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The decade also saw the emergence of Inergy LP, a propane-transmission service that helped energy executive John Sherman amass a fortune and, a generation later, prove instrumental in pro baseball circles with the purchase of the Royals in 2016. The ’90s also saw the rise of power ful changes in equities trading, thanks to the transformational work of Kansas City’s Dave Cummings with the founding of Tradebot Systems. It broke new ground in high-frequency, high-speed equities trading and later helped him bootstrap BATS Global markets in 2005. The latter would eventu ally overtake NASDAQ as the nation’s sec ond-largest trading platform before selling in 2017 for a tidy $3.4 billion. The entrepreneurial hits continued af ter the turn of the millennium when Peter Mallouk, a young financial adviser, acquired the boutique firm he was working for and began turning Creative Planning into the undisputed king of regional wealth-manage ment firms. It has soared 10,000-fold from $30 million in assets under management in 2006 to more than $300 billion today. Over roughly the same time frame, a former A.G. Edwards & Sons adviser, Marty Bicknell, launched Mariner Wealth Man agement. Through a savvy combination of timely, strategic acquisitions and organ ic growth, he matched Creative Planning nearly stride for stride in being recognized among the nation’s top five advisories by Barron’s for multiple years running. Blue-collar entrepreneurship took a back seat to no other brand during the decade as the Ross siblings, led by Fred Ross as CEO, turned Custom Truck One Source into a national powerhouse in heavy construction equipment, setting the stage for a nearly $1.5 billion sale in 2020. The beat goes on in the 2020s, as bank ing scion Sandy Kemper sets annual volume records almost daily with C2FO, a global ac counts-payable management platform that since its founding in 2008 has provided more than $300 billion in business funding for clients. The spectacular performance in fintech has created industry buzz about an initial public offering of stock that could create another Kansas City superstar com pany. If that happens, he’d be bringing things nearly full circle on entrepreneurial history: He’s a sixth-generation descendant of the family that laid the foundations for banking in Kansas City.

Discerning Minds: Paul Gorup, left, Neal Patterson and Cliff Illig left the security of ac counting careers with Arthur Andersen to launch Cerner Corp., which eventually would become the biggest private-sector employer in the Kansas City region.

care IT firm would become a multi-bil lion-dollar business, go public, and generate enormous wealth that continues to fund business startups in the region today. The ’80s would also be a transforma

tronic devices as driving-instruction tech became a free service through Google. Still, the company employs more than 5,000 at its Olathe headquarters and generates billions in annual revenue.

From financial services to IT, from manufacturing to logistics, the story of business in Kansas City has been written by entrepreneurs.

tive time for United Utilities, which had been incorporated in 1938 in Kansas, where 40 years earlier it set down its first roots as Abilene-based Brown Telephone Co. It would morph into United Telecom in the 1970s, which formed a partnership with another communications company to create U.S. Sprint in 1986. From there, we saw Sprint Nextel, then Sprint, on its rise to being the Kansas City area’s biggest pri vate-sector employer—a distinction that faded over the past decade as Sprint was eventually sold to T-Mobile. As the decade wound down, events on both global and hyper-local levels would prove influential. The biggest involved a pair of tech entrepreneurs who launched a company hoping to leverage satellite tech nology as a consumer way-finding service. Thus did Min Kao and the late Gary Burrell change the world with Garmin, which has pivoted into personal health-related elec

At about the same time, and on a very micro level—that nomenclature is part of the sector’s name—John McDonald launch- ed Boulevard Brewing Co. in 1989. It quick ly established a reputation for authentic hand-crafted ales and ushered in Kan sas City’s microbrewery phase, though it wouldn’t be long before it dropped the “mi cro.” It became one of the nation’s biggest re gional brewers before selling to a European firm in 2013 for a reported $36 million. In the 1990s, aftershocks from the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite states reverberated across eastern European mar kets, opening them up to western flavors of capitalism. Stepping in to fill the void with electronic payments was Kansas City tech entrepreneur Michael Brown, who along with his brother-in-law founded Euronet Worldwide. Today, it’s a multi-billion-dol lar investor-owned company processing e-transactions worldwide.

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