As Arkansas Business writers were preparing last month’s well-received Business Icons features, we specifically asked some of the 10 to talk about what they were doing when they were in their 20s.
I want to use some of them to introduce this week’s eighth annual The New Influentials: 20 in Their 20s feature, because their answers were instructive — and not just because most of those business legends had found their life’s work before they were 30. Some of their stories seem like products of an earlier time that would be hard to replicate in the 21st century, but they also delivered reminders of the timeless qualities that propel a young adult toward success.
Bob Shell was already on his third career when he joined the Little Rock construction company that would eventually be renamed Baldwin & Shell — and he wasn’t yet 20. He had been fired from a job driving an ambulance. He had been denied a promotion from mail clerk to furniture salesman at Fones Hardware.
He was, in his words, “pretty disgusted” by the setbacks when he hired on with the 4-year-old Baldwin Co., and he was determined to make himself valuable to the company’s three founders, who had taken a chance on a 19-year-old who, by his own account, “didn’t know anything about construction.”
Six and a half decades later, Shell spoke of P.W. Baldwin, Werner Knoop and especially Olen Cates with an admiration and appreciation that reminded me of Ebenezer Scrooge’s memories of his first boss, old Mr. Fezziwig.
“They were all very good to me,” Shell said. And his job at Baldwin Co. became more than just a job. “I’ve really loved it.”
The morals of Bob Shell’s story, then, are to shake off failure and to make the most of opportunities. (And for those of us who are no longer young, Shell serves as a great reminder that eager beginners deserve the opportunity to show what they can do.)
Johnelle Hunt, widely considered the operational talent that turned her husband’s dream into the reality that is J.B. Hunt Transport Inc. of Lowell, also found her life’s work before she was 30 — just barely and involuntarily.
She was 29 and happy as a housewife and mother when Johnnie Bryan Hunt started his trucking company. But someone had to make those collection calls, and her fierce dedication to her family was all the impetus she needed.
“In collections you have to have someone really strong who doesn’t take no for an answer,” said Hunt, now widowed and in her mid-80s. “I knew for every dollar I didn’t collect, we lost 50 cents, so I couldn’t feed my children. I was a nice person until I started collecting money.”
A lesson from Johnelle Hunt, then, is this: One may find professional satisfaction — what is too often referred to as “passion” — in unexpected places and even in responsibilities that we didn’t seek out.
Jim Lindsey spent most of his 20s on the gridiron — he turned 20 the year he was part of the Arkansas Razorbacks national championship football team in 1964 and spent seven years in the NFL.
Then, at 29 in 1973, he founded Lindsey & Associates, the foundation of his real estate empire.
But he had a plan even while he was playing football, the game that he says taught him to understand a big picture. When he was drafted by the Minnesota Vikings at 22, he invested his $75,000 signing bonus in real estate — including the future site of the Northwest Arkansas Mall in Fayetteville.
The lessons from Jim Lindsey: When you get your hands on some money, don’t blow it. And if you know that what you are doing right now is not going to last forever, start preparing Plan B.
When George Gleason was 25, he bought the Bank of Ozark, with assets of $28 million. The next day, he gathered his 30 employees and gave them a pep talk:
“The theme of the speech was we may never be the biggest bank in Arkansas, but if we work really hard and every one of us does the very best we can, … we can be the best bank in Arkansas,” Gleason said.
Thirty-seven years later, the renamed Bank of the Ozarks has assets of more than $18 billion. It is the largest bank headquartered in Arkansas and one of the 100 largest in the United States.
Gleason said he set his goals too low in that first staff meeting, but I think the moral of his story is to under-promise and over-deliver.
I personally interviewed Johnny Allison, chairman of Home BancShares Inc. of Conway. He was a millionaire (“on paper,” he said) by the time he was 30, as had been his goal. But he had done it the hardest way possible: by accidentally investing in two money-losing mobile home manufacturers that he had no choice but to fix. He was barely in his 30s when he became the largest shareholder of a bank that, unbeknownst to him, had regulatory problems.
Allison’s business career would make a great management textbook, but I think the biggest life lesson he can teach all of us, young or old, is this: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
The New Influentials
A long-scheduled vacation kept me from participating in the committee that selected this year’s 20 in Their 20s, so I learned about most of these young leaders the same way you will: by reading the short profiles spread over the next 10 pages.
I have no way of knowing whether there’s another Bob Shell or Johnelle Hunt or George Gleason in this year’s crop. Some may have already gotten rich quick, like Johnny Allison. One of them, D.J. Williams, is following the Jim Lindsey path: Razorbacks to NFL to real estate, with on-air TV work thrown in for good measure. A couple of them, Jonathan Crossley and Eric Dailey, have chosen the get-rich-never field of education, but I suspect their stories will be as inspirational to you as they are to their students.
I do see in all of them the energy and ambition and adventurous spirit that is obvious in our state’s business legends, even decades after they were in their 20s. We’re proud to introduce these New Influentials and to consider all the potential they offer our state in the decades to come.