Ingram's August 2022

Dennis Curtin RE/MAX Regional Services Kansas City The RE/MAX brand in residential real estate was just two years old when a recent Rockhurst College graduate named Dennis Curtin became that Colorado-based upstart’s first franchisee. Over the course of the next 50 years, he’s

John DeHardt Kessinger Hunter Kansas City

In four decades with one of the Kansas City region’s biggest commercial real estate entities, Kessinger Hunter, and 30 of those as managing partner, there isn’t a lot John DeHardt hasn’t seen: Some brokerage work here, some sales there,

done as much as anyone to make it a power brand in Kansas City, across Missouri, nationally and even globally. It all started with a single office in the Northland, where Curtin grew up learning about hard work at the small diner his mother operated. Flash forward 50 years, and Curtin is a highly regarded, award-winning real estate industry pro whose agencies have groomed thousands of agents carrying the RE/MAX flag. By the time he sold his individual franchise operations in 1990, opting to focus on development of a much broader region, he and his affiliates consistently held more than 40 percent of the residential market share in the KC region. Eventually, he would extend his organizational reach from Missouri and Kansas to Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and as far away as Ireland. Never one to forget his roots, Curtin has impacted tens of thousands of food-bank recipients through collaborations with Harvesters-The Community Food Network, and Mimi’s Pantry, which he founded in honor of his mother to help put food on the tables of needy families. “When you see the impact that receiving good, nutritious food has on a pantry client,” he said, “it makes you realize all the hard work is worth it.”

overseeing property management and accounting, and serving as managing partner for roughly 40 real-estate partnerships. Along the way, there have been some big deals, but almost nothing compares to what he’s been tied to for the past 17 years, which, he says, “we’re trying to get it ready for development, finally.” That would be the old Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant near DeSoto, which recently won one of the nation’s hottest economic development projects when Panasonic announced intentions to build a plant to supply makers of electric vehicles with batteries— eventually employing 4,000 directly, with the potential for many ancillary jobs. DeHardt and Kessinger Hunter have been tied to that site since acquiring it from the Army to oversee environmental remediation. The only problem was, after spending $100 million on that work across 9,000 deeded acres, it was clear the Army would need to pony up several times that amount. It’s taken that long to clean up enough of the land to position Kansas as the Panasonic Sweepstakes winner. DeHardt is a native of Independence who majored in accounting and economics at Rockhurst University.

Gene Diederich Moneta St. Louis

Mitch Dolloff Leggett & Platt Carthage

“My father was a CPA, so I grew up around that,” says Gene Diederich, reflecting on his youth in Salina, Kan. “He was definitely my most-admired person; I wanted to be like him.” Gene—yes, he’s a CPA—is a partner for

Leggett & Platt is a $5 billion company whose products go into furniture and vehicles worldwide. So last year, when the time came to identify a successor to CEO Karl Glassman, it would have been a snap to find a new chief executive

the Diederich Simmons Perez team at wealth-management firm Moneta, where he came on board as CEO in 2009. That followed a long run in financial services with such prominent firms as KPMG, A.G. Edwards, Wachovia, and Wells Fargo. Being a CPA would be a vocation; what really got his blood moving, and at an early age, was the investment side. “In college, I always had an interest in investments,” the KU grad says. “And I worked on the farm as a kid, made a little money doing that, so, at a young age, I bought a couple of stock positions, and I got the bug.” Those shares have long since been sold off, he says, “but they got me watching the markets, I took a finance class at KU, and I loved being in the business.” As a firm, Moneta has nearly $33 billion in assets under manage ment for more than 6,300 clients, nearly two-thirds of them falling in the high-net-worth category. When he’s not busy attending to their needs, Diederich also spends time learning to fly. “I’m working on my instrument rating,” he says. “I have about 150 hours in the air, so I’m still very much a baby pilot. … You always want to be super safe, but I also wanted something to challenge myself.”

from the outside. Instead, the publicly traded company’s board turned to Mitch Dolloff, a company veteran of more than 20 years, to lead a business that is a major employer and point of civic pride in southwest Missouri. Dolloff succeeded Glassman in January, completing an ascendancy that began when he joined the mergers and acquisitions unit in 2000. That put him on a path to operations, then leadership of various divisions, including the global automotive-products business and then the global bedding business, before becoming president and taking his seat on the board of directors in 2020. He’s a graduate of Westminster College in Fulton, where he earned an economics degree, and then picked up a law degree from Vanderbilt University, where he later earned his MBA. Before coming to Carthage, he was in private practice with the Los Angeles-based firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, working in securities cases, mergers, and acquisitions. In his new position, Dolloff has oversight of a nearly 140-year-old global enterprise with 15 business units and more than 20,000 employees in 135 manufacturing facilities in 18 countries.

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