President: Brent Blake

PUBLISHED JANUARY 2024

Brent Blake fell in love with the travel industry early in his career, so much so that he partnered up to found an agency and build it into the biggest of its kind in the Kansas City region.

Twice.

Acendas Travel was flying high through 2019, having established itself as one of the region’s biggest private companies. Then came a little bug out of a Chinese community almost no one in the U.S. could find on a map—Wuhan—and governments around the world pulled the plug on travel of almost any kind. After knocking on the door of $300 million in revenues, the pandemic slashed income by two-thirds in 2020. 

For a guy within hailing distance of retirement, it was time to start all over again. And that he has done, along with a team he directs at the Overland Park agency. Sales jumped 20 percent in 2021 as the pandemic panic eased, then roared back in 2022, just shy of a 100 percent year-over-year pop. That put the company on track this year to make up all the lost ground and reclaim its highest ranking on the Ingram’s 100.

Some might harbor a lingering resentment at the way things transpired. Not Blake.

“Looking back, this has been the greatest career I could ever have imagined,” he says. “It’s been challenging but fun. And the client relationships I’ve developed over 25 years have been incredible—some clients I still have today are ones I landed when I was a kid. Doing this was the best decision I ever made.”

His display of resiliency, his team-building, and his ability to take on dramatic industry change and come out on top are all reasons why Blake is our selection for 2024 Corporate President of the Year. 

An Overland Park native and Shawnee Mission West graduate, Blake was the youngest of five children, so he had an early taste of what life was like in a complex organization. “Dad was a really strong personality, a mentor to me, and he taught us work ethic and hard work—when you’re in a family of five kids, there’s always some chore to do. But things were really organized: We’d wake up in the morning, find our chore list on the fridge, kid by kid, of what to do today.”  And there were consequences implied, if not specified. “Those were big,” Blake says with a laugh. “If we didn’t do it, well, there was not a second option. Things were pretty strict and disciplined.” 

After earning his degree in marketing and administration from Oral Roberts, Blake started off with food giant Hormel, selling to hotels and restaurants before he was recruited into the travel world. By 1997, he was ready to flex his entrepreneurial muscles as an owner and bought into All About Travel, which later rebranded into Acendas. Pause here to consider the year: 1997. That’s when an outfit named Priceline.com went live online, just a year after Microsoft launched an operating division called Expedia.com. The race to digital booking was on, and with it, the transformation of an industry. It was cataclysmic-level change. Thriving in the midst of it would prove to be a valuable trait come 2020.

Along the way, Blake embraced a couple of key leadership skills. “I focus on two things: I know it will sound cliché, but I think humility in leadership positions is so important, letting people see you don’t think you’re all that. I preach that to our leadership team. The second thing I concentrate on that has really helped us is having a forward-looking philosophy. We try to look three to five years down the line vs. day to day, and that’s helped in this crazy industry we’re in. We’re constantly looking five years down the road.”

That’s a philosophy born of hard experience. 

“Really two tidal waves hit us, the first back in early 2000; the industry changed when airlines stopped paying agency commissions,” Blake says. “That required us to go from being order takers, booking flights and delivering tickets … to being more advisers and consultants for our companies. So now travelers are paying for our service. That was huge. We had to evaluate our value proposition, what services we would provide, and what clients were willing to pay for.”

The second, of course, was the growing Internet threat. With that, “we now weren’t the only ones that had travel information,” Blake says. “That required another change, the second biggest, as we had to provide travel technologies. We realized as part of being consultants, we had to provide corporate clients with the tech to book travel, so there was a huge emphasis on tech. Today, we provide online booking tools, en route texting, updates on cancellations, and data analytics to clients to make suggestions for improving their own travel planning.”

At about the same time, he says, he found guidance in a book that has become a philosophical bible of sorts for executives in any field. “It was pretty dramatic, but I stumbled onto Good to Great (by Jim Collins). That really helped us decide what we could be good at and focus on our value proposition to become that.”