Ingram’s Historical Series 2010-2019: Out of the Frying Pan . . .

How much can things change in a decade? In Kansas City and across the nation, the period from 2010 to the end of 2019 was one of spectacular growth.

On a local level, one notable metric can be found in the Ingram’s 100, which in its debut year used 2010 from the region’s biggest private companies as a baseline. Their combined revenues: just shy of $80.63 billion. Fast forward a decade and the list, while modified with new players, sported an aggregate of $135 billion. Difference? 63.47 percent. 

On a national level, it wasn’t just steady; it was superlative: If the Dow Jones Industrial Average were an indicator of overall economic health, America’s draft-card status would read 1A. The Dow came out of the gates in 2010 at 10,430.69. When the Times Square ball dropped at the end of 2019, the index read 28,538.44. That was up better than 173 percent.

So, no, the biggest and the best of what Kansas City commerce has to offer didn’t fare nearly as well as Wall Street, but a slow-and-steady annual growth rate of nearly 6 ercent was nothing to sneeze at. And it was indicative of a broader recovery throughout the region, one driven by a revived construction sector, a boom in apartment building, continued access to cheap money in a near-zero interest-rate environment, and—good for the health-care profession, but perhaps not as good for patients—huge advances in revenues for hospitals and medical centers.

The markers of progress over that decade are visible to us today: We have hundreds of millions of square feet of new, sprawling warehouse and distribution space elevating our status on the nation’s logistics scene. We’re a city with an NCI-designated cancer center, a trigger for strong growth in life science. We now have tens of thousands of new luxury apartments as the longstanding American Dream of home ownership takes on new contours. We have a rail-based streetcar system that connects the River Market to the Crown Center area (with more miles to come). We won one World Series after taking another to a decisive seventh game, and we saw the stage set for NFL dominance with a monster coaching
hire and a franchise-changing draft pick. Why, we even saw the end—well, for the time being—of the decades-long border war that Kansas and Missouri fought with economic development incentives.

And yet…

It would also be a decade with multiple signals, yet undeciphered to most of us, that powerful forces were converging to change key parts of the regional economy. By the time the decade drew to a close, some of the most iconic brands in Kansas City business had taken down their signs for new-owner branding. Others, true pillars of commerce in 2010, began to experience seismic changes that would make this full decade their last as hometown institutions.

Back on a Growth Track

By official measures, 2010 arrived with the nation’s economy already on the road back from The Great Recession. One would have had a tough assignment convincing people in the construction sector that recovery was imminent; contractors continued to tighten budgets on staffing, a move that was not without labor-supply risks that would become apparent when the recovery would come.

Still, some significant things were happening. The region’s biggest general contractor, JE Dunn Construction, took the wraps off a new $60 million headquarters at 10th and Locust, setting the stage for a decade of dramatic growth and bolstering the effort to infuse the nascent Downtown revitalization with additional office workers. On a larger scale related to regional growth, the massive, years-long process of correcting the design nightmare that was the Grandview Triangle wrapped up with a much more commuter- and trucking-friendly passage, Three Trails Crossing.

By 2013, the recovery was producing strong growth on the construction scene, particularly with projects that would come to define the decade: luxury apartments. They rose from the ground like spring weeds across the metro area, adding thousands of units to the residential mix. Mixed-use projects that blended some of those with office and retail as master-planned developments—also came on strong. High-profile projects, like Overland Park’s $580 million Prairiefire project, Lenexa’s Lenexa City Center project, and Downtown Kansas City’s residential towers—new construction by the Cordish Co. and office tower conversions like Commerce Tower, continued to bring residents to the central business district.

One of the biggest construction projects of the era wrapped up in 2011 when the $414 million Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts opened its doors. The two-venue complex, with separate halls for theatrical and symphonic productions, immediately thrust Kansas City into any discussion about the best concert venues not just in the U.S. but the world. 

Just a few blocks and five years away, the long-awaited and much-debated Downtown streetcar debuted in Kansas City, additional grist for the ongoing revival of that area. The 2.2-mile starter line, priced at $110 million, was touted by transit officials as a key to continuing redevelopment. They say it logged its 1 millionth rider within six months, arguing in favor of an extension to near UMKC and the Plaza at a projected additional cost of $270 million.

With the 2017 opening of the Sprint Center, the Kansas City Council signed off on a bid by the Foutch Brothers development team to buy Kemper Arena for a dollar and transform it into a two-tiered youth sports facility. Earlier proposals to demolish the historic structure had run as high as $12 million, so in addition to that savings, the city was off the hook for the $24 million cost of redevelopment. 

Health-Care Upheaval

It was a decade of strong growth and unbridled ambitions for the region’s brightest entrepreneurial star of that era, Cerner Corp. From its mothership in North Kansas City, the health-care informatics company was extending its global reach and sinking its physical roots into other quadrants of the metro area. First came the 2011 groundbreaking for a two-tower complex in Wyandotte County, followed just three years later by the first dirt turned on the site of the former Bannister Mall property in south Kansas City.

Combined, the two projects would eventually be home to nearly 30,000 employees—or so the thinking went at the time. In retrospect, that buildout represented perhaps the decade’s starkest “I did not see that coming moment,” as the company would be acquisition bait before the south campus—hailed as the biggest private-sector development in Missouri history—could assume anything near its envisioned $4.6 billion form.

What was unfolding in that corner of the health-care universe was a reflection of large-scale disruption in provider delivery during the decade. The biggest upheaval came in 2003 when Nashville-based HCA crashed the Kansas City party by acquiring the Health Midwest system for $1.1 billion. At the time, the deal represented the biggest transfer of non-profit hospital assets to a for-profit operator in U.S. history.

It also signaled a continuation of major care changes within the core of the metro area. Just two years before that sale, Midtown’s Trinity Lutheran Hospital had merged with Baptist Memorial to form Baptist-Lutheran Medical Center, consolidated to the latter’s Brookside-area campus. The HCA acquisition saw it rebranded as Research Medical Center-Brookside, making those combined facilities the largest provider of care for admitted patients on the Missouri side.

To the west of the state line, the shakeup continued. In 2013, Providence Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan., and Saint John Hospital in Leavenworth announced that they would become part of Prime Healthcare Services, a California-based hospital chain. Both hospitals were in dire financial situations, with a combined $170 million in debt, and that sale—combined with Prime’s acquisition of St. Joseph Medical Center in south Kansas City and Saint Mary’s Hospital in Blue Springs just two years later, established another major provider in this market. 

One of the biggest health-care-related developments of the decade—and one with huge long-term implications for bolstering the regional reputation as a center of biomedical research—came in 2012, when The University of Kansas Cancer Center secured the National Cancer Institute designation as a treatment/research center. That was a key step on the way to its eventual rise to comprehensive cancer center status, which officials said could eventually have a $2.6 billion economic impact on the region and create 3,500 jobs at an average wage of $68,000.

The Sporting Scene

For sports fans, it was a transformational decade in these parts. And it started early, with the 2010 rebranding of the professional soccer team, The Wizards, as Sporting Kansas City. That was just the first outward sign of what the new owners, including Cerner co-founders Cliff Illig and Neal Patterson, envisioned as a movement to make KC the Soccer Capital of America. (Their visions would be realized with World Cup host city status in the ensuing decade.) Tangible proof of that emergence came with the opening of what is now Children’s Mercy Park, home of Sporting KC, in 2011.

Other hints of prominence to come arrived in 2013, when the Kansas City Chiefs capitalized on what, in retrospect, was a hasty decision by the Philadelphia Eagles to unburden themselves of Coach Andy Reid. Clark Hunt swooped in, signed Reid, and enjoyed an immediate ROI as the team went undefeated in the first nine games of that season, an immediate departure from the 2-16 embarrassment of 2012.

Our resurgence as a professional sports town continued in 2014 as the Kansas City Royals—who last sniffed World Series popcorn sales in 1985—completed a grueling turnaround under the ownership of David Glass. Though they lost the series in seven games to San Francisco that year (keep that city in mind for a few years, Chiefs fans), they dispatched the New York Mets in five games a year later to complete 30 years of wandering through championship baseball’s desert.

The regional college sports scene was upended as the Big XII conference saw its first defections—and a portent of what was coming to college football—when Missouri joined the exodus with Nebraska, Texas A&M and Colorado starting in 2011. The Huskers went to the Big 10, Colorado to the Pac-12, and Mizzou landed in the Southeastern Conference along with A&M, aligning with teams that had, overall, a much higher reputation for top-tier football.

None, however, have had the consistent high-level performance they enjoyed in the Big XII, which has since become known as the nation’s premier collegiate basketball league.

 Mega Sales

On the transaction roster, Highwoods Properties threw in the towel on ownership of the Country Club Plaza to a pair of real-estate investment trusts for $660 million. That 2016 deal would ultimately fail to live up to the promise being hyped at the time for the 804,000 square feet of retail space and 468,000 square feet of office space.

That same year, one of the nation’s biggest innovators in the wealth-management space changed hands when founder Adam Bold sold The Mutual Fund Store for $560 million. That groundbreaking effort democratized investing by serving clients well below the high-net-worth individuals served by traditional wealth managers.

Also, on the financial services scene, an unprecedented consolidation gave us a new addition to the region’s five biggest local banks. Seven local banks that had collaborated under the BancAbility branding initiative announced they would merge into one entity, Security Bank of Kansas City. The union of Security with Valley View State Bank, Mission Bank, and other community banks in the region would yield a Top 5 bank by market share, with $3.2 billion in assets.

Specific to the equities markets—as a platform, not a stock—was BATS Global Markets, which roared from startup to billion-dollar revenues and then to status as the world’s second-largest equities trading platform. By 2016, it had surpassed venerated NASDAQ as the trading marketplace for shares of innovative companies. But, like all good things, this one came to a next chapter, if not an end, when it was sold to the Chicago Board Options Exchange, a deal valued at $3.2 billion. 

The regional entrepreneurial ecosystem saw one of its own blossom with an eye-popping exit when EyeVerify, the biometrics startup, sold to Ant Financial, a subsidiary of China’s Alibaba Group Holding, for an undisclosed price, but one that some startup experts say approached $100 million. EyeVerify developed a blood-vessel-based biometric technology for smart devices, creating what it calls “a password-free mobile experience” for consumers.

And on the employment front, few industries were moving the needle the way logistics was. When online shopping giant Amazon.com broke ground in Wyandotte County on a huge fulfillment center—855,000 square feet—it marked the company’s fifth such center in the area and placed well on a trajectory to becoming one of the region’s job-creation leaders.

By mid-decade, the region’s biggest private-sector employer was showing signs of slipping, as Sprint Corp. began selling some of the buildings on its Overland Park world headquarters less than a decade after its opening. At that point, Sprint was down to about 6,000 employees on a campus designed to accommodate 14,500—a trend line that would eventually cost the region its biggest public company as a hometown brand. Before the decade was over, Wichita-based Occidental Management was the new owner of the 17-building campus, with big plans for a remake of the site.

Another local brand—and a huge civic champion of a restored Downtown—started to fade away when DST Systems calved off its customer communications unit for an impressive $410 million. That was no small consideration: The communications operation accounted for 40 percent of DST’s 2015 revenue—a hefty $1.1 billion—, and that deal set the stage for a new outside owner in the years to come, with disappointing results for the civic leadership in town.

One of the most jaw-dropping entrepreneurial success stories in the past two decades involved Silpada, a company launched by two housewives who took $50 from their grocery budgets to start a jewelry shopping club. In 2010, they sold it to Avon for $650 million, and just two years later, bought it back for $85 million. Then, to the surprise of many, Silpada announced in 2016 that it would close its doors; Berkshire Hathaway’s Richline Group agreed in October to acquire Silpada’s assets.

About that same time, Ash Grove Cement Co. of Overland Park announced plans to sell to Dublin-based CRH plc. The nation’s largest supplier of Portland cement for the construction sector fetched $3.5 billion, and the ownership,  the Sunderland family, steered much of that into the company foundation, creating one of the region’s biggest philanthropic givers.