Ingram's May 2024

EURONET WORLDWIDE Year Founded: 1994 Headquarters: Leawood, Kan.

FARMLAND FOODS Year Founded: 1966 Headquarters: Formerly Kansas City, Mo. Sector: Agribusiness Number of Employees: 16,000 (peak)

Sector: Electronic Payment Services Number of Employees: Appx. 8,000

This might be the biggest company many people, even in these parts, have never heard of, and there’s a reason for that. Though its headquarters are in suburban Leawood, Euronet specializes in electronic financial payments precisely where the name indicates—around the world. Capitalizing on the aftermath of communism’s collapse across Eastern Europe in the 1990s, founders Mike Brown and his brother-in-law, Dan Henry, were quick to help millions of newly unyoked consumers get their hands on cash needed to buy and sell in newly capitalistic systems. Just two years after lthe aunch with its first ventures in Hungary, the firm made its first stock offering and, since then, has steadily climbed the list of the largest public companies in the Kansas City area. As of 2023, it stood as the sixth-largest in the region, with revenues of nearly $3.7 billion.

The brand still stands today—you can see it in grocery meat cases across the nation—but Farmland Foods isn’t quite the local presence it was for nearly 75 years after its founding in 1929. At its zenith, it was owned by 1,700 farm cooperatives in the Northern Hemisphere—who, in turn, were owned by more than 600,000 farmer families. Farmland became a Fortune 100 company, with revenues peaking north of $11.8 billion in 2001 (about $21 billion today). The fall, however, came quickly, with the onset of a liquidity crisis just a year later, prompting a bankru ptcy filing and signalling the end. Smithfield Foods, U.S. Premium Beef, Wichita-based Koch Industries, and a hedge fund ended up with the biggest pieces of the cooperative’s assets.

GARMIN Year Founded: 1989 Headquarters: Olathe, Kan. Sector: GPS Technology Number of Employees: 19,900

H&R BLOCK Year Founded: 1955 Headquarters: Kansas City, Mo. Sector: Tax Preparation Number of Employees: Appx. 3,000

Garmin is a crown jewel among Kansas City businesses, a mix of entrepreneurship and innovation that has exceeded even the most iconic of brands in this city’s rich history, such as Hallmark, H&R Block or Cerner. It was founded in 1998 to exploit emerging consumer demand for GPS technology scaled to consumers on the road, in the air or on the open water. As that technology has evolved and disrupted the model, Garmin has pivoted to become a dominant player in wearable tech for the outdoor and fitness markets. Though a global power, it recently reaffirmed its commitment to Kansas City as its home with a massive expansion of the Olathe headquarters, where it can now accommodate 5,000 employees among its total workforce of 19,000 scattered across 35 nations. Cliff Pemble, one of the first hires, event-ually became CEO in 2013, succeeding co-founders Min Kao and the recent Gary Burrell.

Founded almost as a sideline business by accountants Henry and Richard Bloch in 1955, H&R Block has paid dividends for the Kansas City area as a corporate citizen in two very important ways. First, it put the region on the map as the home for an emerging financial services sector focused on helping consumers and business clients produce their tax returns and optimize their tax strategies, and it became the global name in income-tax services by doing so. It also helped salvage the vision of a renewed Downtown by committing to build a new headquarters there, and that building’s opening in 2006 helped create critical mass for the development that followed—today’s Power & Light entertainment district, along with thousands of new market-rate apartments bringing residents back to the central business district. Jeff Jones, the current CEO, took the reins in 2017.

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Kansas City’s Business Media

May 2024