Ingram's August 2022

Boeing Co. The F/A-18 Super Hornet, the F15-EX fight er jet, various missile, and space-system com ponents—are all part of the product line that makes Boeing a household name in St. Louis and one of the biggest brand names operating in Missouri. With 14,500 people on the payroll at its St. Louis facilities, it’s also one of the larg est private-sector employers in the Show-Me State. Of course, the Boeing brand stands tall with hundreds of millions of air travelers world wide, thanks to the commercial-aviation prod ucts rolling out of factories in Washington state,

Wichita, and other locations. The defense unit traces its roots back to the McDonnell Douglas Corp., which was acquired by Boeing in 1997 but was allowed to remain as an operating unit of the merged company. The C-suites were re located to Arlington, Va., in 2017, but Boeing Defense, Space & Security continues to be a vibrant brand for the St. Louis region and a key component of Defense Department research through its Phantom Works operations, operat ing from a plant at Lambert–St. Louis Interna tional Airport.

BJC HealthCare The undisputed heavyweight of health-care employment and services in Missouri is BJC HealthCare, a monolith operating two flagship hospitals in the St. Louis market—Barnes-Jewish Hospital and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Com bined, they employ nearly 31,000 health-care professionals and support staff. The St. Louis region has one of the nation’s premier names in medical services, research, and commercial ization through the system’s affiliation with the prestigious Washington University School of Medicine. Those, in fact, are pillars of the orga

nization’s mission to provide care, research, and instruction. The BJC fold also includes 13 other facilities, and systemwide, it delivers more than 4,700 physicians to the market, with more than 3,000 staffed beds. It admits more than 130,000 patients each year, generating more than $5.5 billion in revenue. BJC is also an exemplary corporate citizen with its charity and unreim bursed care, and every year, it yields more than $750 million in financial assistance, education of health professionals, safety net services and community outreach programs.

Burns & McDonnell Kansas City, it’s been said, employs more engineers on a per-capita basis than any other American metro area. A big reason it’s able to make that boast is because it’s the global headquarters for Burns & McDonnell, often thought of as an engineering firm, but in fact, is an engineering, construction, and consult ing amalgam with nearly $5 billion in annual revenue. With a remade Kansas City campus that expanded its footprint and created offic es for several thousand additional workers,

Burns & McDonnell is far from the two-man operation upon its 1898 founding. The brand has powerful recognition in two realms: First, within the engineering/design space, but with its offices in Kansas City and St. Louis, a broader recognition among Missourians for the civic contributions it makes and the quality of the workplace it has created as an employer. More than 4,000 of the company’s 10,000 employees work at the headquarters campus.

Centene Corp. If revenue growth is your metric for brand strength, you won’t find many in Missouri strong- er than Centene. In 2021, this seller of govern ment-subsidized health insurance products saw its revenues climb by nearly $15 billion to hit $126 billion. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a year-over-year pop of 13 percent, a growth rate almost unheard of for a company with a 12-figure baseline. Founded in 1984 as a non-profit Medicaid plan, Centene today is the nation’s largest Medicaid man aged-care organization. It began through the

leadership of the late Betty Brinn, who founded it as Family Hospital Physician Associates but saw explosive growth under the leadership of Michael Neidorff, who died earlier this year. He led the creation of the Centene brand, moving the headquarters to St. Louis, and orchestrat ing its first public offering in 2001. It’s also the nation’s largest insurance carrier on the fed eral Health Insurance Marketplace, created as part of the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, and contracts with the Defense Department to provide managed-care for military families.

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D e s t i n a t i o n M i s s o u r i . c o m

Missouri's Business Media

2022