Missouri: We’ve Got You Covered

Fifty years after its first edition rolled off the presses, Ingram’s today is a number of things, but if we had to boil it all down to a single phrase, we’re about recognizing excellence in business and building connections. We strive to connect our readers with the most significant trends in regional business—primarily, banking and financial services, health-care and insurance, construction and development, and higher education and workforce training. And a key aspect of that is helping influential leaders identify and connect with their peers.

We do that with editorial themes that rotate throughout the year, providing enterprise coverage that explores how market conditions, economic trends, executive achievement, and other factors are influencing growth and investment in Missouri. By doing so, we connect executives and business owners with actionable intel that also helps them frame their own decision-making.

We layer over that a robust program of business and individual achievement awards, recognizing the best employers, rising young executives, outstanding health-care providers, pinnacle educators, and others who set standards. By doing so, we connect the regional executive community with high achievers who present new business opportunities.

Yet another layer comes with our industry ranking lists, updated each year to inform the community of the top performers in banking, professional services, health-care, education, real estate sales, construction, venture capital, and literally dozens of other disciplines. By doing so, we connect potential customers with proven market leaders.

The man who launched Ingram’s in 1974, Kansas City businessman Ludwell Gaines,  started it all with a single platform: a monthly print magazine. We’ve taken the baton from him and added other means of sharing this wealth of content with special publications. Among them is our annual Missouri Edition, which you’re reading now. There are also products like our Chiefs’ Super Bowl tributes, an increasingly robust online presence addressing the biggest news developments daily, and Ingram’s Executive Insights, a series of daily, themed newsletters that provide additional business insights to thousands of subscribers.

Much has happened in this region—good and bad—since the first issue came off the presses in December 1974. We’ve learned over the years—and relearned, examining more than 600 issues since then—the importance of serving as an archiver of the biggest of business trends in this region, of spotlighting the most influential of business personalities, of recognizing the most successful companies, and of engaging the region’s greatest collection of thought leadership from executive suites.

It’s been a lot to pack into one working lifetime.

In 50 years, the United States has overcome seven recessions and major downturns, including the Great Depression and the sharpest one of all, brought on by the global pandemic in 2020.

Bankruptcy has claimed one-time business icons like Woolworth’s, Sears, and Kodak. Financial services firms like Lehman Brothers, PaineWebber, and Arthur Andersen have gone under, replaced in the roll call of U.S. business icons by both the wildly profitable—Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.—and the questionably trendy (think Uber/Lyft, Bird/Lime and other companies with eyebrow-raising bottom-line numbers). Travel companions Eastern Airlines, Pan-Am, and TWA are no more. Such has been the pace of change that even some monster corporate brands have both come and gone, a la Blockbuster. 

Publication of this magazine’s first issue coincided with the bottoming-out of a Wall Street bear market in 1974 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at just under 578 points—a figure that seems quaint by comparison, as it represents a single afternoon’s worth of volatility in modern market fluctuations.

Closer to home, the regional population has increased by more than 1 million souls to 6.2 million. The shifting tides of commerce saw both St. Louis and Kansas City emerge as leaders in bioscience commerce and research, logistics/distribution, vehicle manufacturing and more.

Consolidations have swept through banking and financial services, construction and development firms, health-care providers, and other sectors. Across almost all sectors, the big got bigger. The region has bolstered its position as a center for agribusiness, advanced manufacturing, logistics and distribution, health-care delivery, and research—even technology, giving rise to the self-adopted title of Silicon Prairie. All of those factors have enhanced this region’s reputation for being less likely to fall into national recessionary patterns and more likely to emerge first from downturns, thanks to an economy that does not rely on one or two major employers in given sectors.

Having been right there, stride for stride, with the business community through so much of this shared journey, we pause here with this special edition to commemorate a milestone year in Ingram’s history. We hope this retrospective view of a state’s business history will be as informative and entertaining for you as it has been for us.