Ingram's August 2022

Scott Meierhoffer Gen5 Holdings St. Joseph

Jim Mauer Mayson Capital Partners Cape Girardeau A point of community pride in Cape Girardeau is its status as the hometown of the late Rush Limbaugh, so earning the Rush H. Limbaugh Award, as Mayson Capital’s Jim Maurer has done, is no small achievement. The award is given

“It’s impossible,” says Scott Meierhoffer, “to talk about the influences which shaped my career without talking about my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.” That’s to be expected from someone

who represents the fifth generation of a family business that has been part of his hometown St. Joseph for nearly 130 years with Meierhoffer Funeral Home & Crematory. “That legacy of caring for families, along with seeing their commitment to both the business and the community, really shaped how I think about not just business, but also the importance of leaving a legacy,” Meierhoffer says. He earned his business degree from Westminster College, but before coming back to the family business after a bit of a detour, working at a funeral home in Melbourne, Australia. “At the time, they were the largest privately owned funeral home in Australia,” Meierhoffer says. “Again, it reinforced my belief in the importance of building a sustainable business that will leave a legacy long after I’m gone.” That also shaped the way he views innovation in a millennia-old business line, especially with explosive growth in cremation services. In addition to that line, Gen5 owns and operates 10 other brands in Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa, with plans to expand.

to recognize an honoree’s efforts to support the Mississippi River city over the course of a career. Mauer has done that in multiple ways. He leads a Cape Girardeau private investment firm that invests in a diverse portfolio of business lines, primarily in convenience stores, restaurants, and hotels, but also in a community bank, a construction company, a self-storage business, and an urgent-care clinic. Spin through that list again, and you’ll see a common denominator in nearly all of those: they are companies that are part of everyday life for most people. Mayson also has a commercial real estate portfolio that includes both property ownership and development, with other investments in technology and venture funding for companies with high-growth potential. The firm’s strategy is to be among the first into an investment, leading with its own capital, then raising additional funds as needed from a network of high-net-worth individuals. The foundation for that capital formation was PAJCO, a company Maurer co-founded, operating the Rhodes 101 Stops chain of convenience stores across southeast Missouri and Illinois.

Echo Menges Edina Sentenel Edina

Kathleen ‘Kitty’ Ratcliffe Explore St. Louis St. Louis Kitty Ratcliffe’s career in hospitality and tourism has included stops in Denver, Baltimore, Jacksonville and New Orleans— and St. Louis. Twice. Coming back to the Gateway City in 2006 after a 16-year cross country trek was not a difficult decision:

Early life was not particularly kind to Echo Menges, who describes it as “moving around a lot” before entering foster care at age 11. Not until high school did the adults around her realize two key things: No. 1, she was pretty darn

smart, and No. 2, idle time was not a good way to leverage No. 1. Once out of foster care and living with a grandmother, she was placed into a gifted program and a calendar packed with most any extracurricular activity available, including volleyball, basketball and Upward Bound. As an audience member for a teen-produced television show in Reno, she was invited to test her broadcasting skills, and her piece on administration resistance to a black student union at school led to a policy reversal, “and that had a big impact on me,” Menges says. It inspired a career in both print and broadcast journalism before she and her future husband decided it was time to leave Reno for someplace new. By chance, that was Missouri. In 2010, living in Edina’s only motel, she reached out to the local newspaper editor, offering a commentary for publication. Impressed by her work, he offered her a job a few months later, and before long, she was editor of The Sentinel. In a town of 1,253, “if I’m in the courthouse sweating elected officials today, there’s a high probability I’ll be standing in line next to them at the grocery store this evening,” she says. But “it’s nice,” she says, “to be remote from the brow-beating and hate-mongering” of a bigger city.“

“I didn’t need to be sold on St. Louis,” says the president of Explore St. Louis, which promotes convention business and tourism for the city and county. “St. Louis,” Ratcliffe says, “is a great convention destination because it has everything; it’s the best family destination in America.” She ticks off a healthy roster of amenities that make the city a family tourismmagnet and an unmatched place to live and work: Forest Park (“The best urban park in America,” she says), superior air service, robust hotel brands and price points, and plenty of new and improving facilities to attract convention business. She found the regional convention strategy particularly compelling: “In other cities where I’ve worked,” she says, the destination-marketi ng entities and city-run convention centers “were separate entities, with budgets and missions that didn’t always align. Sometimes that difference was enough to interfere with winning new business.” She’s been a key to unifying those efforts in St. Louis, and the result is a revenue stream that helped justify the current $210 million upgrade of the convention center. And now in the works: a new MLS stadium Downtown, and upgrades at City Foundry, Union Station and West port Plaza. “It’s a very exciting time to be in St. Louis!” Ratcliffe says.

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