Lessons from the Past; Visions for the Future

When people from Kansas City say they hail from a place with entrepreneurship in its DNA, they’re not blowing smoke: The very first non-native entrepreneur here was a fellow by the name of Francois Chouteau, a fur trader and explorer who—before his untimely death at the age of 41—earned the distinction “Father of Kansas City.”

That was back in 1819, before there even was a formal Kansas City—before there even was a formal state called Missouri, for that matter. But the point stands: This region screamed opportunity for America’s settlers, and not much has changed in the 200-plus years since Chouteau set up his first trading post here.

If you go back a century or more—150 years, even—to the time when Kansas City was just assembling critical mass as a center of commerce, you’ll see the roster of entrepreneurial icons with which this city has long been associated, such as the extended Kemper banking family and names like Thomas Swope and R.A. Long, then figures like J.C. Hall and a cadre of engineers with names like Burns, McDonnell, Black, and Veatch.

Scoot forward half a century, and you see more of the Halls and Kempers, along with the Blochs and Helzbergs, all of whom helped shape the contours of a startup ecosystem that thrives today. It does so in large part because of the generations who followed their lead, business figures who, in many cases, have recently begun handing the baton off to new cohorts of visionaries.

You can start with companies that were already half a century old—or older—by the time Ingram’s predecessor, Outlook, began printing as the 20th century’s fourth quarter was about to start. 

Commerce Bank and UMB Bank, divergent branches long led by the extended Kemper family, were well-established by then, and each entity had powerful market positions. Stan Durwood was applying innovative approaches to expand the audience for movie-going—his father was one of the three brothers who acquired what would become AMC Entertainment back in 1920.

While they had yet to assume the global proportions they hold today, both Burns & McDonnell (founded: 1898) and Black & Veatch (1915) were positioning themselves to become national, then global, players in engineering and design, especially for large infrastructure projects. 

Hallmark, founded in 1910 by J.C. Hall—he was yet to turn 20 years old—had by the mid-1970s asserted its claim to being the world’s leader in production of greeting cards. More than that, it changed Kansas City as a center of excellence for the creative class, generating thousands of jobs as adjacent industries and companies employed the artists and production staff to keep the presses rolling.

On the hospitality front, Arthur Bryant was already 30 years into his ownership of the barbecue restaurant that bore his name and made Kansas City-style smoked meats a standard by which the nation would judge those delicacies. In tandem with the growth in Bryant’s success, young Ollie Gates was achieving fame in his own right as a competitor, furthering the city’s reputation and spawning dozens of imitators and competitors that continue to make this city the first name in American barbecue.

Barnett Helzberg, meanwhile, was coming down the back stretch of a career that had seen him go national with the jewelry concept launched by his grandfather in the early 20th century. Nearly 30 years after selling Helzberg Diamonds to Warren Buffet, that brand continues to resonate with the American public.

On the financial-services front, Henry and Richard Bloch were 20 years into their leadership of the accounting firm-turned-tax specialist. Just seven years after they founded H&R Block in 1955, the company went public—and their transformation of the tax-filing process stands as yet another instance of how the Kansas City entrepreneurial spirit could produce change on a global scale.

All of that had been set in place well before Outlook’s first edition hit the presses, and all of it had helped inspire Ludwell Gaines to begin chronicling the region’s business success with a monthly publication that had no peer.

Over the past half-century, Kansas City has seen some spectacular corporate successes, with institutions that have formed and taken on global dimensions. Others have become the biggest and the best of what the business infrastructure here has to offer, only to be swept up by larger global players with bottomless pockets and seemingly insatiable appetites for acquisition. 

The bottom line: Kansas City continues to boast a powerful roster of historical business figures who, at various levels, have built on the legacy gifted to them to cast their influence across regional commerce and, in some cases, around the planet.

Let’s take a look at some of the major entrepreneurial figures from the past half-century by decade. To know their names is to appreciate what they left behind to inspire the entrepreneurs of the next 50 years—and beyond.

The 1970s, of course, belonged to a pair of visionaries who, by separate paths, came to set the foundation for fans of professional sports here. Ewing Kauffman made his fortune building a pharmaceutical company he founded as a one-man entity, then would leverage a fortune made in that field to help Kansas City regain pro-baseball status by founding the Kansas City Royals. In less than a decade, the team would make three runs at the American League pennant, each time bringing to mind the reason why a stage play that debuted in 1955 was titled “Damn Yankees.”

Hunt, hailing from a Texas oil family fortune, founded the American Football League in 1960 and three years later moved his team from Dallas to Kansas City. But his influence did not end on the field. Hunt Midwest, the real-estate development firm he created, has become a monster in logistics development (and was the original owner of Worlds of Fun).

As the 1980s were about to dawn, three executives from the Arthur Andersen accounting firm penciled out an idea for a health informatics company that could leverage the emerging power of the microchip. From PGI & Associates (for founders Neal Patterson, Paul Gorup, and Cliff Illig) to its rebrand as Cerner Corp., the health-care IT firm would become a multi-billion-dollar business, go public, and generate enormous wealth that continues to fund business startups in the region today.

The ’80s would also be a transformative time for United Utilities, which had been incorporated in 1938 in Kansas, where 40 years earlier it set down its first roots as Abilene-based Brown Telephone Co. It would morph into United Telecom in the 1970s, which formed a partnership with another communications company to create U.S. Sprint in 1986. From there, we saw Sprint Nextel, then Sprint, on its rise to being the Kansas City area’s biggest private-sector employer—a distinction that faded over the past decade as Sprint was eventually sold to T-Mobile.

As the decade wound down, events on both global and hyper-local levels would prove influential. The biggest involved a pair of tech entrepreneurs who launched a company hoping to leverage satellite technology as a consumer way-finding service. Thus did Min Kao and the late Gary Burrell change the world with Garmin, which has pivoted into personal health-related electronic devices as driving-instruction tech became a free service through Google. Still, the company employs more than 5,000 at its Olathe headquarters and generates billions in annual revenue.

At about the same time, and on a very micro level—that nomenclature is part of the sector’s name—John McDonald launched Boulevard Brewing Co. in 1989. It quickly established a reputation for authentic hand-crafted ales and ushered in Kansas City’s microbrewery phase, though it wouldn’t be long before it dropped the “micro.” It became one of the nation’s biggest regional brewers before selling to a European firm in 2013 for a reported $36 million.

In the 1990s, aftershocks from the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite states reverberated across eastern European markets, opening them up to western flavors of capitalism. Stepping in to fill the void with electronic payments was Kansas City tech entrepreneur Michael Brown, who along with his brother-in-law founded Euronet Worldwide. Today, it’s a multi-billion-dollar investor-owned company processing e-transactions worldwide.  

The decade also saw the emergence of Inergy LP, a propane-transmission service that helped energy executive John Sherman amass a fortune and, a generation later, prove instrumental in pro baseball circles with the purchase of the Royals in 2016. 

The ’90s also saw the rise of powerful changes in equities trading, thanks to the transformational work of Kansas City’s Dave Cummings with the founding of Tradebot Systems. It broke new ground in high-frequency, high-speed equities trading and later helped him bootstrap BATS Global markets in 2005. The latter would eventually overtake NASDAQ as the nation’s second-largest trading platform before selling in 2017 for a tidy $3.4 billion.

The entrepreneurial hits continued after the turn of the millennium when Peter Mallouk, a young financial adviser, acquired the boutique firm he was working for and began turning Creative Planning into the undisputed king of regional wealth-management firms. It has soared 10,000-fold from $30 million in assets under management in 2006 to more than $300 billion today.

Over roughly the same time frame, a former A.G. Edwards & Sons adviser, Marty Bicknell, launched Mariner Wealth Management. Through a savvy combination of timely, strategic acquisitions and organic growth, he matched Creative Planning nearly stride for stride in being recognized among the nation’s top five advisories by Barron’s for multiple years running.

Blue-collar entrepreneurship took a back seat to no other brand during the decade as the Ross siblings, led by Fred Ross as CEO, turned Custom Truck One Source into a national powerhouse in heavy construction equipment, setting the stage for a nearly $1.5 billion sale in 2020.

The beat goes on in the 2020s, as banking scion Sandy Kemper sets annual volume records almost daily with C2FO, a global accounts-payable management platform that since its founding in 2008 has provided more than $300 billion in business funding for clients. The spectacular performance in fintech has created industry buzz about an initial public offering of stock that could create another Kansas City superstar company.

If that happens, he’d be bringing things nearly full circle on entrepreneurial history: He’s a sixth-generation descendant of the family that laid the foundations for banking in Kansas City.