in his third stint as president of the Kansas Corn Growers Association, is a 40-year veteran of farming, having joined with his brother to take over the family farm started by their father, who’s now 93. Timmons learned much of what he knows about farming from growing up in that environment, and he supplemented that with a degree in business administration from Baker University.
He and his brother, who own 900 acres but farm roughly 3,500 through lease arrangements, have had their hands full in recent years with the statewide drought, which even made its way into the comparatively rainy southeast corner of the state.
“It’s been rough across all of Kansas, especially two years ago,” Timmons said. But they’ve made adjustments, as farmers tend to do. “We’ve been fortunate with low yields that prices have been better. In the good years, we upgrade machinery and pay off debts, and in the bad—well, we do the best we can.”
John B. Dicus
Capitol Federal Financial, Topeka
John B. Dicus—the middle initial is important here—is the chief executive officer of Topeka-based Capitol Federal Financial, one of the largest banking companies in Topeka and the Kansas City region.
He learned banking, in large part, from the zen master himself—John C. Dicus, his father, who started at the bank in 1959 and retired in 2009. That’s when the younger added the title of chairman to his duties of CEO. That was the pinnacle in a career that saw him rise through the ranks since joining the bank in 1985.
More than just a good corporate executive, Dicus is continuing the family tradition of good corporate citizenship. In 2012, the Capitol Federal Foundation made a $20 million gift to the University of Kansas to help build KU’s school of business. It was the largest donation the foundation had ever made, and covered nearly one-third the project cost. “With this gift,” Dicus said, “we are giving students at the University of Kansas the opportunities they need to be successful in the business world.”
Matt Lowen
Lowen Sign Co., Hutchinson
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: An ambitious young entrepreneur starts a business in his garage, and within a few years, in on course to build a manufacturing empire. It’s been the working model for everything from Disney to Google, Harley-Davidson to Amazon.com. And the Hutchinson variation on the theme came in 1950, when Mike Lowen laid the foundation for Lowen Corp.
Mike Lowen died in 2012, leaving the company in the hands of his son Matt, who earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration, operations management and supervision from the University of North Texas in 1995.
Today, the company is a sprawling manufacturing complex in Reno County, boasting four operating divisions: Lowen Color Graphics, Lowen Sign Co., Lowen Certified and Lowen IT, operating across a combined 250,000 square feet of space. And together, they are among the nation’s largest producers of metal signs for the real-estate industry and vehicle wraps for commercial fleets.
The sign-work starts with raw steel, which is rolled, formed and processed in-house before being shipped for screen printing or digital printing processes.
