Ingram's May 2024

Roshann Parris Two mentors loomed large to help Roshann Parris become the leader she is today, and has been for more than 30 years of leading the highest-profile strategic communications firm in the Kansas City region. One will be well-known to most any mem ber of the business and philanthropic community here: the late Adele Hall, wife of Hallmark chairman emeritus Donald Hall Sr. “She was the most and the best of everything,” says Parris. “She possessed every human trait most of us hope to have but a frac tion of. Her kindness, compassion, boundless generosity and intense belief in the goodness of people is an inspiration I carry with me every single day.” The other figure would be harder for most people to discern: It was Stella Parris, her mother, back in her home town of Louisville, Ky. “Mom was raised by her very modest Greek immigrant parents, and never went to college,” Parris says. “Still, she was one of the smartest, most motivated, and most giving women I have ever known. She was my icon for how to juggle life’s balls. Working full-time in our family drug store while raising us, chairing community organizations and still never missing a Girl Scout meeting. Forever present when it mattered most.” Those two examples speak volumes about Parris’ passion to bring about change through her work. When there’s a big development in the Kansas City region, public offi cials and business executives alike have Parris Communications high on the list of communications consultants. Over the past year or so alone, her team was promoting the new KCI single terminal opening—they spent more than five years on that one project alone—and it handled the ground-breaking for the $4 billion Panasonic Energy plant in De Soto, the largest economic development project in Kansas history. Parris established ties to the nation’s political-power grid while working in the U.S. Sen ate for six years and finishing her degree. Her firm is a fixture for managing events for the White House and other agencies. She’s made trips to more than 50 countries with former presi dents and first ladies, and was the lead international advance manager during all eight years in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. The glittering nature of her clientele, how ever, has never blinded her to what it means to lead effectively, and she turns to none other than Warren Buffett for guidance in that role. “This lives on our Web site from Warren Buffet,” Parris says. “ ‘In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.’ ”

Lenora Payne She could have said the heck with it: A career in tele com services was almost behind her, the kids were grown, and she’d built the place she’d make home in retirement. Then a funny thing happened to Lenora Payne: She became a mid-life entrepreneur. More than 20 years ago, a lunch room discussion with two other Sprint colleagues sparked the idea for a start-up IT services firm, and in 2005, she took the plunge with Technology Group Solutions, now TGS, which provides IT service and solutions for busi nesses—hardware, software, security, cloud computing, network solutions, storage, and more. Before TGS, she had worked for GE Capital Information Technology Solutions, MicroAge Computer Center, and other IT resellers in vari ous senior positions that included operations management, employee training, sales support and human resources. She furthered her business skills by taking courses at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and tapped into local resources available at the Kauffman FastTrac Growth Venture. On her watch, TGS has soared up the list of the region’s largest women-owned/minority owned companies lists, surpassing $100 million in revenues at its peak. TGS cracked Ingram’s list of the region’s fastest growing companies for the first time in 2011, finishing No. 8 overall with 2007-2010 growth of more than 207 percent. Reaching that point was nice. Getting there wasn’t. “The first few years were very, very difficult—starting a company is hard,” she said. “You get that first purchase order and you don’t have the finances to buy the product or deliver the services—if you don’t succeed, you fail.” Compounding that risk was the fact that Kansas City, despite its status as one of the nation’s 30 biggest MSAs, has a tightly knit commu nity of business executives. A prime directive for her team has always been: Meet or exceed the customer expecta tions, or you will pay the price with reputation. “When we first started, we got some opportunities and proved our selves, came back again, proved ourselves again, and as we went deeper and wider, became successful.” The lesson in that, she says, is “You can’t give up. You’re never satisfied. In working with our OEM suppliers, we started years ago at the bottom, but we worked our way to the top. Everyone knows that in tech, the way it changes today, you’ve got to be on top or you won’t succeed.”

32 I ng r am ’ s

May 2024

Ingrams.com