Greater Fort Worth’s Premier Business Magazine
Tiffany Cason becomes one of North Texas’ top bankers at just 38.
Gerald Alley, CEO of one of the largest minority-owned construction firms, dives into his next project: Arlington's Texas Live!
Silver West Limousines' new owners look for markets far away from Uber.
Sunny Brous Erasmus, diagnosed with ALS at 28, keeps working, talking about her journey and bucket-listing.
Diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease at age 28, Junior Achievement director Sunny Brous Erasmus has never been more alive. While she continues to work full time, she’s also checking off a long bucket list of life goals. It’s a lot to blog about.
56 Alley’s Hat: Gerald Alley, who runs one of largest minority-owned contractors in the nation, points his success back to the life lessons he learned from Mom and Dad.
62 Capital Success: A “Fort Worth girl” becomes Capital One Bank’s new Dallas market president.
68 Where the West Begins – Again: How Silver West Limousines survives in the land of Uber.
( BIZZ BUZZ )
9 Bizz Buzz: Texas Wesleyan launches a faster path to an MBA, W Durable Goods shifts its focus, and other news from the Fort Worth business scene.
16 Comings and Goings: Recently rebranded Crockett Row preps for new tenants, a Near Southside bookstore closes, and more business moves.
18 Stay Informed: The owner of Jarrel James Salon opens up about her life as a Vietnam War child.
20 Face Time: Budding entrepreneur Austin Patry is out of school and in the real world. A couple things up his sleeve? A valet parking app and a food trailer.
22 Around Cowtown: Junior Achievement tees it up.
( EXECUTIVE LIFE & STYLE )
26 Distinctive Style: A Haltom City entrepreneur gives up his auto repair shop for something he really wants to do – make clothes.
30 Off the Clock: Luxury in the middle of the woods.
34 Gadgets: The five favorite gadgets of photo and video guru Erik Clapp.
38 Office Space: Steel plays both a functional and aesthetic role in Thornton Steel’s new digs.
44 Wine & Dine: Three must-try meals from Fort Worth office building cafés.
48 Health & Fitness: Five companies making it a little easier for employees to walk 10,000 steps.
( COLUMNS / DEPARTMENTS )
72 EO Spotlight: The man who saved Kisabeth Furniture.
74 Business Strategy/Running Toward the Roar: Four business tips from a “pop” star.
78 Analyze This/FW Chamber Report: Relocation! Expansion! It’s all happening in Tarrant County.
80 Analyze This/Commercial Real Estate Report: Why cars won’t cut it with Fort Worth’s growing population.
82 Analyze This/Energy: Selfdriving cars will be around sooner than you think.
84 Analyze This/Insurance: This alternative to workers’ compensation could save your business big money.
86 Analyze This/Wealth: How investment professionals get compensated and why it matters.
88 Analyze This/Legal and Tax: Data can be daunting, but if used correctly, can be a valuable business tool.
90 Business Leadership/ Management Tips and Best Practices: Decision-making is overrated.
92 Business Leadership/ Successful Entrepreneurship: Why you need a mentor and what makes a good one.
94 Business Leadership/ Startups: Four tips for leveraging PR.
96 Day in the Life: Texas Wesleyan’s new football coach starts his day with country music, yogurt and blueberries.
There’s no better feeling than owning your own land. It’s freedom, security and room to breathe. If you’ve found your own piece of Texas, it’s time to find Heritage. For more than 100 years, Heritage has been the dependable lender for those looking to buy land. Ready for a little breathing room? Let’s talk today.
Fort Worth is rich in family lineage.
The Brous name is one of the city’s long lines. The Rev. Hugh Brous Sr. and Muna Lehew Brous founded The Brous Private School in Fort Worth in 1927 and closed it five decades later. Generations of Fort Worth children were educated at The Brous school.
One of the couple’s children, Michie Brous, attended TCU and later founded the Panther Boys Club in Fort Worth, serving as its executive director for 27 years. The Boys Club was Michie Brous’ way of trying to create opportunity for boys at risk.
Today, Sunny Brous Erasmus – greatgranddaughter of Hugh Brous and the granddaughter of Michie Brous – is leaving her own gift to the city. Sunny, 30, was diagnosed two and a half years ago with amytrophic lateral schlerosis – ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease – and given the standard prognosis of two to five years’ life expectancy, with the possibility of more.
She’s defied odds and the disease that’s taken more and more of her muscle function. Erasmus, the director of development and events for Junior Achievement of the Chisholm Trail, the Fort Worth
regional office of the nonprofit that runs personal financial enrichment programs for schoolchildren, continues to work fulltime. She’s heightened awareness of ALS among young business leaders in the city through her participation in Vision Fort Worth, a program of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce.
Rather than give up, she continues to fight with hope and optimism that she can live a lot longer than the averages. Marilyn Gilbert, executive vice president of marketing for the chamber and a mentor to Sunny, remembers her first meeting with the young woman everyone in her circles knows as Sunny. It was at lunch, the day after Erasmus was diagnosed with ALS in January 2015. “She was upbeat,” realistic and optimistic at the same time, Gilbert told us in an interview for our cover story on Sunny in this issue of FW Inc.
Sunny holds tightly to hope, and she courageously tells her story at every opportunity. Sunny on July 5 got to throw out the first pitch at the Boston Red Sox-Texas Rangers home game for ALS awareness.
Hal A. Brown owner/publisher
or
or go to fwtx.com/fwinc.
Inc. is published bi-monthly by
City Media Group, 6777 Camp Bowie Blvd, Suite 130, Fort Worth, TX 76116. Periodicals Postage Paid at Fort Worth, Texas. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Fort Worth Magazine, 6777 Camp Bowie Blvd, Suite 130, Fort Worth, TX 76116. Volume 3, Number 4, July/ August 2017. Basic Subscription price: $19.95 per year. Single copy price: $6.99 ©2017 Panther City Media Group. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. how to contact us For questions or comments, contact Scott Nishimura, executive editor, at 817.560.6178 or via email at scott.nishimura@fwtx.com.
Texas Wesleyan launches online MBA to meet the needs of working people who want the degree, but fast.
BY SCOTT NISHIMURA
Texas Wesleyan University, which has made “Smaller. Smarter.” the centerpiece of a rebranding, is adding the words “Faster. MBA.” in launching its first online MBA. Students can finish the program in as little as a year, at a cost of about $28,000 before financial aid, or the same as a standard MBA at the school. The university is waiving the requirement of a GMAT exam for admission for applicants who have a 3.0 GPA – overall, or for their last 60 credit hours – on their bachelor’s degree. Can’t meet that? The GMAT waiver also applies for candidates who have three years professional work experience with an overall 2.5 GPA on their undergraduate degree, or a 2.75 for the last 60 credit hours. The waiver also applies to applicants with a 3.0 GPA on a graduate degree.
“What we’re trying to do is remove barriers,” says John Veilleux, the university’s vice president of enrollment, marketing and communications, who researched options for two years before the launch. “The data is showing there’s no correlation between GMAT success and graduate school success.”
The program starts seven times a year – the first is in July - and includes condensed seven-week courses and 100 percent of courses online. Through digital
technology, students will be able to interact with each other and teachers online, as well as participate in joint projects. Students can choose initially from one of three focuses: general, healthcare administration, and supply chain. Students will take nine core classes, for a total 18 hours, and four courses in their focus.
In deciding the focus areas, “what I looked at is the highest demand areas of an MBA,” John Veilleux, the university’s vice president of enrollment, marketing and communications, says.
Texas Wesleyan, like other universities, is playing catchup to the online offerings of for-profit schools, Veilleux says. “We’re trying to stay competitive,” he says. At the same time, enrollment in the university’s standard MBA has been trending downward, and the university terminated the program last fall. Currently, about 40 students are enrolled in the standard MBA.
Data shows 29 percent of MBA seekers nationally are looking for a global brand in the university they choose, while 15 percent are so-called “careerists.”
“They’re looking for work-life balance, accessibility, convenience,” Hector Quintanilla, Texas Wesleyan’s business school dean, says. “They don’t necessarily want to set aside their life to get this additional credential.”
The university is looking for 13-15 students per start in the online program. While it could get students from outside the region, the university is spending 100 percent of its “Smaller. Starter. Faster. MBA.” marketing dollars in the DFW area, Veilleux says.
The university sought the feedback of the private sector in determining how to structure the program and what to focus on.
In launching it, Texas Wesleyan created an Office of Strategic Partnerships to align itself with the private sector. “What are you paying for at the end of the day when you pay for an MBA?”
Veilleux says. “You’re paying for a network.” The university’s also adding one faculty member in supply chain management and a part-time faculty member to assist in healthcare administration.
The business school has been working with a consultant who’s helping it design the platform. Students can register for classes at their own pace.
But once they start one, they must complete it in an allotted time. Instructors will teach using tools like WebEx and Skype. Online discussion boards will allow classroom discussion and presentations, says Quintanilla. The business school has been offering courses online for about 10 years, but this is the first time Texas Wesleyan has offered an online graduate business degree.
“We’re seeing less and less interest in the face-to-face,” Quintanilla says. “Convenience trumps just about everything these days in terms of education.”
Near Southside to say goodbye to micro-park, hello to new hotel and condominiums.
BY KAT BARCLAY
Plans are moving forward for developer Mike Dolabi’s hotel and condominium project in the Near Southside, and the search is underway for a new home for the Magnolia Micro-Park from its temporary location at 1201 West Magnolia Ave.
One of the possibilities for the park is a site somewhere on South Main Street, Paul Paine, president of the Near Southside Inc. economic development nonprofit, says. Near Southside wants to use the park as a way to bring more traffic to different parts of the Southside.
“Not that Magnolia needed popularity, but we wanted to use the park as a way to draw people into new, emerging areas,” Paine says.
Dolabi, who owns the property, allowed the park made of recycled materials to temporarily fill the vacant space while he finalizes his plans for a new hotel/condo-
minium development that is currently in its final phase of design. The project’s current design features a 150-room hotel, as well as 16-20 forpurchase condominiums, located on the northeast corner of West Magnolia Avenue and Henderson Street. There is also an approximately 400-space parking garage in the plan that will have at least 150 spaces available for public use. The architecture of the hotel will be similar to the historic Mehl Building next door, which Dolabi also owns.
The City of Fort Worth’s Southside Tax Increment Reinvestment board approved $6 million on June 7 for the Dolabi project. Though there was some opposition from the neighboring Fairmount neighborhood about the hotel and parking project, the plans have continued to move through the city’s approval process with changes in the design. City Council approval is possible later this year.
J.Christian Bridges, AAMS®, CPFA President
1200 Summit Ave Ste 780 Fort Worth, TX 76102-4403
817-529-8463 Fax christian.bridges@caprockwa.com www.caprockwa.com
A successful retirement in the future can often depend on having a solid plan now. If your money isn’t working as hard as you are, it may be time to act—there are no do-overs in retirement planning. Now is the time to consider developing a strategy that can help you work toward your financial goals. I specialize in providing comprehensive, objective financial guidance with the goal of maximizing every remaining moment of the retirement countdown.
With a new location comes a new business focus for W Durable Goods.
BY SAMANTHA CALIMBAHIN
WDurable Goods is becoming somewhat of a Fort Worth retail icon with its niche in vintage hats and old-school collectibles, once sold in the hip Foch Street Warehouses in the West Seventh Street corridor. But when property management woes coupled with a newfound opportunity to occupy a historic Fort Worth structure, the decision to move became inevitable.
So later this summer (the plan is August), W Durable Goods will reopen inside the historic O.B. Macaroni building, located at 108 South Freeway, easily spotted off Interstate 35. The company will occupy an approximately 3,100-square-foot space that will act primarily as a manufacturing center. There will also be an office, along with a showroom at the front where products will also be sold.
The plan is to make the production area visible to the public, so that when customers step in to purchase a product, they can also watch it being made, said Daniel Wright, who co-owns the store with his wife, Stephanie. It’s a feature that wasn’t present at their Foch Street location, where production took place in a hidden room at the back of the shop.
“When we say ‘made in Fort Worth,’ it means we’re the ones making it,” Stephanie Wright said. “The person checking you out is the person that sewed up the wallet.”
The new space, whose showroom will be smaller than the Foch Street store, also means a shift in sales focus for W Durable Goods.
According to Stephanie Wright, about 90 percent of sales were instore. Customers will still be able to buy individual items from the shop; however, once the new location opens, the company will put more focus on wholesale, since W Durable Goods also sells to other retailers at wholesale trade shows and manufactures private label products for other brands.
“Wholesale was something that we couldn't devote as much time to at Foch Street, but we feel O.B. Mac will allow us to focus on production and wholesale accounts,” Stephanie Wright wrote in an email to FW Inc.
The decision to move came in January after the Wrights learned that maintenance fees in their Foch Street space would go up 65 percent, or about $1,000 a month. That, on top of walk-in traffic in the area being low due to factors like a lack of parking, prompted
them to start looking at other spaces. Daniel Wright said the O.B. Macaroni building was a perfect fit, considering its history.
The O.B. Macaroni building began as a stagecoach hotel, built around 1860. O.B. Macaroni moved in, in 1905, called the Fort Worth Macaroni Company at the time until it changed its name in 1959. Late last year, the company moved out to a new facility at 3066 Southeast Loop 820.
Fort Worth-based development company M2G Ventures is currently rehabbing the 42,000-square-foot building. Some of W Durable Goods’ neighbors will be Craftwork Coffee Co., which already has a roastery in the space; MELT, which is building a production kitchen expected to open in the fall; and a malt company. Each business will occupy the first floor, and M2G Ventures intends to open leasing to the second and third floors in the future. Businesses will also have the opportunity to have branding on the silos on top of the building, designed as public art.
The couple is optimistic about the new space, which Stephanie Wright said will give the company a new mindset, going from storefront to a more manufacturing-oriented location.
American Airlines’ new Fort Worth corporate campus, under construction, consolidates corporate, training and operations employees at one site.
BY KAT BARCLAY
The slogan of American Airlines’ new headquarters is “One Campus for One Team.” Being dubbed the “Trinity Project,” the new campus - west of Texas 360, between Airport Freeway and Trinity Boulevard - will consist of a 1.8 millionsquare-foot, five-building office complex.
The complex will adjoin the 300-acre piece of land that already houses many of American’s training and operations facilities, including the flight academy, integrated operations center, reservations center, and training and conference center. Texas 360 today separates those facilities from the current corporate headquarters on Amon Carter Boulevard.
“It is huge for American Airlines’ culture and way of life,” says Matt Miller, an American spokesman. “Moving everyone onto the same parcel of land will really create a home for all employees — even globally.”
The Fort Worth City Council voted unanimously on June 6 to expand the tax abatement zone, a tax break for construction of the project.
The new complex will include collaborative and open areas such as small and large meeting rooms and multipurpose and outdoor
The planned IKEA store brings a major mixed-use project at Interstate 35 and U.S. 287 in north Fort Worth.
BY SARAH JANE GRISHAM
Don’t expect traffic around Interstate 35 and U.S. 287 area to be lightening up anytime soon.
Earlier this year, the developer NTP 35 requested up to $18 million in incentives from the City of Fort Worth to build a mixed-use project around a
spaces. There are also plans to create a fitness and wellness center on the south side of the campus in the future.
With more than 75,000 employees traveling to the facilities for training each year, the consolidation will allow the leadership and administrative staff to better support the frontline team.
“Having to cross the highway is not inviting for our frontline employees,” Miller says. “The goal is to bring everyone closer together.”
Construction is expected to be complete by summer 2019.
employees on the property.
tial retail developments.”
planned IKEA store at the intersection. The City Council in June unanimously approved the 15-year package.
Under the agreement, the developer is required to invest a minimum of $100 million on the project and employ at least 350 full-time
“IKEA is a well-known brand name, which is a good regional draw for the area,” Robert Sturns, the city’s economic development director, said.
“The store, coupled with the additional development around that site, is going to continue providing a very positive experience for people moving to and visiting Fort Worth who are looking for those types of experien-
The development will include at least 75,000 square feet of Class A office space, 48,000 square feet of restaurant space, and 66,000 square feet of retail/ commercial space, all with the 289,000-square-foot IKEA store as the anchor.
Construction on the store is expected to begin in spring 2018, with an anticipated opening in summer 2019.
The global biotech firm Smith & Nephew expands in Fort Worth.
BY SARAH JANE GRISHAM
With 15,000 employees worldwide, Smith & Nephew is no stranger to big investments. And as the company looks to expand its current manufacturing capacity at 4900 W. Vickery Blvd., the City of Fort Worth is in on the deal.
The City Council voted June 20 to give Smith & Nephew a five-year abatement on 55 percent of new taxes in return for the company’s agreement to invest $25 million in, and create 100 jobs at, its current location.
Robert Sturns, the city’s economic development director, said the jobs have potential to add average annual salaries of about $64,000, which will set worker salaries well above the county average.
Sturns said the incentive continues to grow Fort Worth’s footprint in biotech. “That’s one of our targeted industries that we really want to see some additional growth happen in.”
The incentive encourages Smith & Nephew to keep the expansion project and investment of jobs in Fort Worth, as opposed to another site, such as New Jersey or the company’s global headquarters in England.
The value of the incentive over five years would be about $535,000 for the company. Meanwhile, the city would be realizing taxes of about $715,000.
The history of Smith & Nephew dates back 160 years, when it was founded by Thomas James Smith in Hull, England. The highly innovative company has employees in 100 different countries. The Advanced Wound Management Division is headquartered in Fort Worth.
BY SAMANTHA CALIMBAHIN
Two businesses are slated to open in the recently rebranded Crockett Row development on West Seventh Street (previously known as West 7th) this fall: CH Robinson and Common Desk. CH Robinson, a third party logistics company, is expected to move in first, with plans to occupy an 11,984-square-foot space at 812 Norwood St. in August. Then in September, coworking provider Common Desk will move into a 13,000-square-foot space at 2833 Crockett St., offering 75 shared desk seats, 110 dedicated desks, 25 private offices, and five conference rooms – all designed with an “industrial chic” vibe, according to a news release.
Texas Family Fitness is expanding in Fort Worth. In June, the fitness center opened a 21,000-square-foot gym in the Sam Moon Center, located at 9120 North Free-
way, Suite 200, in north Fort Worth. In early September, Texas Family Fitness plans to open another location in a 20,700-squarefoot space at 1320 Airport Freeway, Suite A in Bedford’s Cimarron Plaza. In total, Texas Family Fitness will have nine locations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Bell Helicopter is building three new runways just southeast of its corporate campus in northeast Fort Worth. The company is working to relocate its practice field (currently located north of Texas Motor Speedway) to make it closer to its Training Academy, which opened in 2015. According to Bell Helicopter, the move will have several benefits, from reducing air traffic north of its Fort Worth facility to limiting noise impact to surrounding neighbors. The move will also mostly eliminate the need for a Highway 377 and Rufe Snow flight path. Construction of the runways should be complete by late 2018.
Higginbotham recently opened another downtown office at 901 Lake St., operating in addition to the existing office at 500 West 13th St. The insurance firm relocated 52 employees to the 13,000-squarefoot space, an approximately $6 million project. According to the company, the new facility will allow Higginbotham to accommodate a growing customer base and expand operations.
The First Tee of Fort Worth, a youth development organization that teaches golf to young people, opened a 12-acre practice facility at Edward J. Briscoe Elementary School in May. The facility features a driving range, a short game area with a bunker, a putting green, and a modular indoor classroom building. It’s open to Briscoe students, as well as 11 other schools in the Morningside area.
Near Southside bookstore The Last Word closed in June, citing declining sales as the reason for the closure. According to a Facebook post by the store, “2017 has been a hard year for brick-and-mortar retail stores, and this has been particularly true for us over the past several months.”
Deciding to divorce is one of the most important decisions a person can face so it makes sense to know your options.
“
One option is traditional court room litigation. Another option is collaborative law divorce.”
Although attorney Stephanie Foster Gilbert is prepared to be the warrior in your court room battle as she has been in thousands of Tarrant County divorce cases over the past 25 years, her preference is to be peacemaker in your interest–based negotiations through the dignified, private, child–protecting process known as collaborative law divorce which involves no court.
Stephanie Foster Gilbert is confident that the collaborative law process is a powerful way to generate creative solutions in family law disputes while minimizing financial and emotional damage to the couple and their children all the while promoting post–divorce psychological and financial health of the restructured family.
As a family law mediator and one of the first Tarrant County attorneys trained in collaborative law, attorney Stephanie Foster Gilbert will help you navigate through your divorce options and zealously represent you through the process of your choice.
The owner of
Worth’s Jerrel James Salon turns her life story into a memoir.
BY SAMANTHA CALIMBAHIN
From growing up in post-war Vietnam to becoming a small business owner in Fort Worth, Jerrel James Salon owner Sau Le Hudecek has been through a lot in her life. Now she’s telling her story through her book, The Rebirth of Hope: My Journey from Vietnam War Child to American Citizen, published by TCU Press. It’s been getting quite a bit of buzz among readers, including bestselling Fort Worth author Dan Jenkins, who says he “couldn’t put it down.”
But Hudecek admits, writing wasn’t always her strong suit. She took some time to talk about her book with FW Inc., as well as offer advice for anyone who wants to write his or her own.
GIVE US A QUICK SUMMARY OF THE BOOK – WHAT WERE SOME OF THE CHALLENGES YOU FACED, AND HOW HAVE THOSE CHALLENGES SHAPED YOU TO BECOME THE PERSON YOU ARE TODAY?
There are two main parts of my story: my life in Vietnam as a child of an American soldier and my life in America. Imagine being an exGerman or Japanese soldier in America after World War II or perhaps a relative of Osama Bin Laden’s in your neighborhood today. That is what I and the other Amerasians in post-war Vietnam lived, or didn’t live, through. You learn quickly to accept reality, or you don’t last long. Once I made it to America, my whole life changed. I had to work very hard bootstrapping myself from step to step – hotel maid, learning English, studying for my cosmetology license, building my clientele, fixing up rental properties, buying my salon. I worked hard, but I also had the help and guidance of many people.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR WRITING PROCESS FOR THE REBIRTH OF HOPE? Do, learn, and repeat. I knew that my writing skills were not the best so I reached out to a friend to listen to me and capture and organize what I said. My husband read this first draft of my story and said that now we needed to turn the facts of my life into the story of my life. I knew I needed help so I searched the internet and found an
editor whose profile felt right to me. In addition to helping me with structure, she helped me understand the need to show and tell my story and how to do it so that my story wasn’t just a collection of facts. We then went back and forth, always moving forward as a collaboration between my editor, husband, and myself – my editor providing guidance, and my husband acting as liaison between us and holding my feet to the fire when the topic was one tied to painful memories.
HAVE YOU ALWAYS LOVED WRITING?
I can’t say that I have. Writing has never been my strong suit. In school I was good in math, but in life my main skills are my willingness to work hard and diligence. My passion is helping people feel good about themselves. Writing was something that I needed to do to finish the job of telling my story.
WHAT’S YOUR ADVICE TO A BUSINESSPERSON WHO WANTS TO WRITE HIS OR HER OWN BOOK?
The first step is to get started. It sounds stupid, but too many people procrastinate and never move. Just get your story out onto paper or in a computer so that you can then look at it honestly to see where you are at. Once you honestly look at where you are at, you can then determine what the next step should be, which may mean that you need to ask for help to continue on.
TCU entrepreneur finishes senior year on a rush, developing a valet parking app and preparing to launch a food trailer.
BY SCOTT NISHIMURA
Business ideas come easy to Austin Patry. He has a list of 70 he maintains on his iPhone. “Whenever I think of something, I write it down,” Patry, who graduated from TCU’s Neeley School of Business in May, says.
Nice finish. Patry had a bad experience with a parking valet two years ago, and he went home and sketched out the beginnings of his Voila Valet, a mobile app that lets valet customers pay, tip and keep track of their cars. Finished with early tests of his app for Apple users, he’s developing one for Android. Then he’ll pitch the app to valet companies for a pilot test. Valet companies will love the app because it’ll make the business more efficient and help eliminate employee theft; employees will get higher tips, Patry says.
And then there’s the food trailer, Rollin’ n Bowlin.’ Patry and partner Sophia Karbowski, a just-minted Neeley graduate he met in class last fall, spent six months developing the basis of what they think can be a franchise-worthy healthy fastfood business. Rollin’ n Bowlin’ serves up 18-ounce thick fruit smoothies topped with fruit and granola and rich with superfoods and acai seed known for its antioxidants. Patry and Karbowski are seeking permits for a trailer they bought on Craigslist and, before the end of April, catered three events, prepping the smoothies at other locations. Their target launch: August.
“I’ve always grown up around food, and I’ve always had a passion for it,” says Patry, 21, whose father was in restaurants and grandfather emigrated from France and opened a French restaurant in Dallas. “Being here [Fort Worth] for four years, there wasn’t anything around here I craved that I
could walk to.”
The valet app presents two key revenue streams. Valet companies would pay monthly fees to link to it. And valet users would pay convenience fees of 50 cents per transaction. The valet company records the car’s vehicle identification number and driver’s name; that establishes an account for future use. Customers can pay and tip by card, or pay cash and use the app to request their car. Finding a designer was the first hurdle. Patry met a group of designers through family connections, but “they said it would cost $100,000,” he says. One of the group’s spouses is a software developer, and Patry convinced him to work at a substantially lower price. “It wasn’t a huge investment,” he says, declining to say what he paid.
Patry, whose older brother works in oil and gas, has invested in Voila Valet. The Bill Shaddock Investment Fund, which provides capital to student-run businesses at TCU, has granted $13,000.
For Rollin’ n Bowlin’, Patry is looking to raise $20,000-$25,000 startup costs, of which he and Karbowski still need about $15,000. They’re running a $8,000 crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The money would go toward buying a generator, deep freezer and pickup to tow their trailer. “We’ve been borrowing trucks,” he says.
The menu includes four bowls at $9 apiece and two cold-pressed juices. Within a year, the partners want to open a store, Patry says. “We want to make it one of the first genuinely healthy fast-food places,” he says. “We think that’s a big untapped market. We want to bring that here and then franchise it out.”
Junior Achievement
Junior Achievement of the Chisholm Trail held a fundraising tournament this spring at Mira Vista Country Club in Fort Worth.
Photos by Mike Lewis
1. Nick Martin of Michigan Texas Corp., Rosie Moncrief, Mike Moncrief, and Jeff Schmeltekopf (immediate past JA Board chair) of Dean Jacobson Financial Services
2. Team GE Transportation: Todd Fowler, Anne Routson, Mike Patton (Tournament chair), Nick Blancke
3. Kenneth and Sunny Brous Erasmus, JA
4. Early Davis of Republic Title, Brad Chapman of FreshList (JA board member), Marvin Girouard, former CEO of Pier One Imports, and Tournament Co-Founder, Darren Lewis of JP Morgan (JA board member) 1 2 3 4
A young entrepreneur from Haltom City leaves the automotive world to start a men’s tailoring company in Fort Worth.
BY SAMANTHA CALIMBAHIN / PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX LEPE
Two pairs of shoes. Three pairs of jeans. A few t-shirts. And no sense of style. That was Phillip Prany once upon a time –until he bought his first suit. He had never owned a suit before and
needed one for a wedding, so he bought one. It wasn’t tailored, but he remembers how he felt when he slipped it on for the first time.
“It totally changed me,” he said. “The way that I felt when I first wore my suit – it was not a tailored suit; it wasn’t
bespoke; I didn’t know anything about fit – but just the feeling of having your first suit is unchangeable.”
It was a moment that inspired him. At the time, he was knee-deep in the automotive business. He once worked at a car dealership before opening his own automo-
Craig Rogers President & CEO
tive repair shop in Haltom City in 2012. With a little more money in his pocket after starting the business, he could finally go shopping and began to care a little more about what he was wearing, to the point that he developed a passion for it (particularly, bespoke clothing). He then bought a sewing machine and put it in the office of his automotive shop – a room with no heat
or wherever is convenient for them. Prany sits down with customers to get to know their lifestyle, gathers at least 17 body measurements from the client, and makes shirts, jackets and other menswear based on the client’s preferences. The company also sells accessories like bow ties, lapel pins and pocket squares.
or air conditioning, where he would study books on tailoring and practice sewing. In 2015, he sold his shop and launched Mener Grand Train Co., French for “to live in style,” the following year.
The philosophy behind the men’s bespoke clothing company is to help customers express their individuality, Prany says.
“That was my inspiration for the brand –‘live in style.’ To me, it means having your own style and not being judged for who you are,” he said.
The company doesn’t have a brick-andmortar location but rather sells online and sees clients by appointment in its studio at West Seventh Street and University Drive,
“I follow the rules of thumb when I put on a suit, but what I like to do is put my attitude in it,” he said.
Personally, Prany said he tries to emphasize individuality with the way he dresses. He says he’s gone through a number of phases (at one point he had silver hair and black nail polish), but now he’s cleaned up a little more, hoping that his statement comes from, of all things, his hands.
Prany has tattoos on each of his fingers, depicting images like a rose, an anchor and arrows. He said each tattoo doesn’t necessarily have a meaning, but he hopes his hands will make him recognizable as a tailor.
Eventually, Prany said he wants to expand to streetwear and open a store, but his current focus is formal and professional attire.
As a student, Jerry “Chip” Davis quarterbacked the Tarleton Texans in football, gaining experience in teambuilding and leadership from Athletic Director and Coach Lloyd Taylor. Knowing the power of education, he continued after his bachelor’s degree to earn a master’s while coaching.
Recognized throughout the industry, Davis won the 2016 American Council of Life Insurers’ Forum 500 Distinguished Service Award, serves as President of the Tarleton State University Foundation, Inc. Board and received the Tarleton Distinguished Alumnus award in 1995.
BY SAMANTHA CALIMBAHIN
Sometimes it’s nice to leave the polished, air-conditioned office for a few days to unwind in the natural beauty of the outdoors. But for some, the idea of swatting mosquitos out of a tent and digging holes to do their business makes camping seem less exciting.
Thankfully for places like Broken Bow, Oklahoma, there’s plenty of options for those looking to trek the great outdoors without having to give up comfortable amenities. About a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Fort Worth, Broken Bow offers the classic camping experience: hiking, boating, fishing – all the good stuff. Broken Bow Lake, perhaps the area’s claim to fame, has 22 miles of seemingly endless clear water framed by the stunning cliffs of the Ouachita Mountains.
And the best part is, you get to go home to
a gorgeous cabin, take an actual shower and sleep on an actual bed. Here are five cabins that offer travelers luxury accommodations in the middle of the woods.
GRAND LODGE, by Broken Bow Vacation Cabins
brokenbowvacationcabins.com
One of Broken Bow’s newest cabins is The Grand Lodge, built just this year. The single-story, four-bedroom and four-bath cabin, with memory foam king beds in every room, is made especially for small corporate retreats, family reunions and other group trips. The kitchen, designed with a granite island and custom-painted soft touch cabinets, is decked out with stainless steel appliances. On the days you need a rest, the cabin sports plenty of indoor games like shuffleboard and 5-foot-tall giant Jenga. Outside, the 1,500-square-foot
covered deck features a hot tub, fireplace and 55-inch TV. It all sits less than two minutes from Hochatown, a community known for famed Broken Bow restaurants like Grateful Head (pizza), The Blue Rooster (southern) and Abendigos (American).
HIDDEN ACRES CABIN, by Hidden Hills Cabins
hiddenhillscabinsok.com
The stately Hidden Acres Cabin features a modern design inspired by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright – 24-foot-high, 55-foot-wide glass windows stretch from top to bottom, giving visitors a panoramic view of the surrounding wildlife. Inside, the cabin holds five bedrooms and three full baths, along with an optional bunk house that has two sets of bunk beds and an additional bath if you need it. On the days you don’t feel like cooking over a fire,
a full kitchen is outfitted with stainless Bosch appliances. Outside, a 1,300-squarefoot covered deck includes a hot tub and wood-burning fireplace. The cabin also borders an open meadow for outdoor activities and connects to the Ouachita National Forest trails.
NATURE HOUSE, by Creative Escapes beaversbendcreativeescape.com
For an outdoorsy experience with a modern vibe, Creative Escapes’ Nature House stands out with its contemporary architecture, characterized by a steep, sloped roof that deviates from the traditional cabin designs in Broken Bow. Still, the wood-paneled interior retains the house’s cabin-esque vibe. And while the inside has board games, DVDs and cable TVs, Nature House gives guests plenty of reasons to chill outside – an outdoor deck, fire pits, eight-person hot tub and playground for the kiddos.
MAJESTIC MOUNTAIN LODGE, by Beavers Bend Luxury Cabin Rentals beaversbendcabins4rent.com
The Majestic Mountain Lodge is what Beavers Bend Luxury Cabin Rentals calls its “crown jewel,” just minutes from the main
entrance of Broken Bow Lake. The cabin boasts floor-to-ceiling windows and individual sound systems in the living room and bedrooms so you can play music from your phone via Bluetooth. The exterior features an upstairs balcony and downstairs covered deck, along with a beautiful breezeway that also acts as a seating area. If you’re planning a trip for a large party, this two-story cabin can sleep up to 28 people.
IRON HORSE LODGE, by Blue Beaver Luxury Cabins bluebeavercabins.com
Blue Beaver offers cabins ranging between one to six bedrooms, one of the largest be-
ing the six-bedroom, five-bath Iron Horse Lodge. The cabin has a full kitchen, which can be stocked with your favorite grocery items, flowers, chocolates or wine if you ask in advance. There’s also an outdoor fire pit for roasting marshmallows in the evening. Then after dinner, you can relax on the covered back porch and listen to the sounds of the forest – all while sitting in a hot tub. If you’re sore from hiking all day, in-cabin massages can also be purchased separately.
“There’s an entrepreneurial spirit unique to Fort Worth, and FW Inc. captures that perfectly. It’s become a ‘go-to’ read for me.”
BY SARAH JANE GRISHAM
With a resume that boasts ADDY and TELLY awards, a film featured at the Hollywood Film Festival, and multiple video projects for the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau, including the latest popular “Things to Do” video, Erik Clapp has built his reputation as a photographer, videographer and film director. Check out the five gadgets he can’t live without.
1. DJI Osmo - “A miniature steadicam that produces supersmooth tracking shots. Its small size allows you to be more creative in where you can place the camera and helps you move freely around your subject without getting exhausted.”
2. LiteGear LiteMats and LiteRibbon - “The versatility of these LED lights is what makes them so handy. The LiteMat is an LED light about as thick as a DVD that comes in five sizes and can be mounted on almost anything. The LiteRibbon is exactly that – an LED ribbon that can be stuck in small or hard-to-get places where regular lights won’t fit, such as in a car. They are dimmable and can change temperature as needed depending on their environment.”
3. Westcott Icelight - “A lightsaber-like LED light wand for portable runand-gun light situations. The Icelight is great for both video and photo when you need to be moving but don’t have time to plug in lights. It stops the mood from breaking and keeps subjects on their toes.”
4. Atomos Shogun - “A portable monitor and video recorder. This plugs into your camera and records exactly what your camera is seeing but in a higher quality format. It doubles as a monitor and can be used to show clients footage immediately without having to use the camera to do so. An invaluable tool on the set.”
5. Manfroto Video
Monopod with feet“An extremely useful monopod used to replicate shooting handheld without putting stress on your back. I love this thing. It has really helped me to be mobile and to acquire footage that I might otherwise not have from being too tired out if I had been holding the camera all day. Using a tripod all day can be cumbersome, but this has three tiny support legs at the bottom.”
Enter your well-designed space for a chance to be featured in the December issue of Fort Worth HOME. Winners from 10 different categories will be recognized at a future event in front of the top Dallas/Fort Worth design professionals. Nominations end Aug. 1.
For more information, visit fwtx.com/FWhome/design-awards
A local team of experts makes what could have been a sterile steel structure into a personable and interesting office for a storied Fort Worth company.
BY KENDALL LOUIS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY RACHEL PAUL PHOTOGRAPHY
The Thornton Steel portfolio reads like a Where’s Where of Fort Worth landmarks. The local company, the leading steel fabricator in the country’s Southwest region, worked on AT&T Stadium, Ed & Rae Schollmaier Arena (the remodeled Daniel Meyer Coliseum), Mary Wright Admissions Building, Sundance Square Pavilion, the Cassidy Building, and even the shaded steel structures in Sundance Square Plaza that have quickly become synonymous with downtown Fort Worth. And the team behind Thornton Steel’s new office building is a Who’s Who of Fort Worth construction professionals. Bennett Benner Partners was the architect on the project, Muckleroy & Falls was the general contractor, and the steel that’s found both aesthetically and functionally throughout the building? Well, you already know where that came from.
“The first thing we wanted was a building that would show off the product. And we wanted to do a more high-tech, functional office space while exposing it,” said President and CEO Donny Lassetter.
And said product certainly can be found everywhere. Walk through the front doors, and guests will come face-to-face with a steel
accent wall. The large piece of sheer steel is clear coated, and the result is something that could even stand on its own aesthetically, with hints of subtle watercolor and the kind of veining found in a marble backsplash. Steel’s high function is exposed along with its beauty.
One hallway showcases exposed bracing against the wall like a piece of industrial art. “A brace like this is usually hidden behind the wall, but it’s the most important part of a building,” Lassetter says.
Steel was also used in furniture where possible – creating the base of the conference room tables. Above one of the tables, speakers hang like pendant lights – part of the technology push in the new office. “The high-tech function is my favorite part of the new space,” Lassetter says. “We use our webcams all the time.” The webcam connects the Fort Worth team to the 115,000-square-foot San Antonio plant that Thornton purchased in 2010. Between the two facilities, Thornton Steel handles projects from South Texas all the way to Oklahoma, Colorado and Missouri.
While the office is new, the location and the 20 acres it sits on at 2700 W Pafford St., between Granbury Road and McCart Avenue, have been home to Thornton Steel since 1946. Lassetter bought the
majority interest from the Thornton family in 2006. Current company CFO Kerry Lee remembers the old office well. He’s worked for Thornton Steel for 24 years. When Lee went to work for the family, the office was in a building that sat where the current parking lot is. “You see my truck there?” Lassetter says as he points to a prime spot in the parking lot. “That’s right about where Kerry’s desk was.” The office had been remodeled and expanded numerous times. But it had become dilapidated, and the team was outgrowing the space. Now, in the new 9,300-square-foot office, Thornton Steel’s employee base can triple in size without reaching the building’s walls.
And the new space aims to keep those employees happy — there are 62 between the office and the 100,000-square-foot enclosed fabrication facility on the same property (plus more than 50 in the San Antonio location). A break room/kitchen with high tops and red chairs overlooks what Lassetter calls an “employee amenity area.” Outside stone steps lead out to steel picnic tables in a serene, modern garden setting. Lassetter and Lee have bigger plans for the amenities too. “We plan to get a smoker so we can feed employees for the holidays,” said Lassetter.
Other future office plans will infuse art into the space. Two
murals by noted Fort Worth artist Alice Bateman will flank the steel panel inside the building’s entrance. She used photographs of Thornton Steel workers erecting steel structures to inspire the murals. Bateman is the hands and eyes behind numerous local pieces of art, including the steel gates for the Texas Wild entrance to the Fort Worth Zoo and a steel fence with sculptures of kids and animals surrounding the Fort Worth Animal Care and Control Shelter.
Her experience with steel is no coincidence. Bateman and her husband, Tom Vanderzyl, actually used to live and work in a small studio on the grounds of the Thornton Steel property. The studio was a prototype for a mobile school room that Thornton created. After traveling Europe for many years working with stone, Bateman returned with Vanderzyl to his hometown of Fort Worth. The story goes that the couple “found a vestige of the familiar” on the Thornton Steel grounds and lived, worked and reared a child there for nearly 20 years. “We had a small child there, and she loved the factory,” Bateman said. “At 4 p.m. Thornton Steel closed up, and she could roam the place with our Great Danes.” Now, Bateman returns to paint the murals.
As for other touches inside the office, Lassetter and Lee say there is still a lot to do in the way of new furniture and office décor. As we walk through the halls, it’s evident, as vintage chairs and desks sit inside new clean and modern offices as a charming reminder of where the company has been and where it plans to go. One might think a new build with polished concrete floors and exposed steel would lack warmth. But inside these walls, steel is personal.
BY SAMANTHA CALIMBAHIN
Cafés built inside office buildings can be hidden gems in their own right – they don’t catch the eye of anyone strolling downtown or passing by on the freeway. Instead, they’re nestled inside towering buildings for employees and executives to run to for a freshly cooked meal on the days they aren’t busy with lunch meetings. Eventually, after a few lunch-break visits, regulars get a feel for their favorites, know the people behind the counter by name, and can drop by to order “the usual.”
And just like any restaurant, these office places have stories too, along with that one meal customers keep asking for. Here are just a few of the office building cafés around Fort Worth and the dishes they take pride in the most.
Mallick Tower
101 Summit Ave., Ste. 110
Having grown up in Syria, Blue Tower Café chef and owner Feras Alzaitoun brings a Mediterranean twist to a menu otherwise predominated by burgers and
sandwiches. His take on Ouzi, a baked chicken dish from his home country, is seasoned with chili powder, cinnamon, garlic, salt and pepper, maintaining a light crispiness on the outside and juiciness on the inside almost reminiscent of American fried chicken. It’s served with two sides – buttery rice mixed with peas and topped with almonds and walnuts, and a cucumber and tomato salad dressed with olive oil, lemon, garlic and dried mint.
Alzaitoun came to the U.S. in 2000, having little experience in the food industry other than helping out at his family’s restaurant back home. Living on his own, he learned to cook for himself and soon discovered that cooking was how he wanted to make a living someday. He got that opportunity in 2013 when he bought
“We
the Blue Tower Café. Alzaitoun kept the menu mostly the same but added dishes like the Gyro, Chicken Kabob and Hummus Wrap.
Customers won’t find Ouzi on the regular menu, as it’s one of the café’s weekly rotating specials, listed simply as “baked chicken.” Another popular special is kafta, a Mediterranean meatloaf.
Western Place
6000 Western Place, Ste. 60
Fresh From the Oven owner Sisy Sid grew up in the food business, working at her mother’s restaurant in Thailand. Sid came to the U.S. in 1980 and eventually, despite having no formal cooking education, got a job making simple items like burgers and burritos at a Burleson convenience store. Tired from working long hours, Sid was ready for a change and took over the Fresh From the Oven café inside one of the Western Place buildings in 2012. The job gave her the chance to be more creative with her meals, adding recipes like the Southwest Chicken Wrap to the menu.
one of the most popular items on the menu, perhaps the true stars of the plate are the housemade potato chips and french fries, flavored with seasoned salt that has a mild kick. Chef Germaine Williams, or “Chef G” as he’s called, says customers sometimes come by just to order the fries.
Sid hasn’t lost touch with her Thai roots, however, regularly offering items like pad thai, green curry and spring rolls as weekly specials.
Burnett Plaza
801 Cherry St.
No, it doesn’t actually have tequila in it. But the Chicken Tequila Pasta served at Alonti has long been a favorite among tenants in the Burnett Plaza building, catering sales manager Devany Florence says. Though made with roasted red pepper cream sauce and jalapeños, the kick of spice is relatively mild, blending with the flavors of herb-roasted chicken and bell peppers. It’s served with a side of garlic bread or salad.
The dish began as a special until building tenants requested that it be permanent. Today, it’s still listed under the “specials” menu, scribbled at the top of the chalkboard and never erased. The chicken breast is marinated in cumin, cilantro, lime, salt, pepper and a little sugar overnight. When ordered, the chicken is grilled and wrapped in a tortilla with housemade chipotle sauce, pepper jack cheese, avocado, lettuce and tomato. And while Sid says the wrap remains
Houston-based Alonti is primarily a catering company but has three cafés in the Dallas-Fort Worth area (two in Dallas and one in Fort Worth). The Fort Worth location has practically become an establishment in Burnett Plaza, having been in the building for about 20 years, Florence says. While tenants like GM Financial, Huckabee and Basic Energy Services are regulars, Florence says one of Alonti's biggest downtown customers is Oncor, often in need of catering for various company events.
Golf Cars and UTVs for the Ranch, Neighborhood or Worksite. QUALITY VEHICLES THAT GET THE JOB DONE!
Metro offers the best selection of off-road vehicles. Whether you have a job to do or just for fun, we have an unbeatable lineup of premium golf car and UTV brands - all backed by our award winning service department.
Come by and See Us
BY KAT BARCLAY
Ten thousand. That’s the magic number of steps the American Heart Association suggests people should take in order to prevent heart disease.
For many Americans who spend the majority of their workday sitting at a desk, this goal isn’t always feasible. Employees and executives have to make greater efforts in order to get their steps in.
But some Fort Worth companies are making it a little easier for employees to reach their goal, from marking out walking paths throughout their buildings to hosting walking events. For other businesses, the mere location of the office is what makes it walking friendly. Here are just a few walkable workplaces located in Fort Worth.
3024 Acme Brick Plaza
Acme Brick’s offices are located along the Clear Fork of the Trinity River. With convenient trail access through the café, employees can easily take a walk during their lunch break, or even just to get some fresh air throughout the day. It is also convenient for running or biking before and after work, and employees have access to locker rooms so they can shower and change before heading back inside.
Access to the trail was a factor when deciding the location of Acme Brick’s headquarters, according to marketing director Britt Stokes.
“The aspect of having a safe place for employees to walk was a big incentive,” Stokes says.
1000 Throckmorton St.
Six laps around the track-shaped path outside City Hall equal one mile. But employees don’t just use the track for exercise; they also sometimes use it to host walking meetings. The City of Fort Worth also takes advantage of the path by hosting events such as the one-mile Heart Walk Kick-off and National Walking Day.
1301 Pennsylvania Ave.
A walking path that runs along West Rosedale Street, Sixth Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, and South Henderson makes up the perimeter of the campus at Harris Methodist. One lap, about 2,200 steps, is one mile. On bad weather days, staff and visitors can take advantage of the marked path located inside the Richardson Tower, marked with labels 1-12.
800 E. Northside Drive
Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD) employees have easy access to a walking path, with company offices located right along the West Fork of the Trinity River. According to TRWD spokesman Chad Lorance, many take advantage of the trail by walking before or after work, and during lunch.
Though its location at Western Place isn’t exactly walking friendly, the company encourages walking through an incentives program. Employees can download an app and scan the barcode at different locations in the building to get credit for the distance they walked.
Junior Achievement director gets an ALS diagnosis at age 28 but keeps moving, blogging about it to raise awareness, and raising money for school entrepreneurship programs.
BY SCOTT NISHIMURA / PHOTOGRAPHY PETER ROBBINS
It’s a big question, one thrown onto the table sometime after the plates of enchiladas at the El Fenix on Camp Bowie were cleared. “Sunny, what does hope look like to you?”
Sunny Brous Erasmus, 30, two and a half years removed from what she calls the “death sentence” diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral schlerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is ready for that one. It was a straight ball over the plate, the kind she used to feast on as a softball player.
“Hope looks like getting some of my strength back with this new drug,” says Sunny, her trek pole, “Phil,” a walking stick she uses to get around, lying on the bench next to her. In August, she’s to begin treatments – assuming she can afford it under her insurance – with a newly approved, but expensive, drug called Radicava that slowed the decline of daily functioning in human trials.
“Hope is not just stopping this,” Sunny continues. “It’s reversing it. It’s better quality of life.” Who’s to say in 10 years, with advances in medicine, she can’t be in the same stage she’s in now, Sunny says.
“Hope is having kids,” she says. “I can’t imagine life without being a mom. That’s something I’ve always identified myself as.” Her 11-month-old nephew is “as big as a sumo wrestler,” she says. “And I can’t hold him.”
Erasmus – director of development and events for Junior Achievement of the Chisholm Trail, the Fort Worth regional office of the nonprofit that runs instruction on entrepreneurship,
financial literacy, and work and college readiness for schoolchildren – isn’t giving up. The disease has no cure, but she’s kept on living. Every day of the neurodegenerative disease brings more stiffness, cramps, muscle deterioration, and risk of bad falls, which have occurred several times in recent months. And more concessions: first, Phil, and, most recently, the acquisition of a scooter and a service dog, a chocolate Lab named Baloo Bear that will be trained to retrieve things Sunny drops.
Her social worker was surprised Sunny was still working. She continues to work full-time, running golf and bowling tournaments to raise money for JA. Just since the fall, Sunny and her husband Kenneth Erasmus married, bought a home, traveled to Mexico for a family wedding, and helped serve 142 steaks out of a tent at a cook-off in her hometown of Hico. She’s volunteered for the Vision Fort Worth leadership program for young business people, given speeches on her journey, blogged on living with the disease, and ticked items off of a substantial bucket list. In early July, she got to throw out the first pitch during ALS awareness night at the Red Sox-Rangers game in Arlington. “She’s getting it all in,” Laurie Jackson, Sunny’s mother and a retired Justice of the Peace in Hico who now works at one of the city’s banks, says, understatedly.
Sunny’s Bucket List Throw an epic 30th birthday party? Check, with 65 guests earlier this year. Sunny gathers friends like metal to a magnet – college buddies and friends she’s met through Junior
Achievement, Vision Fort Worth, and growing up in Hico – and she comes from a big family. Her grandfather Michie Brous founded the Panther Boys Club in Fort Worth and was its executive director for 27 years. Her great-grandparents, the Rev. Hugh Brous Sr. and Muna Lehew Brous, founded The Brous Private School in Fort Worth, which operated for 50 years.
core, and since-expanded, group she met while attending Tarleton State 10 years ago? That one’s in the works. The “girls” – all athletes, and comprising mostly teachers and coaches today – have been to Cabo San Lucas, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Aruba. “My dream trip is the Maldives,” Sunny says. For this summer’s outing, the group came to Sunny for a four-day weekend in June that included massages, hair and nail appointments, a visit to Fort Worth’s new Topgolf driving range, Friday on the Green concert on West Magnolia Avenue, and dancing at Studio 80. The women even got to take turns pushing Sunny’s new scooter, a device that briefly allowed her to keep up, across Magnolia, its battery drained. “This is the girl who just got her boobs done,” Sunny says, pointing out one of the women – still sore from surgery, but gamely up for swinging a club – as the group assembled at Topgolf in the middle of a hot Saturday for two hours of Michelob Ultras, topped balls and dramatic fades.
Drive a car she can’t afford? Check. Sunny borrowed a new Porsche Carrera and got it up to 105 on the highway in Aledo. Rewatch every episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” with her husband? In progress. This raises the question of why somebody in her position would want to watch a TV series where people die every episode. “It’s the only show I’ve committed to through high school, college and graduate school,” says Sunny, who holds a business degree from Tarleton State University and master’s in education from Texas State University. And “Grey’s Anatomy” prompted end-of-life conversations with her husband. “I’ve had ALS a year longer than I’ve had him.” Her favorite character: the diminutive Dr. Miranda Bailey. “I think we’re soul sisters,” Sunny, who’s 5 feet 9 inches, says. “We’re bossy. We’re in charge.”
Schedule another big summer trip with her girlfriends – a
On the Cabo trip, one of the women, Ashley Rodriguez, a coach at a school in Benbrook, confided she thought she might be pregnant. Off to Walgreens they went for pregnancy tests. “Ashley peed on three of them, and I peed on two of them,” Sunny says. “For control.” Back home, Sunny didn’t wait on confirmation from the official test results, calling the office of Rodriguez’s physician, providing a correct full name and birthdate, and learning the results. Rodriguez’ soonto-be 6-year-old son is so far the lone offspring of the group. The group – today living in Corpus Christi, Benbrook, Waco, New Braunfels, and Granbury –includes four coaches who’ve been able to provide quick support to Sunny, group-texting on concussion symptoms after one of her most recent falls.
The trips have become more difficult to execute with their more complicated lives, but Sunny’s illness has helped keep them together. “We don’t know if we’re going to have two years with her, or eight years,” Rodriguez says. “Seeing her slow down, that let us know we have to be there.”
Through it all, Sunny has continued to throw humor and candor at her disease. “I know I promised more fun, upbeat posts, but, y’all, this is serious: I am losing my shoulders,” Sunny wrote on her Wordpress blog, Sunnystrong, in early June.
That gave way to an honest update: “I used to have strong,
muscle-filled shoulders; they could lift weights, push girls around in the paint, and pop to smack a softball,” wrote Sunny, who played every sport in Hico, where she says “everybody played everything or they wouldn’t have enough people.”
To anybody who didn’t know the story, Sunny reminded readers she noticed something was wrong in early 2013 when she experienced muscle weakness.
“Thankfully, there are some constants,” she added. “My sisters and I always take ridiculous pictures together.” Her 28-year-old twin sisters Casey and Carlie live in Dallas and Lampasas. “I will always find a way to hug those I love, with or without shoulders. Muscle atrophy is a harsh, ever-present reality of ALS. I’ll try to make sure my straps are pretty, since we’re all going to be looking at them.”
Sunny’s honesty surprises no one who knows her. “You want honesty, you go to Sunny,” says Kacy Railsback, another Tarleton graduate and member of the girls' group.
banquet whose father had died of ALS and who cut up the steak on her plate. “Switch!” she said, giving her plate to Sunny. Massages relieve. She got a deep massage on her honeymoon and slept for the next seven hours. “It’s like a full-body workout.”
Her mother worries and is grateful for Sunny’s husband. “I worry about her all the time,” Jackson said during a recent break from work to entertain a guest at the bank, 90 minutes from Fort Worth. “I worry about her any time the phone rings.” Jackson needs to work full-time, or she’d be spending much more time with her daughter. “If I wasn’t working here, I’d be up there helping as much as I can.”
“Hope is not just stopping this. It’s reversing it. It’s better quality of life. Hope is having kids. I can’t imagine life without being a mom.”
– Sunny Brous Erasmus
That Sunny has made her journey so public has been a source of inspiration for Fort Worth’s young professionals, says Marilyn Gilbert, executive vice president of marketing for the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, Sunny’s chamber mentor in the Vision Fort Worth program. One of Sunny's speeches was in August last year to a Vision group.
“It’s really informed this group of young people,” Gilbert says. “Not everybody would do that. A lot of them would just want to be private about it and go on. She’s a leader.”
Gilbert’s first meeting with Sunny was over lunch the day after her diagnosis, and Sunny’s demeanor was striking. “She was realistic, yet at the same time she was optimistic,” Gilbert says. “She was upbeat.”
Constant Cramping It’s well past lunch at the El Fenix, and Sunny’s contemplating how she’s going to feel when she gets up. “My muscles are constantly in a state of cramping,” she says. Sunny has to take care to stay hydrated throughout the day to deal with the charley horses.
She’s not cramping now. “But it’ll be really hard to stand up in a minute,” she says. “My mind still thinks I’m an athlete. I’m really stiff after sitting for awhile. Sitting for long periods of time is just as detrimental as standing. When I stand up, I have to stretch to make sure I’m balanced.” The muscle tightness is where the falls – 15 or 20, she estimates – happen. And because she has no strength in her upper extremities, she can’t grab anything or push off to prevent the fall. “Whatever is solid, that hits. It’s usually my face.”
She orders food she doesn’t have to cut. She improvises at banquets. People who’ve been around her know to help, and Sunny’s not shy about asking. Like the friend sitting next to her at one
Sunny’s path to diagnosis was long. Playing first base in a softball intramural tournament in April 2013, “I went to close my glove and couldn’t,” she says. She was having difficulty pushing herself up out of the tub, one of her refuges. Six months later, while working in her job as assistant director of housing at Weatherford College, she threw her back out. “Pain motivates,” she says. She had twitching in a ring finger and weakness in her upper body.
That began a year of tests. A sports therapist looked for nerve damage, a spine specialist for degenerative disc. Finally, a pain specialist asked what her pain level was. “Three,” Sunny responded. “And you're 2.5 of it because your office isn't where Google Maps said it was.” The physician sent her back to her primary care doctor, telling her she needed to start over.
At about the same time, Sunny switched jobs, moving to Junior Achievement, where she’d volunteered for two years. JA helps apply school teaching to workforce needs. In middle school, students explore finances and careers. In high school, students learn how to develop companies and soft skills necessary to compete in the workforce. Sunny runs five bowlathons and two golf tournaments annually, raising money toward the annual $1.2 million budget. She also occasionally teaches. “My niche is second grade,” where JA talks about jobs and personal finance skills like calculating income tax. “We are the same maturity level and enjoy all the same jokes.”
Sunny’s physician next ruled out rheumatoid arthritis and lupus and sent her to a neurologist. “That was the start that it was a neuro issue,” she says. Her neurologist narrowed the possibilities to ALS or another condition that presents the same way, but is curable.
In January 2015, Sunny arrived alone at her neurologist’s office, believing she was in for another referral. “I’d been doing this for a whole year and a half,” she says.
Instead, her physician delivered the diagnosis and told her she had three things to think about: Did she want a second opinion? Did she want to try an expensive drug Riluzole? And did she want to consider clinical trials?
Sunny drove home, got into her pajamas, and called her long-
time friend, Dawn Kahlden, who she worked with at Weatherford College, where Kahlden is director of special populations. Kahlden brought over a cheese ball, tub of Cool Whip, bottle of wine and one beer. “She was bawling; I couldn’t understand her,” Kahlden says. “I ran home, grabbed whatever I could find. It must have been before payday.” The two, eschewing the neurologist's advice, read up on ALS on Kahlden’s iPad. Two to five years’ life expectancy, with some patients living longer, they read. “Well, that’s not going to be me,” Sunny said of the short end of the stick. “No,” Kahlden replied, “you’re a little more stubborn.”
“We read, took a shot to take the edge off, and read more,” recalls Sunny, who called in sick to her office. “I said it’s ALS, I’ll be in tomorrow, and we’ll take it from there."
met through an online site and went bowling on their first date in November 2015 to Main Event in Fort Worth. “They had to put up the bumpers for me,” she says. She didn’t confide her disease then. “I couldn’t drop the ALS bomb on the first date,” she says. Sunny did, however, return texts from two girlfriends to say she was enjoying herself, a mutual protection tactic they’d deployed previously to bail out of bad dates. “I told Kenneth I have to respond, or they will show up,” she says.
“I couldn’t drop the ALS bomb on the first date.”
– Sunny Brous Erasmus
From the reading, Sunny learned the hot baths she thought she was enjoying were instead triggering muscle fatigue. Then it was time to revisit her neurologist’s three questions. Did she want a second opinion? “Do I want to go through all that again?” Sunny says. She went through testing again over two appointments, starting with blood work. “I didn’t realize I had that much blood in my body, much less that you can take it and let me walk out of there,” she says. Then came an electromyogram test, which measures electrical activity and reaction time in muscles. Small electrodes are placed on the skin and around the fingers, and brief shocks are delivered. In the second half of the test, small pins are inserted into the muscles, and the patient is asked to contract muscles. “The test is very interpretive, so every doctor wants to do their own,” she says. Finally, she had a spinal tap to rule out another disease. The diagnosis came back ALS again. She opted for the Riluzole treatment. And she participated in a clinical trial, even though the drug was already available off label use, meaning it could be prescribed for treatment not included in the government's approved label. “I wanted to contribute to science,” she says.
Her employer’s insurance coverage has meant she pays $75 per month for the fistful of prescription medications she takes. She hasn’t determined whether the insurance will cover the new medication that’s coming out in August. “I don’t know how that’s going to pan out,” she says.
God’s Plan for Sunny At the El Fenix, the interview has gone well past the what-happened-and-when questions. Sunny grew up Baptist, but wasn’t regularly attending church before she met her husband, whose father is a deacon at Ridglea Baptist Church in Fort Worth. Sunny talks a lot about God in her blog posts.
What is God’s plan for Sunny? “I absolutely have no idea,” she says, taking another sip of her Dr Pepper on the table in front of her. “But I trust him explicitly. It’s one of the few areas in life where I’m able to pass control. I don’t need to know the answer. I have peace knowing that he is in control.”
She believes God put her future husband in her path. The two
ALS came out the next day on their second date, over breakfast. “This is going to get worse before it gets better, and better is death,” Sunny said.
It had occurred to Kenneth Erasmus the previous day that Sunny was a bad bowler, but he suspected nothing else. “I could tell she was getting tired, but she wouldn’t give up,” says Erasmus, a golf pro and service adviser for a luxury car dealership in Fort Worth. And he’d already sensed the girlfriends, noticing her online dating profile was covered with pictures of her and friends.
The two married on a golf course in November last year, but not before Sunny’s friends beat a path to Kenneth – "every single one of them, and that's a lot," he says – to tell him he had to stick with her. “You’ve got to be in this for the long haul, or 500 of us will come break your legs, and we will kill you,” Kahlden recalls telling Sunny’s fiancée. “We had her back. I think she was expecting it.”
During Sunny’s bachelorette party, which started with manicures and pedicures, and then moved to Rahr Brewing on the Near Southside, Los Vaqueros in the Stockyards, Pete’s Dueling Piano Bar downtown, and the Capital Bar in West Seventh, Sunny fell in the street while trying to get into an Uber ride. The driver thought she was drunk. “What do you need?” Kahlden asked Sunny, who said, “I need you to pick my ass up and put me in this car.”
Erasmus thinks he knows what God’s plan is for Sunny. “Just to be a role model to friends and family, be an inspiration to those around her,” he says. “Whatever happens, she believes there’s a purpose behind it. She would give you the shirt off her back before she thinks of herself.”
Sunny helped prepare her friends for what’s ahead, sending out an Evite locally, inviting them to a showing of the 2016 documentary “Gleason,” about the former New Orleans Saints football player Steve Gleason, who was diagnosed with ALS at 34. He’s 40 today and has established a foundation to provide advanced technology and equipment to people with neuromuscular diseases. A power outage shut the showing down, but Kahlden saw it later. “I don’t know I could have handled watching it with Sunny,” she says.
Sunny and her husband bought a home in West Fort Worth this spring, moving out of Sunny’s apartment, but taking care to ensure they can make the payments on Kenneth Erasmus' income. Junior Achievement helped Sunny obtain voice software that's recording a database of her speech and will speak for her one day – “I can say fuck across the room in my own voice," she says – and arrange her
schedule for efficiency. The couple isn't sure about insurance if Sunny can no longer work. “We're starting to look at that,” Kenneth Erasmus says. They talk about having children. ALS is rarely passed along genetically, but they’re waiting to see how the disease progresses. “I don’t want to inflict the burden of parenthood and caring for me fulltime on another person if I’m not going to be around to help,” Sunny says. In the meantime, she enjoys other people’s kids, like her nephew Peyton and Kahlden’s fourth-grade son Hudson and thirdgrade daughter Quinn, who routinely vacuumed Sunny’s apartment with a Dustbuster.
What’s Up, Doc? Sunny’s regular doctor appointments today include quarterly “clinics” with her healthcare team and other ALS patients. They meet in an infusion suite at Texas Neurology in Dallas, which diagnosed Sunny. Patients and guests – they’re each allowed two, and Sunny has a waiting list – sit in a circle, and their physicians and other team members rotate. Some patients have died since Sunny began attending the clinics.
Her dietician tells her she needs to keep taking in calories and can’t lose or gain too much weight – five pounds either direction of her base weight. At some point, if she loses too much weight or can’t swallow, she’ll have to consider a feeding tube. “He said, ‘you’ll know,’” says Sunny, who gets a milkshake on the way home from work when her daily calorie intake isn't high enough to maintain energy.
Her speech therapist looks for regression in her speech and warns Sunny against overusing muscles related to swallowing. This could be a tough one for Sunny. “I don’t know if you notice, but Sunny talks a lot,” says her mother, who named her daughter Sunny because it seemed appropriate.
Sunny’s occupational therapist trains her in minimizing exertion and maximizing efficiency and runs hand-and-thumb strength tests. She coaches her to sit back to conserve trunk strength and build in rest if she’s on her feet for a long period.
Sunny's physical therapist teaches her to engage muscles be-
fore standing. Sunny has trouble reaching and pulling and getting dressed. Her medications include pills to control cramps. Sunny typically doesn’t sleep well, so she uses Ambien to help.
In April, she posted about having read the bestseller “Tuesdays with Morrie,” about author Mitch Albom’s relationship with an old college professor dying of ALS. Some of Albom’s takeaways that Sunny highlighted:
“Why suffer in front of so many people? Stay at home. Get your affairs in order. But the idea of quitting did not occur to Morrie.”
“Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.”
“I may be dying, but I am surrounded by loving, caring souls. How many people can say that?”
“I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life.”
“Sunny will always find the positive and the brightest. The silver lining,” Kahlden says. “She’s defied the odds. She’s already moved slower than they thought it would.”
Gerald Alley grew up with little, but he ended up going to college, earning an MBA, and founding one of the nation’s largest minority-owned construction contractors. Where he started: lessons from mom and dad.
BY SCOTT NISHIMURA / PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER ROBBINS
Gerald Alley could have written a book off of lessons he and his siblings learned from their father, who owned an Esso station in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and mother, an educator who preached to her kids the way to a life was through learning.
Lesson one from his father, Troy, Alley says: “I’m going to provide for everything you need, but I’m going to be able to provide very few things you want.”
Lesson two: “You don’t spend money you don’t have.” And three: “Make sure you have enough. Make sure you have enough cash.”
“We always wondered why we didn’t drive new cars,” Alley says. “He’d say, ‘Our job isn’t to drive around in the best cars. Our job is to fix cars.’”
And Gladys Alley? “My mother was all about college,” Alley says. “My father’s motto was to work hard. Hers was to get educated.” Gladys Alley attended a private college, Philander Smith College, a historic black college in Little Rock. The Alleys’ service station was across the street from a black college that later became the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.
“Most African-Americans [in the town] were exposed to picking cotton and working in the field,” Alley says. “We were exposed to teachers. We were not at the same level as whites, but we were at the same level of expectations. My brother was good at math. My mother would say, ‘Don’t you want to be an engineer?’” His
brother attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. “Mom said I should go to Fayetteville. I went to Fayetteville.”
And later, when Alley called home to tell his mother he wasn’t enjoying his first job working on the management track for a major retailer in Dallas, Gladys Alley told her son he needed to pursue a graduate degree; Alley earned an MBA from Southern Methodist University after he presented a life’s business plan to the admissions director for what he’d do to give back to the university if the business school let him in.
The messages stuck. Alley, 64, became a consultant in Fort Worth who helped minority-owned businesses better position themselves for city contracts. When his own city contract dried up, he launched his own construction firm in the early 1980s, focusing first on restaurants, and then running a string of increasingly more ambitious projects in retail, office, medical, dot. com, distribution and hospitality. Today, nearly four decades later, Alley’s Con-Real, a construction and real estate company whose headquarters are in a strip shopping center in North Arlington, is one of the nation’s largest minority-owned contractors. And its next bite of the apple: it’s in partnership with Manhattan Construction Co. to build the giant $250 million Texas Live! entertainment complex in Arlington.
It’s a hat Alley proudly, but modestly, wears, and one whose dings and dents go back to the stories he tells of his childhood. Con-Real calls itself “a local firm with global reach,” a threshhold Alley was
initially reluctant to approach. These days, Alley and his wife of 31 years, Candace, have been passing lessons of the same sort on to their own three children. And Alley, at the same time he continues to build the business he owns with his brother, Troy, and a longtime partner, Joseph Breedlove, is working on setting the company up for the next generation of owners, who eventually will take the company on. He’s stopped saying “it has to be an Alley” who does that. “Our goal is to make sure the next generation of leaders for Con-Real takes the same principles my father and mother had,” Alley says. “Get up early, stay late, have an impact and keep learning.”
What a Dad Can Teach Alley’s father grew up in a small town between Little Rock and Memphis, left home at 16, hopped a train, and came to Pine Bluff in search of opportunity. He went to vocational school and became a mechanic, going to work for the Esso station across the street from Arkansas AM&N, the black liberal arts college that later became the University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff. “His goal was to have a business,” says Alley, the youngest of five siblings; his brother Troy is a partner in Con-Real and runs its real estate services side. Their father bought the gas station soon after he started working for it, then the building and other small pieces of real estate around it, becoming landlord to numerous other businesses, including a popular ice cream shop. Gladys Alley, who earned a graduate degree at the University
of Kansas after Philander Smith, stayed at home with the couple’s five children, volunteering at the polling booth and Scouts, and working at the Esso. Forty-seven years after he bought the station, Troy Alley died at age 69. Through a land swap, his family provided the real estate that the university built the Troy and Gladys Alley Information and Public Safety Center on.
The Alleys lived in a three-bedroom shotgun in a mostly black neighborhood near the university and the gas station. “The boys were in one bedroom, the girls in one bedroom,” Alley says.
At the Esso, their father wore a white coat to serve customers. He quickly bought into technology, buying electric gas pumps in 1936. “He would buy manuals, because he wanted to know how the cars worked,” Alley says. “He offered credit to anybody that needed it, because he needed the customers.” At age 9 – “maybe I was 7” – Alley began working in the station, wiping the cars down and cleaning oil cans. By the 11th grade, Alley was doing the books and running the station while his dad worked on customers’ cars. The station employed two to three people at any given time, plus the Alley children. “He had to pay Esso in cash to buy gas,” Alley says. “We understood the models of business very quickly.”
When the siblings got around to asking their father what wages he would pay them for working at the station, “he said, put your
hours down.” Then he had them deduct expenses of living at home, including rent, food, and laundry. “He gave whatever he felt he could give,” Alley says of what he and his siblings received for working. “He’d say, make sure other people get paid before you get paid.” One night, Alley promised his friends he’d attend a high school dance with them, but he got caught up helping his dad at the station. “My dad was working on a carburetor,” he says. “He said, ‘If I don’t fix this carburetor, we don’t eat tonight.’ So I asked, ‘What tool do we need?’ I didn’t go to the dance.”
When Troy and Gladys Alley began buying real estate around the station and university, becoming landlords to the ice cream stand, shoe shop and grocery store, they didn’t tell their kids, who figured it out. “Dad told us, never ask them for anything,” Alley says. “We got ice cream at home.”
But then tensions ignited in 1957 over Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus’ use of National Guard troops to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High School after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision struck down segregation in public schools. “When Little Rock Central High School happened, I became sensitive to it,” he says. He grew up during the era of Jim Crow laws, meant to keep whites and blacks separate, but wasn’t largely aware of their significance.
“We didn’t ride the bus; Dad drove us downtown,” he says. “At the movies, we had to go up in the balcony, but as a kid, we thought it was kind of cool.” Then Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and riots broke out in Pine Bluff. Alley remembers the TV coverage. “That was the first time I ever saw Pine Bluff on a map,” he says.
“Most AfricanAmericans [in the town] were exposed to picking cotton and working in the field. We were exposed to teachers.”
– Gerald Alley
Alley and his siblings grew up during the burgeoning 1960s civil rights unrest, but “it wasn’t tense” in their black community, where black business owners did business with other blacks, he says. “We saw our community as our community,” he says. “It was a very segregated city. We were used to seeing entrepreneurship in our own community.”
In his senior year in high school, Alley wrote he wanted to run a big business in the yearbook. During his first year at the University of Arkansas, Alley recalls he usually was the only black in class; blacks numbered 120 of the 12,00013,000 students at the university. “By my senior year, the student body elected a black president, and I was elected to the student senate representing off-campus students.” His parents kept up the same messages with their children. “You need to work hard,” his father said. “White people who didn’t like him – he didn’t get hung up with what they thought. My dad would say, ‘Go make the change.’”
Alley recalls he was a mostly C student in
high school. By his second year at Arkansas, things weren’t better. “My dad came and said, ‘You’re wasting my money,’ ” and threatened to pull his son out of school. Alley got a work-study job that included closing out the student union at nights. “Working in the student union, you had dead time,” he says. He pulled his grades up by his junior year. As a senior finance major, Alley took a retail elective and caught a break when the president of the retailer Sanger Harris came for a guest lecture.
Getting His MBA Alley took the opportunity to ask how many of the company’s buyers were black. None, came the answer. “What percentage of your market is black?” Alley asked. The executive didn’t know. “How do you communicate with your market?” Alley asked. Two days later, he received a letter from Sanger Harris, offering to fly him to Dallas for a job interview for a position in the company’s management program. First, they put him in the toy department at the downtown Dallas store. Then the company moved him to men’s. “I hated it,” he says. “A month later, I called my mom and said I needed another job.” She said, ‘You need graduate school.’”
He applied to the MBA programs at North Texas State University, Texas A&M, and East Texas State. SMU occurred to him, and he walked in, unannounced, to the admissions director, who told him the program liked a certain number of years of experience and reminded him SMU “is not an inexpensive school.” Alley replied he didn’t have any money and told the director SMU would not become a prominent business school without embracing diversity.
“It’s easy to take rich kids,” Alley, demonstrating his sales chops, told the director, promising he’d write a business plan detailing how he was going to go back and give back to the school. Two months later, Alley received a letter from SMU informing him he was accepted and offering a scholarship plan, more money than he’d been making at a previous job. “I went back and accepted it right there,” before the university had even seen his GMAT admissions test scores,
he says. Just 20 when he graduated Arkansas, Alley was 21 when he entered SMU. His intent: to quit work and study fulltime. He saw no path for blacks in Sanger Harris anyway. But the Sanger Harris president wouldn’t let him go and instead sent him to work for the vice president of personnel, exploring employee turnover among blacks. Alley worked fulltime while studying fulltime for his MBA. He also talked SMU into considering his brother, Troy, who was working in real estate in Washington, D.C., for the MBA program.
After SMU, Alley first went to work for a consulting firm in Dallas, then was recruited to consult small business owners in Fort Worth. Alley went to the City of Fort Worth and put in a bid for a contract to operate as a consultant to small contractors applying for jobs at the city. He won a $62,000 contract. “I was getting paid $20,000 where I was working,” he said. He paid himself $8,000 and budgeted money for another consultant, secretary and rent. After the fourth year, the city didn’t renew the contract. “I said for four years, we’ve been telling contractors what to do; we need to be contractors.” He went into the construction business in 1981 with a partner. Alley focused on pitching fast-food restaurants, even though he’d never built one. “Their name recognition will help lift us up,” he says. He contacted McDonald’s and was turned away. Then he pitched the regional office of Taco Bell. “He said, ‘Why would I let you build a Taco Bell?’ ” But Alley got one piece of important information for his trouble: where Taco Bell was building restaurants in the region. Visiting a construction site, he learned who the subcontractors were and that they tended to follow the general contractor from job to job. Then he pitched a job to build a fast-food restaurant in south Dallas. He was the low bidder and won the job. “Ditch Witch came up,” he says. He didn’t know what that was. “I told all the subs, you’ve got to tell me how to build this thing. And every Friday, I will buy beer and pizza.” He was late finishing the project and lost money on it. But that put him into the game. Soon, he learned the
concept of putting his fee at risk, seeking a bonus on one job for every day he was ahead of schedule. “We shared the bonus with the superintendent,” he says. “We got to where we could build a Burger King from start to selling hamburgers in 51 days.”
Then Alley caught another break, in a roundabout way. He’d been building restaurants for $250,000, but restaurant developers overbuilt. “We hit a wall,” he says. With five years under his belt and a record, some wanted him to do jobs nationally, but “I didn’t have the management span. I couldn’t do that in Tallahassee.”
He heard the developer of the City Place office tower near downtown Dallas was going up for bid. “They needed a local partner, and I came up,” he says. Con-Real landed a $3.5 million piece – building four eightstory garages – of a $12 million project. It was the company’s first joint venture and signaled “you’re in the big times. This is not a restaurant.”
Con-Real next ripped off a string of projects in the mid-1980s, including Lone Star Park at Grand Prairie, retail stores, schools
and other public facilities, grocery stores, and medical office.
Big Hit: Psychiatric Hospital The company took a big bruising in 1989, when it signed on as the general contractor to renovate a psychiatric hospital in Waco for the federal government. The $12 million project took 18 months and was mired in paperwork in a dispute over cash flow. “We weren’t getting paid for the delays,” Alley says. “We finally settled the claims, but the damage was done. That’s why we were hesitant on doing major projects.” The project took Con-Real out of its bread-and-butter retail market. “It shook our organization.”
But the experience reinforced what Alley already knew. “We had always had a high level of cash,” he says. “We hoarded the money, so we were able. It was heartwrenching. We lost a lot of equity.”
His attorney suggested Alley consider bankruptcy, but he declined. “If we’d been operating in the margins, that would have taken us out,” he says. “You don’t become a business until you get hit. You have to be prepared for the tough days.”
The company moved into real estate services to diversify. It also moved into the dot.com segment when that was riding high, doing projects for AMD, Texas Instruments, and Intel. With those clients, the company started putting itself more at-risk, with arrangements that rewarded it for performance. “Even though it’s at risk, it’s a more controlled risk,” he says. “It allows you to have inputs.”
to do what it been reluctant to do: build projects nationally. Con-Real offered to take over the construction process for clients. In one case, he shaved the number of subcontractors to three from 20. Alley figured out he could build nationally for clients with little infrastructure. “All we need is a travel superintendent and a technology base.”
Going National With Wachovia Having figured out how to go national, Alley and Con-Real were presented with a new major challenge: renovating 250 bank branches for Wachovia, the North Carolina banking company that had acquired another bank. “They wanted a single contractor that could do the whole project,” he says. Wachovia’s other criteria: none of the branches could close during the renovations, and Con-Real had to complete planning, design, and construction within nine months. Con-Real figured it could do the job with 75 superintendents and 30 project managers, but kept pushing Wachovia to break the deal up into smaller contracts like 75 bank branches. Wachovia said no. A friend of Alley’s told him, “Don’t go for the concession prize when the real prize is on the table.”
“I called my mom and said I needed another job. She said, ‘You need graduate school.’ ”
– Gerald Alley
Alley bid the $50 million contract. Wachovia subsequently invited ConReal to travel to North Carolina for a presentation. Alley instead brought 14 key people, each with part of the presentation.
“We had janitors clean up each night after the day’s work,” Alley says. “We had a vendor take cookies to the tellers [with notes that read, excuse our mess].” Con-Real also blew away Wachovia’s goal for minority participation in the project. And Con-Real brought the project in on time. “It turned into a $73 million project.”
The 2008 recession was approaching, and Alley ensured he got fully paid by asking Wachovia to bring in an audit team. ConReal got paid, and, soon after, Wachovia failed. “Was that luck, or was that God?” Alley says. “We did a project that size; we considered ourselves big-game hunters.”
Big Prize:
In the 1990s, the company – then at 40 employees – took its next major shift, making deals to design and build distribution centers in Dallas and Houston, working for clients such as Frito-Lay. “A guy said, I thought you were in the semiconductor business,” Alley says. “I said, we’re still in the chip business. Just corn chips.”
Distribution clients then asked Con-Real
Wachovia had a policy against taking first-time vendors at the size of the contract, but Alley pressed ahead. Wachovia was still hesitant. Alley reduced his fee by 25 percent, but negotiated several bonuses related to service satisfaction. Those included promises that the branches would never open dirty during the work, and the offices would not close during construction. Moreover, Con-Real would earn bonus points from periodic satisfaction surveys it sent to the branch personnel during construction.
It’s a warm and humid morning in mid-June, and Alley’s just flown in from a business trip to Atlanta the night before for a photo shoot at the Texas Live! site. He’s making small talk with Wesley Weaver, a Manhattan Construction vice president and its project director or the Texas Live! construction. Crews are digging the piers. “Nobody really appreciates all the stuff that goes underground,” Alley said.
Alley’s expertise in hospitality and conference centers, and his local relationships and ability to draw area contractors
into the project, made sense to Manhattan, Weaver said. Manhattan today has only two other joint ventures in progress: an eightyear project to renovate Dallas/Fort Worth Airport’s terminals B and E and a contract with Dallas County to renovate the Old Dallas County Criminal Courts Building, the Dallas County Records Building, and the Records Building Annex.
“Everybody had different connections and different relationships, so it makes sense to pool all of those relationships,” said Weaver, who’s worked for Manhattan 18 years. “It’s an opportunity to help Gerald and Gerald’s people grow, and it’ll be a good opportunity for some of my guys to learn from his teams.”
Arlington's mayor, Jeff Williams, also likes the potential of the Manhattan/ConReal joint venture. It's “an excellent example of how local and minority and womenowned businesses are being included.”
For Con-Real, Texas Live! represents the company’s most recent “paradigm shift,” as Alley calls them, came from its pursuit of contracts to the construction of AT&T Stadium. “We supported the [sales tax] vote, we bid, we didn’t get it,” Alley says.
But he began looking for sites to buy in Arlington for a hotel that could trade off
of the stadium. Alley joined the Arlington Convention and Visitors Bureau to better understand the market and today serves on its board of directors. Con-Real went into a partnership that designed, developed, built, and operated the Hilton Garden Inn on Lamar Boulevard in North Arlington.
The big prize emerged early last year, when Alley heard talk that a developer – The Cordish Cos. – wanted to build a big project around Globe Life Park. Alley contacted Williams, the mayor, who recommended Alley reach out to Cordish.
Alley reached out to the company, which invited Alley to visit the company’s headquarters in Maryland. During a three-hour meeting, Cordish’s principals asked Alley what his interests were in the $250 million project. “I said I want to be an owner,” he says. “They said no. I can always come down, but I can’t go back up. They asked me if I wanted to do it myself. I said no.”
Cordish’s principals suggested Alley contact the other primary contractors who were bidding on the project; Alley and ConReal landed the joint venture, with the $50 million conference center as its own piece.
Today, Con-Real, which has 40 employees and whose bread-and-butter projects are $10, $25 and $30 million deals, helps other
minority-owned contractors. “We lead by example,” Alley says. “If you fall behind, realize it and get it in gear.”
Giving Back As an Arkansas alumnus, Alley says he didn’t maintain significant contact with the university for years.
“Then in 2000, one guy called me from the university,” he says. “He asked me to come back” and help the business school. “I said, ‘How many black students do you have in the business school?’ ” Alley says. He agreed to support initiatives that helped black students, then eventually to serve on the business school’s board.
His family created the Gladys and Troy Alley Scholarship for minority students with financial need. It throws off $2,000$4,000 in scholarship money per year, and has $100,000 in the fund, from the Alley family, Alley says. Alley also helped launch the Alley Scholars Summit, a series of lectures at Arkansas, SMU, and 16 other colleges. Alley supports an engineering program at Arkansas, and he also contributed $100,000 to the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. Con-Real has also built on the two Arkansas campuses, projects that include a STEM building at Pine Bluff and library at the Fayetteville campus.
The Alley family’s business prowess has rubbed off on Alley’s three children. Gina Alley is a senior assistant city manager for the city of Grand Prairie. Stephanie Alley, a cello player, is working on her master's degree at the University of North Texas in music education.
Son Byron, a junior at Arkansas, has already launched his first company: a commuter bus service called Hog Ride that moves Razorback students between Fayetteville and North Texas for special events, spring break, and football games, selling seats for $99 roundtrip. An estimated 40 percent of Hog students are from North Texas. Byron Alley established partnerships with bus companies and manages bookings and the business over mobile apps. The 53-passenger buses break even at only 27 seats sold, Alley says proudly. “He’s always liked transportation.”
Tiffany Cason, Fort Worth girl, moves quickly and becomes one of the DFW region’s top bankers –taking over the Dallas market for Capital One Bank this year. And she isn’t 40 yet.
BY TERESA VONDER HAAR PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX LEPE
It may be trite, heck, it may even sound sexist, but sometimes, you can tell the character of a woman by her handbag. In the case of Tiffany Cason, it was a large, light green leather satchel with one word on its catch: TOMS. The shoe and apparel company TOMS, founded by the Arlington native Blake Mycoskie, was built on a social good/business philosophy that seems to also guide Cason in her daily life. But she’s a banker.
The self-professed “Fort Worth girl” is a rising star in the DFW banking scene, recently taking over the helm of Dallas market president for Capital One in Texas, one of the major markets in the country for the bank. In 2016, Cason was named to the Top 40 under 40 in Fort Worth by the Fort Worth Business Press and again this year in Dallas by the Dallas Business Journal.
How did the beaming 38-year-old, born in Waco and reared in Fort Worth, rise so quickly through the ranks? She started with good genes. Cason’s mother, Cheryl Isom, was a banker for 13 years, mostly in Fort Worth, rising to branch manager of one of the first branches in the city with Texas American Bank (formerly Fort Worth National), then onto vice president at Equitable Bank.
“I always had a great role model in her,” Cason said. “She was a woman in banking and a woman in business. She was phenomenally inspirational. I didn’t know there was another option besides going into business — it was installed in me early.”
Isom said Cason was always good at math while attending All Saints Episcopal School in Fort Worth from kindergarten through 12th grade. But it was her ability to reason that really caught her mother’s attention.
“In banking, you have to have both math and reasoning,” she said. Cason also has a financially savvy side. As salutatorian of her class at All Saints, Cason received offers from colleges in and out of state, but she said she chose Baylor for a very practical reason. “They gave me the most money,” she said with a smile, but also noting she is in her family’s third generation as a Baylor Bear.
Cason graduated in Baylor’s business honors program with a finance/ marketing degree and a minor in corporate communications. A decade later, she augmented that with an executive MBA from Pepperdine University.
“I was attracted to Pepperdine’s MBA program because it was based on the concept of ‘servant/leadership,’” she said. “It’s not exactly the opposite of command/control, but it teaches that in order to lead you have
to serve others. I can really appreciate that. It helped in formulating what kind of leader I wanted to be.”
Brought up in a household that routinely volunteered, Cason said it was instilled at an early age to give back. “When you are able to marry volunteering with work — it doesn’t get much better than that,” she said.
Those who know Cason are quick to highlight her genuinely good nature. “It’s rare to find a combination of drive, a need for results and iron-clad integrity, all in one package,” said Robert J. “Bobby” McGee, Cason’s first boss at KBK Financial in downtown Fort Worth. McGee now is chairman and CEO of U.S. Growth Funds in Fort Worth.
Their paths crossed initially just by her reputation at Trinity Episcopal School, said McGee. “She was several years above my eldest at school, but her reputation was well-known,” he said. “She was a standout young lady from that time on in her life.”
A chance benefit dinner brought McGee and Cason’s mother to the same table just as Cason was finishing her undergraduate education. Isom took the opportunity to talk up her daughter, and by the end of the night, McGee was sold, handing Isom his card and telling Cason to give him a call.
“She had several offers — there was a track for college graduates in banking she could have taken that would have been the safe and easy way,” Isom said. “But Bobby gave her an opportunity she couldn’t have had in any other place. It catapulted her career.”
KBK Financial focused as an equity partner in management buyouts, investor in debt of companies led by private equity firms and a provider of capital directly to private and small public companies. Cason was immediately thrown into training to be a loan officer, which entailed 50-page report write-ups and presenting cases before a committee in oral arguments.
McGee said he was instantly impressed with Cason’s writing skill and ability to defend her work before a seasoned loan committee at such a young age, but it was her intellectual honesty that really set her apart. “She
“I’m a natural extrovert, and I like to talk to people and understand where they are coming from, understand what they want to do, hear them out, understand where they want to go and ultimately help try to provide solutions for them. I enjoy helping clients. It’s more about strategy than product.”
TIFFANY CASON .
established a remarkably high level of trust with her colleagues,” he said, that translated into a “stabilizing force” at the company.
For Cason, the job was love at first sight. “It was an intriguing, outside-of-the box way of doing commercial banking. An amazing training ground,” she said. “I found a true passion for what I did. I was so blessed to have a number of mentors at that company.”
Cason didn’t plan on becoming a salesperson in banking, but the job fit her personality well. “I’m a natural extrovert, and I like to talk to people and understand where they are coming from, understand what they want to do, hear them out, understand where they want to go and ultimately help try to provide solutions for them,” she said. “I enjoy helping clients. It’s more about strategy than product.”
And as a special side benefit, Cason said she gets to sit down with the movers and shakers of Fort Worth, and now Dallas. “I get to be in front of some of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever met and solve for something I can help them try to do,” she said.
From KBK, Cason moved to Wachovia, BBVA Compass, and then to Capital One, where she rose to the level of market president of Fort Worth. “I knew a leader at Capital One, and she called me and asked if we could have a cup of coffee,” Cason said. “From there, I met the head of the state for Capital One, Kent Eastman. His vision for where he wanted to take the State of Texas coupled with the fact that the bank is founder led made the offer very attractive.”
Cason was immediately drawn to the bank’s motto, “Changing Banking for Good,” and its two pillars of business, “Excellence” and “Do the Right Thing.”
“It’s a top-down approach in Capital One’s culture,” she said. “We are trying to live by our pillars in everything we do. A lot of companies have good intentions. I happen to be lucky enough to be with one that is living by it. It’s been fantastic.”
In February, Cason was named president of the Dallas market, while continuing her role as the commercial executive in charge of middle market banking for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
The team lead by Cason serves North Texas companies with incomes from $10 million to $500 million, Cason said.
“Here’s what I love about the middle market — you get to talk to the CEOs and senior level staff who have built or bought their company and maybe are struggling on where they want to go,” she said. “You can offer them a solution. It’s rarely cut and dry.”
Cason admits some companies are just looking for the lowest rate from banks on their loans. “But the best companies value the advising nature of what we do, helping them create a strategy versus just rate shopping,” she said. “The best bankers take time to study their craft and study their client’s business and industry so they can think about options and solutions.”
On Capital One’s philanthropic side, the bank has committed $150 million over five years to Future Edge, a program to help Americans, especially youth, better succeed in the digital age, Cason said.
The bank also partners with Junior Achievement. Recently, Cason taught a course on budgeting to a group of juniors and seniors at Eastern Hills High School. “They were an incredible group of selfmotivated, eager-to-learn students, and I walked away very impressed with their budgeting choices and decision-making process,” she said.
though Cason moved on to other banking jobs, McGee has kept in touch. Recently, he sponsored Cason’s nomination onto the Davey O’Brien Foundation board, where he is president. The foundation honors a college football quarterback and provides a $30,000 scholarship to a local high school senior annually in the name of the beloved TCU quarterback.
“A lot of people wanted her on the board,” he said. “She can dif-
fuse any issue with charm and grace and laser beam focus.”
It also helps that she loves football, especially the Cowboys. “I am pretty sure the Dallas Cowboys are in my DNA,” she laughs. “I’ve been cheering for America’s Team for as long as I can remember. It stems from a long family history of riding the good and not-sogood times with the team.”
Connecting community needs with those with the means to help is a special talent of Cason’s. She would argue that the people who can help need the outlet as much as those in need.
“I very intentionally try to network the right people to the organization — clients, colleagues, my circle of influence,” she said. “I do my best to listen to the needs of the organization, then network the right people in to help. It is a crucial component of what we try to do. For me, it’s trying to make sure I’m working the best and surest connection based on what the organization needs and what my friends and colleagues need.”
That networking has made a huge difference at Communities in Schools of Tarrant County, where Cason serves as the chair of the CIS Foundation, said Mike Steele, who recently retired as president and CEO.
“She made an absolutely key introduction for us with our founding donation board member,” said Steele. In 2013, James Webb, a Dallas connection with Cason, donated more than $300,000 to CIS in his wife’s name to honor her after she died of cancer.
CIS helps children in local public schools in danger of dropping out by funding the salaries of social workers to identify and help connect the children and their families to community resources. In total, CIS is in 57 schools in nine school districts in Tarrant County.
“Tiffany introduced our donor to us knowing our story would touch his heart,” Steele said. “It’s a perfect example of what she brings to everybody she touches. She has a huge heart and a fierce determination, but is very gentle.”
That gentle arm-twisting has increased CIS’s endowment exponentially. “We started off with $250, and now we have $1.2 million,” Steele said
Other non-profits that Cason is currently involved with include serving as vice-chair of the American Red Cross of North Texas and on the president’s advisory task force for Texas Wesleyan University. She has previously served on the Child Study Center Foundation, the Ladder Alliance board and the Kupferle Texas Health board.
Cason said she tries to limit her board obligations to just three positions at a time in order to also tend to work and her family, which includes her husband for 10 years, Ron, and two daughters, Landry, 7, (named after Tom) and Presley, 8, (named after Elvis). But she admits that the need to give back is strongly instilled in her.
“When I think about why and where to get involved, there comes a time in my executive life where it can’t be all about you. It has to be about a greater good. Where can I make the most impact?” she said.
How does she bundle raising two girls with her husband, volunteering extensively through the community and running a big division of a big bank? “It’s no secret that I am young for what I do,” she said, adding a paraphrase of Luke 12:48: “For whom much is given, much is required.”
The FW Inc. EOE Awards Program has set a new standard for individual entrepreneurial performance here in Fort Worth. Last year’s finalists and winners represent the talent, tenaciousness and innovative spirit that continues to fuel our city’s recognition as a center for business growth and excellence.
It is upon this foundation of achievement that we encourage you to consider entering this year’s awards competition. As a private business owner, here are seven reasons why you should make winning the 2018 EOE Award a high priority:
We are looking for those entrepreneurs whose vision, creativity and integrity have made Fort Worth the premier place to do business. FW Inc.’s Entrepreneur of Excellence Awards showcase and honor the contributions of exceptional entrepreneurs in the area. This unique EOE connection has become the voice for the entrepreneurial community in Fort Worth.
This year there will be EOE awards in 13 categories.
Finalists from each category will be featured in a future issue of FW Inc.
Anyone can nominate an exceptional entrepreneur – you can even nominate yourself. Nominations for the 2018 EOE Awards open June 5 and run through Sept. 22. For more details on the award and to nominate an outstanding entrepreneur today, go to fwtx.com/fwinc/eoe.
Presenting Sponsor
Whitley Penn
Supporting Sponsors Frank Kent Cadillac Origin Bank
Two longtime employees team up and buy Silver West Limousines from its founder and look to move the company toward large-bus business, as far from Uber as possible.
BY SCOTT NISHIMURA / PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL CLOUSER
It’s been a busy year for Brian Wiginton and Frank Montgomery, who bought their former employer, Silver West Limousines, from its founder in April 2016 after having worked at the company for several years. The first challenge Wiginton and Montgomery had to handle: having to move their headquarters to Fort Worth from Haltom City, with their rent about to increase under a new owner. “The new owners wanted to double the rent without making any improvements to the building,” says Montgomery, 36, who worked more than six years for Silver West, starting as a chauffeur before moving into the office. “That was one of the first things thrown at us.”
Good thing, Wiginton, 43, and Montgomery found a 30,000-square-foot warehouse available for lease nearby.
“We doubled the space,” Montgomery says. “Vehicles at the old place were double-parked. Each vehicle now has its own space. Our office quadrupled.”
That’s helped promulgate the professional culture at Silver West that Wiginton and Montgomery want to promote.
The company today has 40 employees and 27 vehicles, including sedans, SUVs, vans, limo vans, stretch limos, limo buses and mini-buses. It also has partnerships that give it access to coaches that hold more than 50 people.
What’s on the horizon for Silver West: moving more into the large-coach business and lessening its reliance on the individual business that’s been hurt by ridesharing services like Uber.
Where these guys came from:
Brian, who grew up in Coleman near Abilene and has a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Texas: Just blue collar. I worked 10 years for the company as a chauffeur. I was in EMS for four years and worked in armed transport before then.
Was the company for sale? Brian: He wasn’t shopping the business, but he was ready. He founded the company and started it with one vehicle in his backyard, and added vehicles and added personnel as the revenue just kicked in. He didn’t have anybody else in the family [who wanted the business]. We saw the opportunity to buy the company. The first meeting was at the Paris Coffee Shop. We put it on the table.
Frank: We presented him with a cash buyout. Then we presented him if he wanted to finance it himself. Within a week, he had already gotten back with us and agreed to a selling number. Then we started our due diligence, our financials.
Finding the capital Brian: It took us about two years to secure the capital. I was taking [a client] to the airport one day. I said I’m looking to buy the company. She got on the plane. I sent her a text. I said, do you know anybody who'd want to invest in this? She talked to some other people and set up a meeting.
“Our goal is to progress to the larger capacity. I think it’s a progression that we’ll take first with one of the larger capacity [50-passenger] mini-buses first.
I see within the next two years, probably having a coach on the ground.”
– Frank Montgomery, managing partner
Frank, who grew up in Fort Worth and has a “master’s in hard knocks”: I’ve done a little bit of everything. Fast food. Delivered bread for Mrs Baird’s. Worked Harris downtown for five years as a patient care tech. I worked for Silver West for six, seven years, one and a half years as a chauffeur. I moved into the office because I had a young son at home. To be a successful chauffeur, you spend a lot of time in the car, a lot of late nights, a lot of weekends.
Buying the Company Frank: I wasn’t satisfied with where I was and some things I thought needed to happen at the company. Brian and I were just talking one day.
Brian: I said I know people who could possibly back us. Frank came back in an hour and said let’s try this.
Frank: We went with private lending versus a bank because we don’t have the business experience. It took us a little bit longer to secure financing than if we were going to go to a traditional bank.
Brian: We originally wanted a loan. We didn’t want investors. All of our revenue comes from depreciating assets. There’s not a whole lot of margin for an investor who wants 10, 15, 20 percent of the company. It took two years [to obtain financing], and there’s a lot of moving parts. During that two-year timeframe, the fleet’s changing, collateral for the loan’s changing, the value of the assets is changing.
Adventure begins Frank: Taking an existing business and going with it has a whole separate set of challenges that in some ways are just as hard as a startup.
Brian: We had to prove to our clientele that we can do the job.
Changing the culture Frank: When a chauffeur comes here, most of the time, they don’t view this as a real job. They think of it as a part-time job, a stepping point. [Rideshare services] have helped. Now anybody who wants to can be a chauffeur so to speak. Not that I think the people who drive for Uber are chauffeurs. There’s a difference between being a chauffeur and being a driver. It’s not just transportation from point A to point B. It’s an experience. If you take a limo to your prom or your wedding, it may be the only times in their lives they’re in a limo. At times, a chauffeur can be a counselor. At times, he takes on a bodyguard
type of role or a concierge for somebody who’s not from the area. It’s getting to see that bigger picture. Financially, [chauffeurs] can make a very good living if they take ownership of the situation.
What’s the company’s growth plan? Brian: We hired another outside salesman. We already had one.
Frank: But he was more of an inside sales and account manager. He’s brought on some pretty large accounts. He’s a proven sales person. Most of the things a salesman is selling, he can walk in and leave with a contract. In our industry, it’s more about relationships. He might have sold the person on Silver West, but it might be three or four months before they pick up the phone and need our services.
What’s the competition Frank: There’s probably 10 companies in the Metroplex that offer everything that we offer. If you start looking at every guy who has an SUV or car service, there’s 200 companies in the Metroplex. When you factor in the [rideshares], there’s a lot of competition in the market. But DFW is growing, and there’s plenty of market share for everybody.
What’s your market share?
Brian: I don’t know if we could put a number on market share.
Where’s the product differentiation? Frank: Customer service.
Frank: You have to factor in the maintenance. You have to factor in the internal costs. You have to factor in the DOT regulations. Our goal is to progress to the larger capacity. I think it’s a progression that we’ll take first with one of the larger capacity [50-passenger] mini-buses first. I see within the next two years, probably having a coach on the ground.
Could we see industry consolidation? Frank: I think so. It’s definitely possible. What I see are some of the larger car companies are buying up some of the smaller coach bus companies to get more market share.
Brian: We’d like to buy smaller services; there are so many of them.
The limo industry is talking about the threat from autonomous vehicles down the road. Are you guys looking at that? Brian: For people using a limo service, a car service, the market in autonomous vehicles is still a ways off.
Brian on Uber: You’re lucky if they unload your luggage at the hotel. Most of them don’t even have insurance. We carry a $5 million policy.
What kinds of threats do you see? Brian: I’ll be honest with you. Where our industry is heading is to the coach bus segment because of Uber. That’s where our future is. We still want to stay as much as possible in the airport transportation.
Frank: Our market is 75 percent sedan and SUV today, 80 percent corporate and 20 percent private.
Are you in the big coaches? Brian: The biggest bus we have is the 36-passenger bus. We have partnerships. We just don’t have [the large buses] in the house.
So, you want to buy your own coaches? Brian: That’s the plan. It’s a half-million per bus investment.
Frank: If I’m driving down a highway and somebody keeps looking in his mirror, I know they’re probably going to merge, so I let him do it. Autonomous can’t detect those signs. In our industry, we’re looking at more internal functions and fully automating there.
Tell us some stories about the service. Brian: We have clients who all we do is pick up Christmas packages for them. We’ve got situations where we don’t even have clients in our car.
Frank: I picked up a lady from the airport one day. When she gets there, her baggage is lost. I asked her if needed to go to Walgreens or CVS to get some things, even though her hotel has all of those things. She took me up. We stopped at CVS. It’s those little things like that that separate our company.
Do you enjoy driving celebrities? Brian: Sometimes.
Frank: You learn a lot about people. You get them in the car, you find out whether it’s just a persona they put on or the opposite.
Do you still drive for Silver West? Brian: I still drive for the client who helped us out and a few others.
Frank: When needed. There’s nothing I will ask one of my employees to do that I’m not willing to do myself.
Keith Webster, finishing
BY SCOTT NISHIMURA / PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX LEPE
Keith Webster was finishing his MBA at TCU’s Neeley School of Business in 2012 and coming out of 18 years in commercial real estate, “really looking for anything else.” A friend put him in touch with the owners of Kisabeth Furniture, a money-losing custom furniture maker in Haltom City founded in 1958 and about to close its doors.
“They were about to shut the doors,” says Webster, 48, a member of the Entrepreneur’s Organization. “They had a key employee pass away, and they had come out of retirement to plug all the holes and gaps.” One of the two owners told Webster he needed an answer by Friday whether he was interested in buying the company. “And this was a Tuesday.”
Sales - $1.2 million when Webster and his business partner/mother, Joy Webster, who’s spent years saving historic buildings in downtown Fort Worth for the oilman and Texas Rangers owner Bob Simpson, bought the company – have zigzagged since. But the trajectory has been up, Webster says. The peak was $1.8 million. Sales were $1.5 million in 2016, but this year, he’s aiming for about $2 million.
Webster bought the business for cash; he declines to say what he’s got in it today. He brought in an employee, Laurel McEuen, from New York to focus on product development and marketing (“Fort Worth is a small community; our mothers knew each other”), produced a cata log, and bought a millshop that expanded capabilities. He leased the Haltom City plant from Kisabeth’s former owners before buying it. Employees, 35 when he bought the company, now number 42.
What he saw in Kisabeth I really liked the history of the company, the qualities of the product. I was really intrigued by the tangible product, something you could be proud of.
Putting a value on the company They were losing money, and we were looking at the assets we were buying. We knew we’d have to throw money at it to turn it around. We’ve got 60 years of product design that came with the company, the exist-
ing catalog, the client list, the showroom sample, and the proprietary process. We leased the facility for three years. We want to make sure [the business] was viable.
Due diligence We made a lot of mistakes. We thought we were asking the same questions [of the owners], but when it got down to it, we weren’t talking the same language. They did track their biggest cost, labor, [but] materials costs, that was the biggest surprise
going forward. That was attributable to employees and managers having grown up in the business.
Changing the business We really had to rethink how we did things. We really had to refocus on customer service. The new catalog makes things more approachable. The old catalog was a 20-pound binder that was made to sit in the designer room, not to be portable so you could take it to clients. We’ve just come out with a new [easy-
to-understand] price list. The manufacturing side was pretty well set up. We didn’t have to tweak it so much.
Reaching out again
[The former owners] really relied on their relationships in the design community and weren’t doing a lot of outreach to the younger and upcoming designers. This year, we’ve really beefed up our outreach. We’re doing several trade shows. We just remodeled our office and had a grand opening. We’re hosting events here.
We’ve beefed up our catalog. Our new customer service manager came on in August. He talks with the different showrooms, the different designers. And keeps the channels of communication open.
How much bigger the company could be It can be a lot bigger. We’re doing a fraction of what we could be doing. Office is 10 percent of what we should be, hospitality 20-25 percent. Residential, I think we could double.
Carolyn Phillips, frozen treat entrepreneur, delivers the scoop on what it’s like to build a business as a millennial woman.
BY JASON FORREST
Forrest Performance Group
With her fleet of three pop carts and a bricks-andmortar store opening in August, Carolyn Phillips is the admiral of Alchemy Pops. With flavors like honey-cream lavender and blood orange lime, Phillips makes what she calls “chasing the pop dream” sound like a whole lotta fun.
I have interviewed many seasoned entrepreneurs, but successful trailblazers of all ages have a few things in common. They’re willing to face down the fears and doubts that would hinder them. They run toward the roar. Here’s what I mean: male lions roar to provoke fear and send prey scattering away from the startling noise and into the path of the smaller, quieter lionesses — the true hunters. If gazelles knew to run toward the frightening sound, they would have a better chance of survival. Likewise, successful entrepreneurs are those who run toward the challenges and conflicts, instead of away.
Building any business from the ground up isn’t easy, and I wanted to discover the daily landmines a millennial entrepreneur must navigate. For the scoop on
how she’s run toward the challenges of being a millennial entrepreneur, I talked to Phillips, who has spent the last two years developing her Fort Worth–based frozen treat business. My top four takeaways from the conversation:
1. Own your personal brand Being a business owner has its fair share of challenges. Being a young, female business
owner is a landmine-filled journey unto itself. While Phillips doesn’t identify these attributes as hindrances, she understands the reality: people come to the table with predetermined judgments that affect the way they view her.
For example, being asked, “Is your husband coming to this meeting?” is unique to women. As the decision-maker for Alchemy Pops, Carolyn Phillips
recognizes that her husband would never face the same question. Still, Phillips believes she’s faced more challenges due to stereotypes about millennials than she has as a female.
While Phillips indeed faces unique challenges, any business owner must learn not to let other people’s perceptions affect their view of themselves. Instead of being a victim to what others think, Phillips recommends building relationships to break down barriers and assumptions. Millennials are often conditioned to multitask and try to “do it all.” That, according to Phillips, is just not real. Part of building your brand is defining your values and investing fully in those.
2. Build a brand on something bigger than product People often wonder whether this frozen treat thing is just another fad — like the gourmet cupcake.
That’s why Phillips builds her brand on “sunshine and smiles” more than on frozen flavors. “We sell fun with friends,” she says.
The economy will change and fads will come and go, but certain values — like community and friendship — remain. Cultivate community and sell the experience, and “You’re going to be okay,” Phillips said. That kind of community can’t stop with customers either. Build social capital in every part of the business.
As for the long-term viability of a good product, Phillips notes that there are still plenty of cupcake shops doing well even after the high point of the trend has passed.
3. Celebrate the whole journey One of the things Phillips would most like to be known for is being able to embrace the mess of life—the things that go well and those that don’t go according to plan. There’s a lot more to any business story than snapshot highlights. There are the wrong turns and times you hear seven nos before you get a yes (as in Phillips’ case, when she was seeking insurance to rent a commercial kitchen). Phillips said that while she has certainly needed to change plans and shift directions, she doesn’t feel she’s failed at anything. “They’ve all just been adventures,” Phillips said, “and if things go sideways, I just make the best of the next thing.”
On a recent challenging day, Phillips had $17 left after paying her bills. While she felt the pressure (and had an ugly cry), she also took the moment to appreciate that she was still able to pay everyone. It’s about perspective.
4. Master your release valve In 2015, 24.2 miles into a marathon, Phillips wanted to quit. She broke down right there on the course. And, as she said, crying while also running and sweating is “the worst kind of ugly cry.” When a running coach joined her from the sidelines and asked if she was okay, she said she was decidedly not okay. She was, in
fact, “terrible.” Still, as she acknowledged the pain and the sweat and the terrible feelings, she also remembered that in less than two miles, it would all be over and she could have a beer. By mile 25, she was back in action.
Phillips believes being in touch with and able to express emotions is a strength. Phillips said that if you’ve been short with two people in the office before 9 a.m. and don’t know what’s actually bothering you, it might be time to take a long walk.
While it may not come out as an ugly cry for everyone, entrepreneurs need to have a release valve (working out, meditating, etc.) to prevent burnout. In a characteristic return to how much she values perspective, Phillips offered a final reminder: “There is always something on the other side of an ugly cry.”
The bottom line Sometimes, you just have to have patience. Being willing to endure means you’ll be in position when you finally get a yes after seven nos or when the answer to a question that has been keeping you up at night pops into your mind just as you’re about to lose hope. Hold tight to your story and your brand. Build a brand on something bigger than a trend or product. Give yourself permission to express your feelings. Never let go of that perspective that has served Phillips so well. If the story seems to have a sad ending, she just chooses to believe it’s not over yet.
Jason Forrest is CEO of FPG.com, a global leader and designer of sales, management, and corporate training programs. He is the author of several books, most recently “Why Training Fails.”
each issue
Relocation and expansion are on an uptick in Fort Worth and Tarrant County, and activity’s moving faster, now that 2016 elections are behind us.
BY BRANDOM GENGELBACH
Executive Vice President of Economic Development
Competitive relocation and expansion activity are humming at high levels in Fort Worth and Tarrant County.
Year to date, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce has worked with the City of Fort Worth, Tarrant County and other partners on 51 projects, moving at a brisker pace in 2017 now that we’re free of the uncertainty surrounding last year’s elections.
Projects include a data center and three health care/biopharma operations, but many involve food manufacturing companies, reflecting local and national trends in that industry that present significant growth opportunities in our market.
Food giants already here include Dannon, Best Maid, Renfro Foods, Parker Products, MillerCoors, Coca-Cola, Andrews Distributing, Ben E. Keith, Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee, Deen Meat Co., Cargill Value-Added Meats and more.
Project Southern Comfort is a food maker looking to create an estimated 170 jobs with a capital investment of $32 million. Project Watson is a food manufacturer looking to invest up to $180 million.
In another industry, Project Prince is an existing company looking to expand its facility and increase employment by 100.
These prospects are moving through the incentive, permitting and planning processes in their respective municipalities. Meanwhile, on our radar are the possible
relocations of four corporate headquarters that would bring major investment, jobs for the degreed workforce and an enhanced outlook for recruitment of other corporate headquarters. Work is in the early stages.
O, Canada Fort Worth and Dallas officials focused on a high-stakes trade mission in June to Canada, meeting in Montreal and Toronto with public and private sector leaders in this region’s second largest North American Free Trade Agreement partner.
Two-way trade between North Texas and Canada amounts to nearly $9 billion annually, and Air Canada recently expanded operations at DFW Airport.
Led by Mayor Betsy Price and Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, the team sought to grow more depth and new strength in trade relations and tourism while reaffirming local commitment to NAFTA – an urgent matter in light of President Trump’s plan to renegotiate NAFTA with Canada and Mexico, another leading NAFTA partner and the DFW trade mission’s destination last summer.
As with the 2016 mission to Mexico, the delegation roster mirrored the high esteem in which this area holds Canada, the scores of Canadian companies that operate here, including Aldo, Bombardier Aerospace and Learjet, and the relationship we enjoy in areas ranging from high-tech to tourism.
With Price and Rawlings were DFW International Airport Board Chairman Sam Coats and board members, airport executives and representatives from the Fort Worth Chamber, Dallas Regional Chamber, the Fort Worth Convention & Visitors Bureau and the North Texas Commission.
Delegates included Fort Worth Chamber board members JJ Cawelti, senior manager of global public affairs for Bell Helicopter; Robbie Briggs, CEO of Briggs Freeman Sotheby’s International Realty; and Tom Galbreath, CEO of Dunaway Associates.
Senior executives on the mission also included representatives from Axxess Technologies, Nunnally & Martin LLP, Dallas Innovation Alliance, NEC Corporation of America, Texas Central Partners and Uber Technologies.
The Consulate General of Canada in Dallas and the Québec Government Office in Texas also supported the mission.
In Toronto, meetings included discussions with Mayor John Tory, who leads efforts on improving urban infrastructure, and bike manufacturer Cervélo (a thrill for cyclists Mayor Price and myself).
In Montreal, trade relations were discussed with Dominique Anglade, Québec’s minister of economy, science and innovation. Via the Montreal Smart Cities Tour, officials exchanged views on urban qualityof-life issues. Delegates also participated in a seminar by the 3,000-member Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal on “Doing Business in DFW.”
What’s Next Within a few weeks, the City of Fort Worth economic development department’s new strategic plan will be delivered to the city council.
Soon after, the Chamber’s new multiyear, five-pillar strategic plan will be introduced. The plan will integrate comparable city strategies, and the Chamber will begin aligning funding efforts with measurable outcomes for our investors.
Gengelbach is executive vice president of economic development for the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, a regular contributor to FW Inc.
We must implement the Fort Worth T’s transportation plan to sustain economic opportunity and growth.
BY JEFF DAVIS Chairman, Republic Title
Great cities have great transit.” That was a quote from Scott Mahaffey, the chair of the Fort Worth Transportation Authority, the “T,” at the celebration of Fort Worth’s obtaining the full funding grant from the Federal Transit Authority in December 2016. This critical grant is for construction of TEXRail, the commuter line from downtown Fort Worth to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport.
It’s true. In Texas, the City of Dallas has the largest light rail system in the United States, Houston recently completed a $1.2 billion transit upgrade to its extensive transit system, and even El Paso is building a $97 million vintage streetcar system to enhance its down-
town economic development potential.
Tarrant County needs to have more mobility choices for its citizens, rather than relying on the automobile.
Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price has said many times that we cannot build more highways to accommodate the growth that will occur in Fort Worth and Tarrant County in the next few years. The T developed a Master Plan in 2016 to begin addressing the needs of its growing population.
And, while important changes have been implemented since then, such as the new “Where Is the Bus” app; planning for a circulator between the Southside, downtown, and West 7th Street; more frequent service; and expanding
service areas, a great deal more needs to be done.
Three champions of transit in Tarrant County - Tarrant County College, the Real Estate Council of Greater Fort Worth, and the T - recognize the need for better mobility and implementation of the T Master Plan. They are forming a transit advocacy group and committing funds to educate the public and elected officials about the benefits of transit.
Eugene Giovannini, the new Chancellor of Tarrant County College, said early in his assessment of the network of the campuses that the issue he was most surprised about in Tarrant County was the lack of public transit.
“Transit is vital to getting the students to and from the classroom and to their jobs. Fort Worth simply must have a better transit system.”
The Real Estate Council has long been supportive of mobility and transit as a catalyst for economic development. Its executive director, Karen Vermaire Fox, says, “It’s a proven fact that investment in our transportation infrastructure, particularly public transportation, drives growth, attracts development and increases property values along its corridors.”
The process of providing more choices in car-centric areas is a journey, but the benefits of connecting our neighborhoods to each other, restaurants to diners, landlords to renters, employers to employees, and families to local stores can help build a great city.
Disruption to the energy and transportation industries from self-driving cars will come sooner rather than later, a new study says.
BY SCOTT NISHIMURA
Your gas-guzzling SUV is going to be obsolete within the next decade or so, driven by the introduction of self-driving vehicles that will drive costs of alternative transportation as a service far below what it costs you to own and maintain a vehicle, says Tony Seba, the futurist author and lecturer.
That doesn’t mean you won’t be able to fuel your gas guzzler. It just means it won’t make sense to financially, Seba says, compared to the cost of taking an Uber ride that very well could be in a self-driving car, or having your new flat panel TV delivered to you via mobile app on your smartphone.
“It’s hard to believe the change is coming, and it’s coming so quickly,” says Seba, who headlined the group of speakers at this spring’s Near Southside, Inc. annual dinner in Fort Worth. Its topic: the disruption to energy, transportation, and
other industries that will be wrought by self-driving cars once they’re approved by regulators.
This spring, Seba, who lives in San Francisco and lectures on entrepreneurship, disruption, and clean energy at Stanford University, co-authored a report called “Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030: The Disruption of Transportation and the Collapse of the Internal-Combustion Vehicle and Oil Industries.” Its findings:
• 2030: By this year, “within 10 years of regulatory approval of autonomous vehicles, 95 percent of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by ondemand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets.” The new transportation-as-a-service model “will cause oil demand and prices to plummet, but also create trillions of dollars in new business opportunities, consumer surplus and GDP growth.”
• Savings: The average U.S. family will save more than $5,600 per year in transportation costs. “This will keep an additional $1 trillion per year in Americans’ pockets by 2030.”
• Competition: The approval of autonomous vehicles will “unleash a highly competitive market-share grab among existing and new” transportation-asa-service providers “in expectation of the outsized rewards of trillions of dollars of market opportunities and network effects. Existing providers like Uber, Lyft and Didi are already engaged, and others will join this high-speed race. Winnerstake-all dynamics
“It’s hard to believe the change is coming, and it’s coming so quickly.”
– Tony Seba
will force them to make large upfront investments to provide the highest possible level of service, ensuring supply matches demand in each geographic market they enter.”
• Margins: “In this intensely competitive environment, businesses will offer services at a price trending toward cost. As a result, their fleets will quickly transition from human-driven, internal combustion engine vehicles to autonomous electric vehicles because of key cost factors, including 10 times higher vehicle-utilization rates, 500,000-mile vehicle lifetimes (potentially improving to 1 million miles by 2030), and far lower maintenance, energy, finance and insurance costs.” Transportationas-a-service will be “four to 10 times cheaper per mile than buying a new car and two to four times cheaper than operating an existing vehicle in 2021.”
• Adoption: Will start in cities and radiate out to rural areas.
• Internal combustion vehicles: By 2030, “will still represent 40 percent of the vehicles in the U.S. vehicle fleet, but they will provide just 5 percent of passenger miles.”
• Barriers: Love of driving, fear of new technology or habit. But existing companies like Uber, Lyft and Didi have “invested billions of dollars developing technologies and services to overcome these issues.”
• Cars on the road: Will drop to 44 million from 247 million eventually. “Seventy percent fewer passenger cars and trucks will be manufactured each year.”
• Oil demand: Will peak at 100 million barrels per day by 2020, dropping to 70 million by 2030.
Before you automatically write another premium check to your workers’ compensation carrier, explore the option to become a nonsubscriber. It could pay off.
The century-old workers’ compensation laws of Texas have always included the option for private employers to opt out of the system. Texas is the only state with this truly elective option. How is private industry continuing to realize cost savings while providing quality benefits to injured employees?
First, the logistics. Traditional workers’ compensation is a state-governed system whereby employers purchase insurance (or become a certified self-insurer) to pay medical and disability benefits for occupationally injured employees. In exchange for receiving this no-fault, no-premium coverage, employees give up the right to sue the employer for tort damages. Texas’ original workers’ compensation laws in 1913 were optional for employers. Four years later, when most states made workers’ compensation mandatory, Texas maintained it as an optional program. Today, over 100,000 Texas employers do not subscribe to the state workers’ compensation system. Texas employers who opt out, commonly referred to as “nonsubscribers,” are not legally required to furnish medical,
wage or other benefits to injured employees. Responsible nonsubscribers, however, provide these benefits through privately implemented ERISA welfare benefit plans. Benefits are typically paid directly from the assets of the employer, although insurance products are also available. Since benefit plans are optional, the employer is free to customize the type and amount of benefits to offer.
Nonsubscriber benefit plans typically establish a reputable network of medical providers, and benefits are provided for treatment within the network. This differs greatly from the workers’ compensation system, which allows an employee to choose his/her medical care provider. In order to minimize an injured employee’s wage loss, many nonsubscribers offer disability payments – usually between 75 percent and 90 percent of the employee’s regular wage – beginning on day one. Workers’ comp doesn’t begin reimbursing wages until the employee has been off work for seven days.
Most of the nonsubscriber cost savings stem from the hands-on management of claims. Issues such as choosing the right medical care providers and facilitating return-to-work protocols are handled directly by the employer. In contrast, subscribers relinquish control of injury claims to an insurance company whose primary concern may not be to efficiently convalesce your employee and return him or her to work for you.
While subscribers enjoy immunity from employee tort litigation, nonsubscribers, even those who provide ERISA benefits, are subject to personal injury lawsuits with virtually no liability caps. Many subscribers cite this lone factor as their reason for staying in the system. Practically, though, only a small percentage of occupational injury claims pit the employer and employee as adversaries. Even then, with binding arbitration becoming the norm with nonsubscribers, few claims ever see a courtroom. Insurance products are also available to limit your risk of monetary exposure.
Attorneys who specialize in representing nonsubscribers can walk you through the process of becoming a nonsubscriber, including notifying your workers’ compensation insurance company of your intent to terminate your coverage, filing the appropriate forms with the Texas Department of Insurance – Division of Workers’ Compensation, and notifying your employees of your nonsubscriber status. Some nonsubscriber attorneys will also draft your ERISA Plan and offer guidance on your selection of insurance.
Before you automatically write another premium check to your workers’ compensation carrier, explore the option to become a nonsubscriber and experience workers’ compensation – Texas style.
Nick Bettinger is a shareholder and director at the McDonald Sanders, P.C. law firm. He is writing this column for the Tarrant County Bar Association, an occasional contributor to FW Inc. Contact him at nickb@ mcdonaldlaw.com. The Tarrant County Bar was established in 1904 and is a voluntary membership organization representing a diverse range of individuals working in the legal profession in Tarrant County.
The applications have been submitted. The employers’ policies, practices, benefits, demographics, and employees’ engagement and satisfaction have been reviewed. The November 2017 issue of FW Inc. will reveal the top-rated companies. These winning companies will be recognized and the overall category winners revealed live at the Best Companies to Work For in Fort Worth awards luncheon on Thursday, Nov. 9th.
How your financial adviser gets paid, and what it means to the returns in your investment accounts.
BY CRAIG ROGERS Rogers Wealth Group
While investing in the 21st century is often thought of tumultuous, in my opinion, there has never been a better time to be an investor.
Given the types of advice and fiduciary standards that are available and the types of fees paid and transparency, there’s something for everyone. Finding the right adviser can be simpler than you think.
The most important thing to start thinking about is: what am I looking for? In part one of this two-part series, let’s take a look at how investment firms and professionals get compensated and why it matters.
Very few investors are unaware that fees and expenses matter a great deal in determining investment success. It might also help to know who pays them.
There are three basic types of fee structures a consumer pays: commission-based, fee-based, and fee-only.
While some structures may be better for you than others, it's important to remember that talented and caring professionals can be found in any of these categories.
Let’s analyze the commission environment first. Here, the broker (registered representative) gets paid for each of your transactions. The regulatory agency is different for commission brokers; they are regulated by FINRA instead of the SEC.
Brokers are bound to sell only investments that pay commissions and those investments that their broker dealer has in inventory. The best analogy I’ve seen
comes from the noted financial services executive Elliot Weissbluth.
He describes the commission-based world as akin to entering a butcher shop, compared to seeing a dietician. You enter the butcher shop knowing you will buy something. They'll help find what you are looking for and probably point you to their best selections.
But you should never expect them to tell you their selections are unhealthy or that you should go somewhere else if there's a better choice. This is where the fiduciary standard becomes clearer.
A broker is held to a “suitability standard” by FINRA. What they sell needs to be “suitable” for the client, but not necessarily in the client’s sole best interest.
Why not pursue this type of fee arrangement? You will only be offered what pays the broker commissions, and because it’s transaction-based, there’s little incentive to dissuade a client from a transaction. Does this mean the broker is not putting the client first? No. But it does mean certain conflicts of interest are ever-present.
Fee-based is a very similar model. Here, not only does the client pay the commission on commissionable products, but the client also pays a fee similar to a retainer.
The fee is usually based on the size of the accounts and relationship. Although there might be more incentive to act in your best interest, it’s also true that you generate fees and commissions. These can accumulate rapidly and negatively impact your returns.
Finally, there is fee-only. In this model, the advisor is a fiduciary and held to a higher standard by the SEC. The advisor must act in the client’s sole best interest.
In this arrangement, a client pays no
commissions on buys and sells or for products. The client pays a fee, similar to a retainer.
Using Elliot Weissbluth’s analogy, the fee-only advisor is the dietician; they recommend foods based on all known factors of your health. They get paid to offer advice in your best interest.
What might be the pitfall here? A client may say paying a fee in a down year is unfair. Remember, however, that a commission is paid in the brokerage environment regardless of performance.
The essential question: Is the advisor achieving what is most important to me, less his or her fee?
It’s important to note the Labor Department is moving ahead with new regs aimed at nonfiduciary advisors or brokers.
The goal is to level the field for consumers who may be unaware their financial professional is not a fiduciary. The regs try to make all financial professionals fiduciaries. The new rules do little to change the lives of fee-only advisors or clients, but there has been tremendous opposition by commission-based brokers and those seeking to maintain the suitability standard. We expect that to remain strong.
The House of Representatives, as of June, already passed a bill to kill the new rules. As it stands, the standards are being phased in, and firms must be in full compliance by Jan. 1, 2018.
In the September/October issue of FW Inc., we will address the ramifications for you as a consumer. We’ll also focus on what services you’re looking for and the different wealth management models.
Organizations can extract valuable information from heaps of data, if they handle it correctly.
BY RENEE OLVERA
Organizations are collecting data about consumers, businesses, and markets regularly. Every time I ask my Alexa Dot to turn on lights or order paper, data is collected about my power usage and product choices. These data can be used by organizations to provide tailored customer service or products that meet my needs. However, collecting data is only useful if it can be analyzed and transformed into
information used by decision-makers. How are these decision-makers transforming and using data? In accounting, it can be said that “Accounting is Big Data” –in fact, the American Accounting Association annually hosts its Accounting Is Big Data Conference with a goal of connecting professionals engaged in incorporating data into the decision-making process.
One use of data analytics is to streamline the process of testing internal controls and compliance. For example, internal audit groups can use a full population of employee reimbursement expenses and using pre-determined algorithms in analytics software or regression analyses to identify outliers in employee reimbursements or identify commonly used vendors. A company’s external auditors may use data analytics to build efficiencies into their audit planning and testing. For example, external auditors may be able to examine full populations of their client’s transactions to identify unusual journal entries. Alternatively, external auditors may be able to use analytics to test transaction-based internal controls.
When I teach data analytics to accounting students at TCU, we focus on four elements:
Asking data-driven questions; extracting, transforming and loading data into analytics software; analyzing data using software and statistical tools; and communicating results.
What is the problem? Before engaging in data analytics, one needs to understand what is the problem that needs to be solved.
Often, this means we need to consider if the problem should be solved using data analysis, or if there are other qualitative aspects that must be considered to get a full picture of the solution. It also requires that we think about segregating business dilemmas into smaller “bite-size” questions.
Data are messy! Before we analyze data, we have to be confident that the analysis will result in a solution that is accurate and complete. Sometimes this means that we need to verify that we have access to all the data and that the data used in the analysis is accurate.
Not every data point necessary for analysis is structured. Some data are in the form of video or audio files. Not all data is complete – often fields of records can be missing or in a format not appropriate for analyzing. Therefore, it is important to have the tools to examine data for completeness and accuracy.
Spinning data – this is the fun part. Examining large data sets for patterns and relationships provides an opportunity to answer those data-driven questions.
A variety of software can be used to analyze data – and it does not have to be complex software. Software programs such as Excel, Tableau, IDEA, Qlik, IBM SPSS, and SAS are a few software packages that provide the tools to visualize patterns and statistically analyze relationships.
Finally, communication is ultimately the most important element of the data analytics puzzle. I teach my students that if they can’t communicate the first three steps to decision-makers, then the analysis is less powerful.
Once the heavy lifting of making a decision is done, what’s critical is how you manage the ones you’ve already made to ensure their success.
BY ROBERT J. ALLEN Board President Leadership Fort Worth
I have observed three qualities that allow people to realize a successful outcome from a good decision: 1) self-awareness; 2) patience/perseverance; and 3) focus.
There is no shortage of books, articles and blog posts addressing the art and science of making good decisions. The attention paid to this subject is warranted, no doubt. The news headlines are littered with stories of people who, in one form or another, have made poor decisions. The ripple effects of poor decision-making are felt throughout our society.
I’d like to shift the conversation, though, from decision-making to a concept that I believe is of at least equal importance: decision management. The attention given to decision-making might lead one to believe that once a decision has been made, the heavy lifting is done.
However, what makes a decision a good one or a poor one often comes down to what happens next. I use the term “decision management,” which some may say is synonymous with “execution.” Whatever you call it, decision management refers to how we manage the decisions we have already made to achieve the success those decisions were intended to create when we made them. I have observed three qualities that allow people to realize a successful outcome from a good decision: 1) selfawareness; 2) patience/perseverance; and 3) focus.
1. Self-Awareness: Some people are gifted with the talents required to be both a great decision maker and a great decision manager. Many of us, though, are better at one or the other. Defeating pride and admitting where we need to tap into the talents of others can make the difference between success and failure. Some of the greatest coaches in professional sports (think Pat Riley and Tony LaRussa) had less-than-legendary careers as players. Creating and casting a vision (or drawing up a game plan) is a much different skill set than the one required to execute the game plan. Know your strengths, and then play to those.
2. Patience/Perseverance: In our
instant gratification, microwavable society, patience is somewhat of a lost virtue. The excitement surrounding a decision and the initiation of action often give way to the monotony of daily activity. If progress and results are not visible immediately, our commitment to the process can wane. In his book, “The Slight Edge,” author Jeff Olson states that simple daily disciplines, repeated consistently over time, can lead us to success. He presents a formula whereby consistently repeated daily actions, multiplied by time, equals a successful result. Some are unable to sustain a level of success once it has been achieved because they stop doing the things that created that success in the first place.
3. Focus: Cal Newport, author of the book, “Deep Work,” stated that “focus is the new IQ.” Managing decisions already made requires a level of focus and attention that is difficult for some to maintain. We seem to be surrounded by various “shiny objects” that beg for our attention. The quest for the new thing often eclipses the continued pursuit of the desired thing. Disciplining our minds to stay the course when distraction surrounds us can make all of the difference.
Continue to make great decisions, but don’t forget to maintain focus and energy around managing the great decisions you’ve already made.
• Established and highly respected print and online digital media publication for over 18 years
• Multi product portfolio to sell - Fort Worth Magazine, FWinc., Fort Worth HOME, Faces of Fort Worth, Dream Home and fwtx.com.
• Loyal passionate readership and social media followers
• No cap on earnings Contact Brian Ritenour at Brian.Ritenour@fwtx.com, or at 817-560-6111, today for more information.
You could sell this page.
Come join Panther City Media Group and be a part of the team behind Fort Worth Magazine, Fort Worth HOME and FW Inc.
How far can you take your business on your own?
Consider teaming up with a coach or mentor.
BY TONY FORD Success Fort Worth
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
This African proverb points to the choice we make as leaders to go it alone or seek the wisdom and support of others as we grow our businesses. But who are the people who can best help us leverage the value of what we already know in a way that will overcome obstacles and open up opportunities?
While we can’t lay our burdens down at the feet of our employees, custom-
ers, vendors or even our spouses, there is a special group of people who not only understand what we are going through — they are equipped to support us in our journey to success. They are called coaches and mentors.
For anyone who follows professional sports, the concept of coaching worldclass athletes to make them better is not new. So why is it that as accomplished business leaders, we so often overlook the benefits of hiring a coach/mentor to help elevate our performance to its highest level? Why do really smart business leaders resist getting help from a coach/ mentor?
In my experience (as a CEO and coach/mentor for over 30 years), the reasons for this resistance fall into four major categories:
1. Arrogance – Highly intelligent and accomplished leaders often confuse knowing a lot with knowing it all. This is one of the most difficult and dangerous positions to find oneself in. The reason? It makes accepting new ideas and input from others nearly impossible. It also sends the message to everyone in the company that the only good ideas originate from the leader. This kind of leadership arrogance quickly removes any incentives employees may have to
Highly intelligent and accomplished leaders often confuse knowing a lot with knowing it all.
contribute new ideas to help the company grow.
2. Fear - I have never met a truly fearless leader. However, I have met many great leaders who are afraid to bring in an outsider for fear of giving up some control or being confronted with their failures. Coaches/mentors who know their craft have a genuine appreciation for these fears and work hard to reinforce the leader’s role while supporting their dedication to improving their performance and that of the company and its people.
3. Ignorance – It is not a sin to not know what we don’t know. But it is foolish to persist in not trying to find out. It is also unreasonable to believe that all of the right answers to our questions reside within our four walls. Much growth in problem-solving comes from gaining the perspective of other successful professionals who have already overcome similar circumstances and are willing to share their experiential wisdom.
4. Apathy – It’s no secret that leading others is hard, taxing work. But when our fatigue as leaders causes us to become complacent about selfimprovement, we are not only limiting our own capacity to grow, we are also making apathy the accepted normal state for our company.
What kinds of skill and experience should we look for in a world-class coach/mentor?
1. Trustworthiness – They will have extensive personal and professional
references who can attest to their character, integrity, commitment to the community and support of other leaders.
2.Track record - They will have an extensive list of personal and professional testimonials from previous clients attesting to their ability to raise you up to the successes they have already achieved.
3.Team member – They will become a valued part of your leadership team by learning each member’s strengths and weaknesses and helping you grow your team.
4.Truth-telling – They will have the ability to share ideas, best practices, solutions to difficult problems and recommendations for improvement in a way that will encourage and support you and your leaders.
5.Tenacious – They will be toughminded in a way that does not shrink from tackling difficult personnel and customer problems until suitable long-term solutions are found and implemented.
6.Transparent– They will be willing and able to articulate how their own failures and successes can be used to inform you of high-value solutions to your current obstacles and opportunities.
7.Totally committed – They will commit to working at your side until realistic problem-solving ideas, best practices, employee training and measurable metrics are in place to secure your ongoing success. They will also introduce you to their network of high-value assets.
Where can I find a coach/mentor who is right for me? Start by asking your trusted business contacts who they recommend.
Tony Ford is the president of Success Fort Worth and is an award-winning entrepreneur with a history of starting industry-leading companies. He now coaches business owners, executives and leadership teams to accelerate growth or effectively sell their companies. He's also program director of the 2017 FW Inc. Entrepreneur of Excellence awards program. Tony writes this column for each issue of FW Inc. Contact him at tford@tonyford.com.
I enjoy reading about the individuals and businesses highlighted in FW Inc. that make Fort Worth a better place. Articles are always well-written and an easy read.
How to master the pillars of public relations and get expert results in your small company
BY BRIAN MURNAHAN President of Murnahan Public Relations
Utilizing public relations in business is often seen as a big business luxury, but in reality, even smaller businesses can use basic tools for successful PR campaigns. PR is defined around key pillars that encompass audience, message, relationship and strategy. Businesses that put a communications strategy in place based on these pillars can find it to be extremely effective.
Step one involves taking the time to research and define key characteristics of your intended audience and what value points matter to that group. Use research drawn from customer surveys, employee observations, or thorough analysis and market study to reveal real-time opportunities.
Know your audience: For expert results, you must define your audience or risk
spending wasted resources communicating with a group that doesn’t care what you say.
PR practices aim to find key leaders within a targeted group to maximize influence. Find the best reporters, bloggers, local leaders or community influencers to help maximize your message within a group.
Target your messaging:
• What is it that differentiates your business from the rest of the pack?
• Share with your target audience (media and customers) why they should come talk with you. (Do you offer private labor and delivery rooms, do you offer in-home evaluations, do you have an impeccable safety record?)
• Talk like a real person and get to the point. Don’t make them listen to a long story if an anecdote will work.
Relationships: PR is about using com-
munication to build relationships with people. When speaking to customers, influencers, or media outlets, be an active listener and keep notes from your conversation. Real people and relationships are built on previous engagements, so sharing your interest will build your rapport as will checking in with them after a big news event, family vacation or medical event. Relationships are built on trust and must be treated with care for them to endure.
Strategy: All of the best intentions and practices will only get you so far without taking the time to identify and outline your business strategy. With a strategy in hand, it will be easier to keep yourself focused on the right audiences, and you will avoid unnecessary wastes of time and energy on activities that have less value. Sending out the right messages will be easier because you will know what messages they have already heard and how they have responded.
In short, with a strategy in place for your public relations activities, you will be able to achieve your goals and develop stronger relationships with the best folks for your business. The world of PR has many aspects, and paying attention to core concepts will surely impact the growth of your business in positive ways. With so many ways to communicate and so many people to meet, formulating a precise strategy will focus your actions to be compatible with how you want to grow.
You can learn more about public relations from the Greater Fort Worth Public Relations Society of America, including resources on how to find and hire the best PR firm or staff for your needs.
Brian Murnahan is president of Murnahan Public Relations, a strategic communications firm that specializes in media relations, crisis communication and content development. murnahanpr.com
The Summer issue of Fort Worth HOME is on newsstands now.
Want to be one of the first to get the next issue of Fort Worth HOME? Subscribe to Fort Worth Magazine at fwtx.com/subscribe to receive both publications before they hit newsstands. Already a subscriber? Look for Fort Worth HOME in your mailbox in September.
Texas Wesleyan’s new head football coach, Joe Prud’homme, settles into a routine as he works to bring the Rams back to field this fall for the first time in 75 years.
6 a.m. I wake up to country music playing from my alarm and good-morning licks from Katie, our dog.
6:15 a.m. I start my day with the breakfast of champions – yogurt and blueberries. While I eat, I read the local
news online and scroll through emails.
7 a.m. I arrive on campus. Before I head into our new football offices, I take a walk around campus – it’s about a mile around and a peaceful way to reflect on the day
Office to take a final look at the invitations for our uniform reveal party. Having a consistent look and feel for our branded materials has been an important part of building a new program.
9 a.m. During the semester, I stop by the Academic Success Center to check on study hall for my players. Academic and long-term success is why we’re here.
10 a.m. Coaching staff meeting begins. The eight of us gather. Agenda includes a recruiting update, review of workout schedules, and discussion of players.
11 a.m. I get a call from Admissions. They have finished a campus tour with a high-priority recruit, and they are headed to my office. I walk him over to President Slabach’s office, who really enjoys engaging in conversation with recruits and parents.
want that story to be about him next year.
2:30 – 4:30 p.m. We practice on the green lawn of the campus mall. There is such a remarkable history to this place. I spend my time supervising, watching.
4:30 p.m. After practice, I enter my mental notes from practice into Team Works, a management platform for college programs.
5 p.m. Coaches gather for an informal end-of-day wrap-up.
6:45 p.m. I’m heading home and call my dad. I call him every day on my way home.
7 p.m. I meet my wife Amanda for dinner. She has her own vet practice and leaves work late, too. We’ve been married 26 years.
8:30 p.m. My daughter Emily calls to say hi. She is in her second year at Oklahoma.
ahead. I make a mental to-do list.
7:50 a.m. I’m at my desk and start checking email and preparing for our coaching staff meeting.
8:30 a.m. I head over to the Marketing
Noon. Usually I bring my lunch, but today I’m having lunch with an area high school coach. I’m interested in hearing which players he thinks will make a good fit for our program. These relationships and insight are critical.
1:45 p.m. On my way back from lunch, I text a recruit. This is a great kid. I’m hoping he saw our signing day story on the news. I
9 p.m. Amanda and I sit down to watch “NCIS New Orleans.” Our son walks in the door, says “hi,” and raids the refrigerator. He’s moving to New Zealand for an internship. We’ll miss him; our grocery bill won’t.
11 p.m. I’m in bed. I scroll through the local headlines before lights out. I see a story about a high school player I know. I send him a congratulatory text.
Offering more thrills in one place than Nürburgring, you’ll find the finest motorcars and professional service built to outperform the rest. Stop by today for an exhilarating test drive and feel the excitement. Autobahn Fort Worth.
ENGINEERED FOR YOUR ASPIRATIONS.
