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PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2024
Entrepreneurship reigns supreme in a state that has produced companies with extraordinary global reach. Here are several of the most successful—and consequential—organizations throughout the Great State of Kansas over the past half century.
AdventHealth
Year Founded: 1973
Regional Headquarters: Merriam
Sector: Health Care
Number of Employees: 3,300
Perhaps no other hospital system over the past 50 years demonstrates the growth and evolution of health-care delivery in the state’s most populous county than the AdventHealth presence in suburban Kansas City. The roots of today’s system run back to the opening of Shawnee Mission Hospital in 1962, with 65 acute-care beds. Starting in the 1970s, a series of ownership changes took it from the Seventh-day Adventist Church to an affiliation with Saint Luke’s and, ultimately, to the Adventist Health System in 2002. The growth has been remarkable: That small community hospital today is a three-hospital network of AdventHealth Shawnee Mission, the mother ship with 504 licensed beds, plus smaller facilities in Overland Park (41 beds) and Lenexa (eventually, 98 beds). That growth has made AdventHealth a key part of the provider system in the Kansas City area and beyond.
AMC Theatres
Year Founded: 1920
Headquarters: Leawood
Sector: Entertainment/Hospitality
Number of Employees: 33,800
By virtue of a few economic development incentives before the cessation of hostilities in the Missouri-Kansas border wars, the world’s largest theatrical exhibitor has made its home in Kansas since 2013. The roughly 450 people in AMC’s Leawood headquarters are just a fraction of more than 33,800 working at more than 10,000 big screens around the world. Founded by three one-time tent-show entertainers in 1920, the company built a reputation for turning moving pictures into entertainment events, evolving in lockstep with film production and storytelling itself. Currently a public company, it has gone from private ownership to investor-owned and back multiple times. Last year, it racked up $4.81 billion in revenue under CEO Adam Aaron, nearly reclaiming the revenue status it held before “temporary” bans on mass gatherings were put in place during the 2020 pandemic. The company has introduced multiple incentive pro-grams and other innovations to draw people back into theater seats.
Ascension Via Christi
Year Founded: 1889 (Wichita location)
Regional Headquarters: Wichita
Sector: Health Care
Number of Employees: 6,400
The corporate mothership is across the state line in Missouri, but the non-profit, faith-based Ascension family of hospitals has a significant presence in Kansas. The biggest of those is the former St. Francis Regional Medical Center in Wichita, where more than 4,400 employees and providers staff an acute-care teaching hospital with 666 licensed beds. The company also operates a 92-bed hospital in Manhattan and a 38-bed specialty hospital in Wichita. Combined, those operations generated more than $3 billion in revenues last year. Ascension acquired the system in 2013, and its service lines include a cancer institute, blood and marrow transplantation, burn center, cardiovascular research and treatment, ER with Level I trauma center, pediatrics, and a stroke center, among a number of other service units.
Ash Grove Cement
Year Founded: 1882
Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Construction Materials/Manufacturing
Number of Employees: Appx. 2,000
Founded in Missouri in the 19th century, Overland Park-based Ash Grove made its first foray into Kansas with a cement-production plant in Chanute in 1908 and later relocated its headquarters here on the way to becoming a national power in construction materials. Three generations of the Sunderland family led the corporate evolution into a $750 million enterprise right up to the 2017 acquisition by CRH of Ireland for a reported $3.5 billion. That cash infusion, in turn, rocketed the Sunderland Foundation to near the top of the KC region’s biggest philanthropic organizations. The company, still based in Overland Park, is led by President Serge Schmidt, and its Portland cement and other materials are used in the construction of highways and homes, bridges, commercial buildings, industrial sites, and pillars of the nation’s economy. Ash Grove produces materials at 12 cement plants and 41 terminals in the Midwest, Texas, and the western U.S., along with operations in Florida, the Great Lakes region, and Canada.
Associated Wholesale Grocers
Year Founded: 1924
Headquarters: Kansas City, Kan.
Sector: Grocery Distribution
Number of Employees: 4,600
The nation’s largest cooperative food wholesaler, Associated Wholesale Grocers, is based in Kansas City, Kan., and with 2023 revenues of more than $12.4 billion last year, AWG retained its place among the Kansas City region’s largest private companies. AWG sells to independently owned supermarkets—more than 3,300 grocery locations owned and operated by 1,100 member companies in 33 states. That’s an impressive growth arc from the 20 grocers who came together a century ago this year (the oldest cooperative of its kind in the U.S.) to leverage their combined purchasing power for products and to spread their advertising costs. In addition to basic food lines, the company delivers health and beauty care, general merchandise, pharmaceutical products, specialty foods, and natural and organic products and has various subsidiaries that provide real estate and supermarket development services for its membership. Since last year, it’s been under the leadership of Dan Funk as president and CEO.
Fourth Financial/Bank IV/Bank of America
Year Founded: 1887
Regional Headquarters: Wichita
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: Appx. 200,000 (nationwide)
The story of what today is Bank of America in Kansas precisely reflects the consolidation that rocked the nation’s financial services in the 1990s. From its inception in 1968, Fourth Financial Corp. grew to become the biggest bank not just in Wichita but in all of Kansas. In 1991, it rolled out an updated brand as Bank IV, but that flag didn’t fly for long: in 1995, Bank IV sold to Boatmen’s Bank, a suitor from St. Louis, for $1.2 billion. A year later, NationsBank stepped in with $9.6 billion for Boatmen’s. And in 1998, it merged with BankAmerica Corp. in what was then the largest merger in U.S. banking history. Time elapsed: 37 months from Wichita-based hometown bank to part of what’s now the second-largest bank in the U.S. Rebranded after the NationsBank deal, Bank of America has remained among the biggest players in the Air Capital and currently ranks No. 1 in deposits statewide, at $7.2 billion.
Beechcraft/Cessna
Year Founded: 1932/1927
Kansas Headquarters: Wichita
Sector: General Aviation Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 8,000 (combined)
Wichita long ago earned its nickname as the Air Capital of the World in part for its work on full-size airliners—but only in part. The heaviest reputational lift came from its production of what are known as general-aviation, or “light” aircraft: smaller personal and corporate aircraft in both prop-driven and jet configurations. Central to developing that status have been the names Beechcraft and Cessna, which continue today as brands of their parent, Textron Aviation. Co-founded by Clyde Cessna in 1927, his namesake became part of the Textron fold in 1992; the conglomerate added Walter Beech’s Beechcraft, founded in 1932, to its stable in 2014. (Both founders, by the way, were inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame: Beech in 1977 and Cessna in 1978.) Together, the two companies still maintain workforces in the thousands at their production facilities in Wichita. Thousands of additional jobs are filled by supplier com-panies, machine shops, and parts distributors/manufacturers.
Black & Veatch
Year Founded: 1915
Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Engineering/Construction Services
Number of Employees: 15,000
Worley & Black? Unlikely you’ve ever heard of it: Ernest Black took on a new partner, Nathan Veatch, in 1915 and put out a new shingle on an engineering firm with a staff of 12. Coming up on 110 years later, Black & Veatch is a global player in the design and construction of energy production and transmission, telecom and water systems in more than 100 countries. With nearly 15,000 employees and $4.7 billion in 2023 revenues, it’s ranked by Engineering News-Record as the world’s No. 3 firm in power systems, No. 8 in water, No. 11 in environmental engineering, and No. 14 among the Top 500 design firms and companies operating in international markets. The magazine says that despite the comparatively recent push into construction, B&V has soared to No. 41 worldwide. Employee-owned since 1999, Black & Veatch is now under the leadership of long-time leader and now CEO, Mario Azar.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas
Year Founded: 1942
Headquarters: Topeka
Sector: Financial Services-Insurance
Number of Employees: 1,757
Slightly more than 2.9 million people live in Kansas, so by providing health insurance coverage for more than 932,000 in 103 of the state’s 105 counties (all, save for Johnson and Wyandotte), nearly one in three residents of the state stand behind the blue shield in Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas. The Topeka-based firm is the largest health insurance company in the state and, as a mutual insurance company, is owned by its policyholders. More than just traditional health plans for individuals and businesses, BCBSKS provides health and wellness programs and services aimed at obviating the need for higher-cost health treatments. In 2022, the last full year of reporting on record, it paid out just under $3.25 billion in claims. With just eight clients, it began providing coverage in 1942, and today, it provides coverage for hundreds of hospital/medical-surgical program combinations. Matt All is the president and CEO.
Capitol Federal Financial
Year Founded: 1893
Headquarters: Topeka
Sector: Financial Services-Banking
Number of Employees: 633
What’s the difference between a savings bank and a commercial bank? As a practical matter … not much. Especially at Capitol Federal, which, over the course of 130-plus years, has evolved from a nearly singular focus on providing home loans into the biggest entity in Kansas banking, now with assets of nearly $9.62 billion. How? By expanding its range of services to match what you’d find at almost any other traditional bank. All the while, though, never losing focus on the mission it embraced at its inception: financing the American Dream of home ownership. The roots of CapFed, interestingly enough, were put down during a time of uncertainty in the nation’s history, the Panic of 1893. Since then, it has gone from shared private ownership to a public company in 1999, a move that infused capital to drive expansion to more than 50 offices and branches today.
Cargill Protein
Year Founded: 1865
Regional Headquarters: Wichita
Sector: Agribusiness
Number of Employees: 60,000 (global)
Wichita often comes up in discussions about the nation’s biggest companies. Sure, everyone knows the hometown colossus, but even the biggest company in Kansas (rhymes with “smoke”) plays trails Cargill on a national scale. You don’t get to $160 billion in annual revenues without a footprint almost everywhere, and in Kansas, the nation’s No. 1 company has Cargill Protein, its Wichita-based meat production wing. The company reaffirmed its commitment to the Air Capital several years ago by building a $70 million headquarters on the east side of Downtown, where about 800 employees lead efforts to produce, distribute and market vast quantities of beef, poultry and egg products for retailers, food-service companies and downstream food manufacturers. The Wichita site is the home base for an operating unit with 40 locations and processing facilities nationwide. It set up shop in Wichita with the acquisition of MPBXL Corp. in 1979.
Cerris
Year Founded: 1932
Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Construction
Number of Employees: 550 (Kansas), 2,100 (overall)
Staring into the gaping economic maw of the Great Depression, Claude Sanders and two of his brothers took fate in their hands and started a Kansas City plumbing business in 1932. For the next 68 years, the company that grew into MMC Corp and its subsidiaries remained family owned, but there was nothing small about it: After adopting an employee ownership model in 2000—going 100 percent ESOP two years later—the company known today as Cerris has 14 offices across the nation, and last year recorded revenues of $1.2 billion. Its operating units include general contractor Cerris Builders, with varied services in the industrial, corporate, hospitality, multifamily, student housing, mixed use and retail sectors; Cerris Systems, specializing in mechanical systems and controls; and Cerris Emerging Solutions, an innovation incubator structured to keep the company on the cutting edge of developing trends in construction.
Coleman Co.
Year Founded: 1900
Regional Headquarters: Wichita
Sector: Outdoor Products
Number of Employees: 4,000
It was once a crown jewel in Wichita’s business community, a huge employer and a global brand that announced the city’s manufacturing presence with authority: The Coleman Co. Founded at the turn of the 20th century by William Coffin Coleman, it made its early reputation with gas-burning lanterns; indeed, kerosene lamps remain a staple of its product lines today. His son, Sheldon Coleman, drove massive growth through diversification over a 50-year career, taking a struggling company to Fortune 500 status as the premier name in outdoor and camping products. Sheldon Coleman died in 1988, touching off a sequence that, from the point of civic pride, proved disastrous. An attempt to take the company private caught the eye of New York financier Ron Perleman, who swooped in and acquired it for more than Coleman’s heirs were able to match. The company has been sold multiple times since 1998 and is now part of Newell Brands and based in Chicago.
Compass Minerals
Year Founded: 1844
Regional Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Mining/Minerals
Number of Employees: 2,000
Kansas is well-known as a top producer of wheat and beef. But salt? You bet: No state turns out more of it, thanks in large part to Overland Park-based Compass Minerals, which generates the compounds used to treat roads during the winter, act as water conditioners, disinfect swimming pools and much more. While its roots run to mid-19th century England, much of the company’s growth has taken place since moving its headquarters to the Kansas City area in 1988 and going public in 2003. In addition to salt, the company is a leading producer of sulfate of potash (a key ingredient in fertilizers), magnesium chloride, which has multiple uses including human nutritional supplements, and fire-retardant chemicals. Some mining sites have also produced a value add for the company, which leases that space for secure records storage. The company recently made business headlines with speculation that private-equity firms were positioning to acquire the company and take it private.
Creative Planning
Year Founded: 1983
Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: 2,300
It wasn’t exactly nothing—Creative Planning had $100 million in assets under management when Peter Mallouk acquired his employer back in 2004. But it was a far cry from where he would take it: In just 20 years, he’s built not only the region’s biggest wealth-management firm (AUM now up 3,000-fold, to more than $300 billion) but one of the best in the nation, with nearly annual No. 1 status from Barron’s and the RIA Channel. Having long ago blown past regional and national in its scope, Creative Planning today has nearly 900 financial advisers serving more than 64,000 individual clients and nearly 12,000 institutional investors. While the firm doesn’t disclose financial details, industry averages for wealth-management fees suggest that Creative Planning could easily claim a place among the Top 20 private companies in the Kansas City region based on revenues.
CrossFirst Bank
Year Founded: 2007
Headquarters: Leawood
Sector: 453
Number of Employees: 453
Mike Maddox earned an NCAA basketball championship ring playing forward for KU in 1988. From the looks of his success in banking, one wonders whether he was also on the Jayhawk swim team because he sure knows how to go against the current. In 2008, when the rest of the nation’s banking sector was on a knife’s edge, he was still in his first year leading a start-up venture, CrossFirst Bank. From initial capitalization during the Great Recession to fast-growth company status to IPO in 2019 and, this past year, a $917 million acquisition by First Busey Bank, CrossFirst has rewritten the rules of banking performance not just in Kansas but nationwide. It’s now the second-largest bank in Kansas, based on its $7.2 billion in assets, soaring past institutions that have been operating for well more than a century. From its Leawood headquarters, the bank operates offices in Missouri, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.
Dairy Farmers of America
Year Founded: 1998
Headquarters: Kansas City, Kan.
Sector: Agribusiness/Dairy Products
Number of Employees: 18,500
The Kansas City region’s biggest private-sector company is also one of the biggest in the state: Dairy Farmers of America, which had revenues of $21.7 billion last year. A marketing cooperative owned by the dairy farmers it serves, DFA is headquartered near Wyandotte County’s Village West district. It sells milk, cheese, shelf-stable dairy products and other components for food production around the world, and grocers’ dairy cases across Kansas feature its products under brands that include Borden’s, Kemp’s and TruMoo, among others. Led by Dennis Rodenbaugh, who became CEO in 2022, DFA comprises dairy farms across America—more than 10,000 of them, some going back through five generations of family ownership. The company was formed in 1998 when four smaller cooperatives decided to join forces, and today, DFA is the largest of the nearly 90 dairy cooperatives registered with the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service dairy program.
Euronet Worldwide
Year Founded: 1994
Headquarters: Leawood
Sector: Electronic Payment Services
Number of Employees: Appx. 10,000
Mike Brown has always been a Kansas City guy, and a tech guy to boot, so when he founded Euronet Worldwide in the mid-1990s, it made sense to launch in a business environment that had nurtured his other fast-growth efforts. Heck, the company’s headquarters is just minutes away from where Brown went to high school. More than 30 years later, that commitment stands strong for a company that specializes in ATM services and electronic transactions around the globe. The strength of a presence he initially built in the former Soviet republics would have justified a relocation to Prague, Brussels, or London, but there he is today in Leawood, steering a global work force of roughly 10,000. The firm’s services also cover point-of-sale systems, currency exchanges, and credit/debit card processing, and it delivers those to people in more than 200 countries, generating a top line of nearly $3.7 billion.
Ferrellgas
Year Founded: 1939
Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Energy
Number of Employees: 3,926
Six decades have passed since young Jim Ferrell returned to the Kansas City region to help bring order to the struggling propane business his father had founded in Atchison before World War II. It wasn’t long before young Ferrell saw scaling the company as one way to improve its fortunes. He acquired several more distributors in the Midwest, which added reach with his own brand of putting customers first and infusing the enterprise with a set of values. Ferrellgas began to assert its presence in a highly fractured market for propane delivery services. That has produced the nation’s second-largest company in that space, a success that set the stage for him to make employee ownership the business model in 1998. Today, more than 68,000 retailers offer the company’s Blue Rhino small-tank exchange services, while the core business provides more than 800 million gallons of propane for residential, industrial, commercial, and agricultural customers every year.
Garmin
Year Founded: 1989
Headquarters: Olathe
Sector: Tech/Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 19,000
Min Kao and the late Gary Burrell were colleagues at a Kansas City-area avionics company in the 1980s, when satellite technology was about to become accessible to the masses, not just the domain of sovereign governments. Their vision: Create a company producing devices that could let motorists access digital way-finding. The reception they got from vehicle makers placed Garmin (a mashup of the first syllables in the founders’ names) on a growth track that would make it a global player in that space. Even when cataclysmic disruption came in the form of smartphones and free apps for real-time directions, Garmin was able to thrive by pivoting into new lines—wearable tech that made it as much a health and personal fitness tech concern as it is with its lines of ground, air and maritime transport systems. Cliff Pemble, CEO for the past decade, was one of Garmin’s first employees as a startup, and he has overseen its growth to global sales of $5.23 billion.
General Motors
Year Founded: 1945
Kansas Plant: Kansas City
Sector: Automotive Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 2,275
From its 1941 inception as a production powerhouse for the U.S. war effort, turning out more than 6,650 B-25 Mitchell bombers, the Fairfax assembly plant operated today by General Motors has been a tribute to the Midwestern manufacturing work ethic. With nearly 2,300 employees, the plant today is engaged in a different sort of war effort: The one against fossil fuels. It’s currently being retooled to begin rolling out electric vehicles, with the first versions of the Bolt EV planned for the 2026 model year. Many of those workers currently find themselves idled by the $390 million retooling effort, which will mark the end of Chevy Malibu sedan production. The plant has been a critical piece of the region’s manufacturing ecosystem, with employees from other companies contributing to its output as specialty parts suppliers.
HCA Midwest Health
Year Founded: 2003
Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Health Care
Number of Employees: 9,000+
Yet another dramatic change in the health-care landscape came with the entry of Nashville-based HCA Corp. to the Kansas City market in 2003—a shakeup whose aftershocks quickly rumbled through Johnson County and beyond. That $1.13 billion acquisition of the Health Midwest System created a market-leading provider in the most populous corner of Kansas, with two medical centers and multiple clinics as part of the network. But this is certain: The hospitals are the anchors driving rev-enues: Overland Park Regional Medical Center, which opened in 1978 by Humana Healthcare, and Menorah Medical Center, which originally opened on the Missouri side in 1931 to serve the region’s Jewish community. Menorah relocated to Overland Park in 1996, then joined OPRMC in the HCA fold as part of the newly constituted HCA Midwest Health. Combined, the two medical centers have more than 500 licensed beds, and last year they had more than 24,000 patient admissions.
Hill’s Pet Nutrition
Year Founded: 1907
Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Pet Products Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 3,404
Hill’s Pet Nutrition, founded in 1939, is an operating unit of global conglomerate Colgate-Palmolive, and the source of more than 50 pet foods, including its signature series under the popular Science Diet brand. More than just meals, the product line helps owners manage the entire life cycle of their pets by helping address factors like weight and aging. Those products generate more than $2 billion a year for the parent public company, and can be found in countries around the world. The brand also solidifies its image in the hearts and minds of pet owners by going well past food sales—it engages with customers to help manage the health of their pets by providing connections to nearby veterinarians, suggesting questions for those office visits. Having recently relocated its headquarters from Topeka, it remains both a major employer and corporate citizen.
INTRUST Bank
Year Founded: 1876
Headquarters: Wichita
Sector: Financial Services-Banking
Number of Employees: 861
The Wild West in the late 18th century was not a phenomenon limited to cattle drives and Saturday-night saloon brawls. There was plenty of action taking place in a nascent banking sector, and the Chandler family was right in the thick of things with young C.Q. Chandler II. He would become a towering figure in Wichita financial services, but before making his way north, he started at the tender age of 18 by purchasing half-ownership of a bank in Elk City, Okla. Around the turn of the century, he moved north and set up shop in Wichita, heading up Kansas National Bank, later the First National Bank in Wichita. In 1993, still under the leadership of the founding family—in this case, Charlie Chandler IV—it adopted the sleeker INTRUST brand it carries today as the largest hometown bank in the state’s largest city, with assets of more than $7 billion.
KBP Brands
Year Founded: 1999
Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Hospitality-Dining
Number of Employees: 15,000
Five Colorado restaurants. Looking back 25 years, that was a humble start for KBP Brands, which today is one of the nation’s biggest owners of franchised restaurant operations, primarily KFC, Taco Bell, Arby’s, and Sonic locations nationwide. As of this fall, more than 1,000 are in 25 states. An aggressive and strategic acquisition strategy from the start—first by picking up a dozen or two units at a time, then deals for a hundred or more—drove the top-line growth for years, establishing KBP as one of the nation’s fastest-growing franchise operators, and eventually, making it one of the Kansas City region’s largest private enterprises, with revenues that surged to $1.45 billion last year. Among the hardware it has collected: Franchise Times’ No. 3 among the top 100 in food-service growth and No. 11 among the Top 200 franchises in scale.
Kiewit Power Constructors
Year Founded: 1884
Kansas Headquarters: Lenexa
Sector: Energy
Number of Employees: 1,687 (Kansas), 31,000 (overall)
The Omaha parent is a $17.1 billion giant in the engineering/construction sector, bolstered by nearly 1,700 team members at the power-focused division based in Lenexa. Since that unit was formed more than 30 years ago, Kiewit has installed more than 125,000 megawatts of electrical generating capacity. That’s the equivalent of nearly 58 Jeffrey Energy Centers (that Pottawatomie County plant throws off enough electricity to power 800,000 homes). The division’s performance has earned Kiewit a consistent placement in the top five of Engineering News-Record’s power contractors rankings. Its services and electrical systems portfolio consists of projects around the world for clients in transportation, waste-water treatment, mining, oil and gas, and chemical sectors. Kiewit has also established a reputation as a model corporate citizen, with a strong philanthropic presence and corporate culture that places a high value on employee volunteerism.
Koch
Year Founded: 1940
Headquarters: Wichita
Sector: Energy/Agribusiness/Consumer Products
Number of Employees: 120,000
In terms of business scale, Kansas has Koch and … well, everybody else is competing for second place. The nation’s second-largest private company, with annual revenues exceeding $125 billion, is deeply embedded into almost every facet of the American consumer’s life. Its holdings include energy companies (oil refining and pipeline transportation), consumer-products manufacturing, ranching and agribusiness production and processing, commodity trading and transportation—for starters. The company has remained in family control since its inception and is led by founder Fred Koch’s son Charles, who turns 89 this month and has been at the helm since 1967. It would be hard to overstate the Koch impact on its hometown of Wichita: Its philanthropy, for instance, has given the city a zoo that compares favorably with those of major urban centers, and the family foundation has donated tens of millions to Wichita State University, the city’s Center for the Arts and many other institutions.
Bombardier Learjet
Year Founded: 1962
Regional Headquarters: Wichita
Sector: Aviation Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 1,200
Fast. Efficient. Luxurious. That was the gap Bill Lear identified when the electronics manufacturer turned plane-builder looked at Wichita, where big airliners were produced at Boeing, and single-engine, propeller-driven aircraft for individuals were being turned out by Cessna and Beechcraft. Lear wanted something that would appeal to an executive class, and he dazzled the world in 1963 by rolling out the first Learjet 23. Though he’d have to sell the company to deal with other financial setbacks in a career filled with entrepreneurial ventures, Learjet became a fixture in Wichita, eventually employing thousands. Since 1990, it has been owned by Canada’s Bombardier Corp., which took the headquarters operations north of the border. The end of the line came in 2022, when Bombardier pulled the plug on Learjet production, converting the Wichita facility to a flight test center, defense-related operations and servicing of 2,000 existing Learjet models.
Lee Jeans
Year Founded: 1889
Regional Headquarters: Merriam (until 2019)
Sector: Consumer Products
Number of Employees: 400
The first denim in the U.S. came off the loom in 1873, and it didn’t take long to gain popularity as workwear. In 1889, a Salina grocery and dry-goods merchant, Henry David Lee, decided to craft his own brand of denim overalls and work jackets. By 1917, the demand justified moving production to the bigger Kansas City area. The company continued to innovate with blends that improved durability, expanded to produce jeans for women, followed fashion trends with trimmer western cuts and bell bottoms as consumer demand shifted, and even dabbled with denim leisure suits. In 1969, it moved its global headquarters across the state line to Merriam, then pulled up stakes there in 2019 and resettled closer to what remains of the nation’s textile-production center in North Carolina. It remains a global player with annual U.S. revenues of more than $500 million, plus $341.7 million from foreign sales.
MGP Ingredients
Year Founded: 1941
Headquarters: Atchison
Sector: Manufacturing/Distilling
Number of Employees: 705
Something of a rarity—in Kansas overall, and especially in Atchison—MGP Ingredients is a public company, with its shares traded on the NASDAQ. Its roots go back to the pre-war days as a grain distiller, but over the past 80-plus years, it has taken on a broad range of production lines, turning out branded spirits (whiskeys, ryes, vodkas, gins and bourbons), high-quality distilled products for use by other producers, and specialty wheat proteins and starches for food-processing companies. Though located just outside the Kansas City metro area, it has a national reach with additional plants in Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and the nation’s capital, and its international footprint extends to Mexico and Northern Ireland. As a corporate citizen in a smaller community, MGPI is right there with efforts like its Boxes of Blessing annual food drive, which has yielded 180 tons of goods over the past 10 years. It also funds college scholarships for students and supports other causes through its foundation.
Menninger Clinic
Year Founded: 1925
Kansas Headquarters: Topeka (through 2003)
Sector: Health care
For decades, Kansas had a special place in any discussions about the nation’s best institutions to treat psychiatric illnesses, and at the center of that reputational excellence was the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. Next year will mark a century since C.F. Menninger and his sons, Karl and Will, founded their treatment center in the state’s capital city, and since then, an estimated 250,000 people from around the world have sought treatment there. Within a generation, the founders’ Menninger School of Psychiatry was the largest psychiatric training center in the country. The opening of a new $23 million facility in 1982 further burnished the clinic’s global reputation for innovative approaches to mental illness, and the Menninger name still retains that status today—but no longer in Kansas. In 2003, third-generation leader Roy Menninger, serving as chairman, orchestrated the hospital’s relocation to Houston after forging an affiliation with the Baylor College of Medicine.
National Beef Packing
Year Founded: 1992
Kansas Plants: Dodge City/Liberal
Sector: Agribusiness/Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 6,200 (Kansas) 9,800 (overall)
Make no mistake: Kansas is Beef Country. Texas may have more cattle, but it’s what you do with them that counts, and the Sunflower State ranks first in beef processing. That’s in large part due to the presence of National Beef Packing, with plants in Dodge City and Liberal that bring thousands of jobs to southwest Kansas, one of the state’s most sparsely populated zones. The role of beef in the state economy was established more than a century before the 1992 founding of National Beef, with drovers pushing herds up from Texas on the Chisholm Trail in the 1860s. Today, the company’s legions of meatpackers produce case-ready products and beef by-products that find their way to tables of customers around the world. The company has a production facility in Kansas City, but the two plants, just 80 miles apart in southwest Kansas, are smack dab in the middle of the state’s ranching sector and cattle-feeding operations. Between the two of them, they’re able to process 12,000 head of cattle every day.
Netsmart Technologies
Year Founded: 1968
Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Helath-Care IT
Number of Employees: 2,549
Mike Valentine made his bones in health-care informatics with the former Cerner Corp., where he rose to COO before jumping to New York in 2011 as CEO for Netsmart Technologies. He saw growth potential in Netsmart’s niche area of behavioral health, knew the Kansas City area’s attributes for companies in that tech space, and soon relocated its headquarters here. Since then, Netsmart has experienced nearly unbroken year-over-year growth, jumping onto the list of not just the region’s fastest-growing companies but the biggest ones, as well: Organic growth and a series of strategic acquisitions over the years pushed revenues to $629 million in 2023, and more than 1,000 of Netsmart’s 2,550 employees produce software and other services from the Overland Park headquarters. The company boasts a client base of more than 1,250 hospitals with more than 1 million individual providers relying on its products and services.
NIC, Inc.
Year Founded: 1992
Regional Headquarters: Olathe
Sector: Government Services Provider
Number of Employees: 978 (at peak)
Harry Herington left a life in law enforcement to pursue a vision in website development, but not for your average consumer: He helped found NIC, Inc. in 1992 to drive the explosion in online access into the public sector, eventually building sites for more than 7,100 federal, state and local governmental units. The company is one reason why you can now renew your vehicle tags online, rather than burn half a day at the DMV. Other services it made available included filing for licenses and business registration, applying for unemployment insurance, or researching public-domain data such as real estate sales and tax levies. It didn’t take long for investors to buy into Herington’s vision; the company went public in 1992, and after climbing to a record $460 million in 2020 revenue, it was acquired by Texas-based Tyler Technologies for a whopping $2.3 billion in an all-cash deal. At that point, it was processing 400 million transactions a year, involving $24 billion in government receipts.
NPC International
Year Founded: 1962
Headquarters: Leawood
Sector: Hospitality-Dining
Number of Employees: 30,000 (at peak)
One of the state’s great entrepreneurial success stories of the past half-century got its start in Pittsburg, Kan. where an enterprising fellow by the name of Gene Bicknell became an early franchisee of a Wichita company called Pizza Hut. He founded National Pizza Co., which went on to become the world’s largest franchisee and, after relocating the headquarters to the Kansas City region, one of that area’s biggest private companies. A corporate journey from private to public and back again, NPC hit a financial wall just ahead of the 2020 pandemic, which proved to be the back-breaking straw. Revenues fell off with the arrival of COVID-19, and despite owning more than 1,200 pizza outlets and 400 Wendy’s locations, the company declared bankruptcy in 2020. Most of those locations ended up in the hands of a California-based Flynn Restaurant Group, which ponied up more than $800 million in writing the final chapter of NPC’s corporate legacy.
Payless Shoes
Year Founded: 1956
Regional Headquarters: Topeka
Sector: Consumer Goods
Number of Employees: 25,000
Pun alert: A Topeka company that, at one point, had arguably the biggest footprint in consumer products, Payless Shoes existed in several corporate iterations—Pay Less Shoes, Payless Shoesource, Payless Shoesource Worldwide, etc.—on its way to becoming the world’s largest shoe store chain; at one point, it was responsible for 20 percent of the footwear being sold in the U.S., with annual revenues north of $2.3 billion. Payless peaked at more than 1,700 employees in its headquarters city of Topeka (and 25,000 worldwide) before private-equity debt brought things crashing down. After navigating a couple of bankruptcy filings, the most recent in 2017 and 2019, it closed all of its 2,100 stores in the U.S., turning its focus on foreign sales and moving the headquarters to Florida. As the financial picture improved, the company has a toe back in the U.S. market, with an initial goal of having 300 to 500 stores open domestically by next year.
Pizza Hut
Year Founded: 1958
Founding Headquarters: Wichita
Sector: Hospitality-Dining
Number of Employees: 350,000 (worldwide)
In a city that prides itself on entrepreneurship, one brand carries a particular sentimentality to people in Wichita: Pizza Hut. Its founding, early growth, franchising success, and public stock offering all predated the 50-year-scope of this feature, but the long-term impact of the company founded with a single store by brothers Frank and Dan Carney continues to resonate in the state’s biggest city. The first store—a small brick building now memorialized on the Wichita State University campus—opened in 1958, and the brothers took it public in 1972. In 1977, the Carneys led a buyout of Pizza Hut for $300 million, and they brought a number of friends along for the ride, having taken on additional investors and franchisees over the years. The tree of Pizza Hut Millionaires, as they’re known locally, would go on to found companies like Rent-A-Center, Lone Star Steakhouses, and other major brands, perpetuating a cycle of investment and growth that continues to define the city today.
Rent-A-Center
Year Founded: 1973
Founding Headquarters: Wichita
Sector: Consumer Durable Goods
Number of Employees: 13,000
Entrepreneurial lore holds that a young employee at an appliance rental store in Wichita overheard the owner telling a long-term customer that he could have paid for a washer and dryer outright with the money he’d spent leasing them. Of course, customers were leasing because they didn’t have the money upfront or didn’t have the credit to make a time-based purchase. That conversation, nonetheless, was the spark for Tom Devlin, the young employee. He teamed with local businessman Frank Barton, a distributor of consumer durable goods, to found Rent-A-Center in 1973 and, 14 years later, sold it to British conglomerate Thorn EMI for a tidy $594 million. The headquarters left town, and the company has gone through several organizational iterations since then, but it continues to operate under the Rent-A-Center brand, selling furniture, electronics, appliances, and computers from nearly 3,000 locations across North and Central America.
Seaboard Corp.
Year Founded: 1918
Headquarters: Merriam
Sector: Agribusiness/Shipping
Number of Employees: 12,000+ (worldwide)
The headquarters building for the biggest public company headquartered in Kansas has a global reach and is, incongruously enough, a modest brick building on a suburban street in Merriam, outside Kansas City, mostly surrounded by middle-class homes. That’s where you’ll find a few hundred office employees and executives for Seaboard Corp., which had $9.5 billion in 2023 revenues generated from agribusiness and maritime shipping interests around the world. Owned by the Bresky family, whose patriarch, Otto, started it by acquiring a flour mill in Atchison in 1918, Seaboard has branched out considerably from its start-up in the grain trade. It became a public company in 1959, and today, it specializes in pork, poultry, and seafood production, marine shipping, grain trading, and flour and mill operations around the world. Last year, under Robert Steer, the first CEO from outside the Bresky family, the company clocked in at No. 364 on the Fortune 500.
Security Benefit
Year Founded: 1892
Headquarters: Topeka
Sector: Retirement Services
Number of Employees: 2,000
A handshake defined the beginning of Security Benefit more than 130 years ago, when the pooled resources of its 11 founders totaled $11. Today, high-fives might be more appropriate for individuals and investor groups with $52.8 billion in assets under management at this Topeka retirement-services giant. The five biggest companies in the Kansas City region all hail from the Kansas side of the state line, and Security Benefit rounded out that elite group with $10.1 billion in 2023 revenues. The firm hit the growth gas pedal in 2005, launching a processing and administration service for insurance companies called SE2 (now Zinnia), and again in 2010, with its acquisition by New York-based Guggenheim Partners (which later spun it off to Eldridge Industries), setting the stage to become a national leader in sales of fixed-index annuities. It’s also a key player in philanthropy, with a charitable trust that donates nearly $1 million each year to more than 100 community organizations and non-profits.
Boeing/Spirit Aerosystems
Year Founded: 1916
Regional Headquarters: Wichita
Sector: Aviation Manufacturing
Number of Employees: 12,000
It’s not fair to say that what vehicle-making is to Detroit, aviation manufacturing is to Wichita: Plane-making is of much greater consequence to the largest city in Kansas. Of the companies that made it the Air Capital of the World, the Boeing Co. was long the biggest employer in the region. In 2005, it sold off its Wichita division to a Canadian investment capital firm for $1.2 billion, which rebranded that unit as Spirit AeroSystems. Coming full circle, Spirit’s board voted in July to merge back into Boeing. The cash-and-debt deal valued at $8.3 billion could, city officials say, help strengthen Wichita’s place on the global aviation stage. As a practical matter, the plant is expected to remain the biggest employer in the city, with 12,000 workers and thousands of jobs at adjacent industries in metal fabrication, machining, and parts manufacturing. Seattle-based Boeing became part of Wichita’s aviation history in 1927 when it acquired the Stearman Aircraft Co. and began producing military and civilian aircraft.
Sprint Corp.
Year Founded: 1899
Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Telecom
Number of Employees: 40,000 (at peak)
It was an amazing run: starting out as a rural telephone company in Abilene back in 1899, growing through mergers and acquisitions to create one of the nation’s biggest wireless carriers in the 21st century, holding court as the biggest employer in the Kansas City region—and in short order, fading out of existence. That was the story of Sprint Corp., the Overland Park telecom colossus that, at its peak, employed more than 40,000 nationwide. The glittering office complex it opened as its new headquarters in 2001—estimated cost: $700 million—was planned to hold more than 14,000 of those workers. But a disastrous acquisition of Nextel Corp. (some business writers call it one of the worst deals in the history of American commerce) was the first financial domino to fall on the way to a weakened position. In 2013, the Japanese conglomerate Softbank bought a majority stake for $22 billion, later upped its ownership to 80 percent, then sold it to T-Mobile in 2020 for $26 billion.
Stormont Vail Health
Year Founded: 1884
Headquarters: Topeka
Sector: Health Care
Number of Employees: 5,689
The biggest health-care provider in Topeka is Stormont Vail Health, which covers a large swath of northeast Kansas, from the western side of the Kansas City metro area as far west as Junction City, more than an hour away. The mothership of that provider network is the 586-bed Stormont Vail Hospital, which admitted more than 18,500 patients last year and treated more than 160,000 others as outpatients, driving system revenues of more than $2.9 billion. The bedrock for its care delivery is the Cotton O’Neil Clinic, a physician group with more than 500 providers in diverse specialties. The role it plays in providing care across nearly one-fourth of the state is a big one: it’s home to the region’s only Level II trauma center and the only Level III Neonatal Intensive Care unit. The system began taking its shape in 1949, with the merger of Christ’s Hospital and the Jane C. Stormont Hospital and Training School for Nurses, then saw the hospital and clinic merge in 1995 to form Stormont Vail Health.
The Andersons
Year Founded: 1947
Kansas Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Agribusiness/Trading/Storage
Number of Employees: 2,259
A national leader in grain storage, transportation and trading, including ethanol production, The Andersons is a public company based in Maumee, Ohio, but it established a vital presence in Kansas when it merged with Overland Park-based Lansing Trade Group in 2018. At the time, Lansing Trade was one of the region’s largest private companies, with production that would account for a significant portion of The Andersons’ $12.4 billion in annual revenues today. That makes it one of the nation’s Top 10 in the grain and milling sector, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Its agribusiness footprint, which extends from the U.S. and Canada to Switzerland and the United Kingdom, includes the capacity to produce nearly half a billion gallons of ethanol, 1.2 million tons of animal feed, and 124 million pounds of corn oil every year. It also handles trading more than 36 million tons of grain and feed/specialty ingredients.
Terracon
Year Founded: 1965
Headquarters: Olathe
Sector: Engineering
Number of Employees: 6,414
The biggest engineering firms in the Kansas City region are well into their second century of operations, some nearly twice as old as Terrracon. But this Olathe-based company of more than 7,000 engineers, scientists, facilities experts, and field professionals has rapidly closed the size gap through nearly six decades of strategic acquisitions and organic growth. The result is a firm with more than 175 offices nationwide and nearly $1.15 billion in 2023 revenues. Offering environmental, geotechncial, materials testing, and facilities consulting services, and working through the lifecycle of any project from earth to sky, Terracon crosses more than a dozen sectors including power generation and transmission, transportation and infrastructure, digital infrastructure and health care. And, as a corporate citizen, its Terracon Foundation has funded over $4 million in community grants and scholarships and employee matching gifts.
The University of Kansas Health System
Year Founded: 1906
Regional Headquarters: Kansas City
Sector: Health Care
Number of Employees: 15,000
It may seem incongruous to think of it as an impactful business since The University of Kansas Health System is an independent public health authority, not a private enterprise. But it receives no taxpayer support; the turn-around since near insolvency as a state-funded entity back in 1998 has been the stuff of entrepreneurship, vision, and determination. The growth story started when then CFO Bob Page helped orchestrate the separation from state control at a time when the hospital had just days of operating revenue on hand. He became CEO in 2007, charting a course of growth with a single-minded focus on patient satisfaction and outcomes and through strategic acquisitions that have extended the system’s geographic footprint by adding rural hospitals and, more recently, Olathe Health System to the fold before jumping the line this past year to add Liberty Hospital in Missouri. In addition to increased patient satisfaction, the system has become a power player in cancer research and treatment, among other health disciplines.
Waddell & Reed
Year Founded: 1936
Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Financial Services
Number of Employees: 1,700 (at peak)
Another don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it exit from the universe of high-profile companies came in late 2020 when retirement services giant Waddell & Reed announced that it was being acquired by an Australian firm, Macquarie Asset Management. That sudden nature of that acquisition and concurrent news that the wealth-management functions of W&R would then be sold to LPL Financial came as a mild shock to the regional business and civic leadership. W&R had been expected to jump the state line and relocate into a new headquarters building it had commissioned in Downtown Kansas City. The plug was pulled on that as a firm that once held more than $100 million in assets under management—a national brand that was among the elites in the wealth-management and asset-management space in this region—simply faded away. Up to that point, Waddell & Reed had been known as one of the oldest asset- and wealth-management firms in the United States.
Watco
Year Founded: 1983
Headquarters: Pittsburg
Sector: Rail/Logistics
Number of Employees: 4,800
Six companies account for the entire universe of Class I railroads in North America, but when it comes to short-line railroads—which operate around 30 percent of the freight rail in the U.S.—there are hundreds to choose from. So it’s tough to stand out in that space—unless you’re Watco. Founded in Louisiana as a single rail-switching operation, it incorporated in Kansas in 1998, relocated its headquarters to Pittsburg, and grew into one of the nation’s biggest operators of short-line railroads, with roughly 45 of them operating around the nation, along with rail terminals and ports. Intriguingly, Watco has expanded to just one other country, and you can’t get there by rail: Australia, where it began by hauling grain in Western Australia in 2012. Some Kansas business trivia: Watco’s Dan Smith is the only CEO of a Kansas company with billion-dollar revenues to throw nine strikeouts in a major-league baseball game. A torn rotator cuff ended his pro career in 2003 after four years in Montreal and Boston.
Westar ENERGY/Evergy
Year Founded: 1992 (oldest predecessor: 1923)
Headquarters: Topeka
Sector: Energy
Number of Employees: 2,400
The Sunflower State energy world tilted on its axis in 1992 when its two biggest utilities—Wichita’s Kansas Gas and Electric and Topeka’s Kansas Power and Light—joined forces (the new company rebranded a decade later as Westar Energy). It was, by far, the most influential energy company in the state, serving 560,000 electric customers and more than 1 million natural gas customers. At the time, the merger was seen as a strategic move by KPL to ward off further merger overtures from Kansas City Power & Light. But, as they say, true love will not be denied: After multiple courtship efforts, KCP&L and Westar finally tied the knot in 2018, creating an even bigger regional power player. Before it bowed out, Westar received assurances that the new entity—Evergy—would continue to maintain a significant Topeka presence, both in business terms and in civic initiatives and corporate philanthropy.
YRC/Yellow
Year Founded: 1929
Kansas Headquarters: Overland Park
Sector: Transportation/Logistics
Number of Employees: 33,000
For more than 90 years, the Yellow brand in various iterations—Yellow Freight, YRC Worldwide, and even the minimalist Yellow—was one of America’s best-known trucking firms. One didn’t have to spend much time on a highway to see a YRC semi hauling freight. As one of the Kansas City reg-ion’s biggest public companies—ranked No. 2 in 2010 and one of the largest transportation companies in the world—it was one of the region’s bragging rights home-grown corporate giants. So, it wasn’t entirely without a loss of civic pride when the company’s leadership moved the headquarters to Nashville in early 2022. Then again, it wasn’t our black eye when YRC went belly up slightly more than a year later. It was the largest trucking-sector bankruptcy in U.S. history and meant the end of the road for more than 33,000 employees. A number of competitors ended up walking away with various pieces of the Yellow empire.
