For three past Mr. K Award winners, the honor has provided validation and deepened their connections in the Kansas City community.
The Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce’s Mr. K Award is named after Ewing Kauffman, the entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Marion Laboratories and the Kansas City Royals.
Mr. K winners, who are chosen by an independent judging panel, must showcase how they embrace Kauffman’s values, which include fostering growth, taking care of employees and giving back to the community.
The Kansas City Business Journal caught up with three past winners to find out how the Mr. K honor shaped their business:
- Kansas City-based Bishop-McCann LLC (2014 winner) – founded in 1997 and produces meetings, incentive programs and events worldwide
- Kansas City-based Pro Athlete Inc. (2020 winner) – founded in 1986 and is an e-commerce retailer that sells bats, gloves, pickleball paddles and apparel
- Overland Park-based Sunlighten (2008 winner) – founded in 1999 and develops and sells several infrared sauna lines; it also has more than 20 patents.
Benefits of the application process
Pro Athlete CEO Andrew Dowis said the award gave him a chance to reflect on his business and showcase its values.
“I think that process is one of the best things you can do for your business because we are all so caught up in the day to day of growing our business that we don’t take a chance to call a timeout and look back on things we accomplished together as an organization,” Dowis said.
Pro Athlete, which applied three times, also got to look at its business through a different lens, thanks to the judges, Dowis said. They provided suggestions on how to improve and outlined what stood out when Pro Athlete won in 2020.
“The timing couldn’t have been more perfect, given everything that was going on in the world,” he said. “It was great for our employees involved in the application process to fill out the questions and be reminded of what kind of business we’re trying to run here. It was very helpful during a pretty dark time in the world.”
Sunlighten co-owner Connie Zack said the process helped the company realize its accomplishments and strengths, including a focus on employee perks.
The goals that Bishop-McCann outlined in the application helped founder Dan Nilsen communicate his vision to then-incoming CEO Rob Adams, who’s still with the company. The Mr. K honor intrigued Adams and further cemented his interest in joining.
“How is this company growing so fast based on principles?” said Adams, who previously was general manager of Microsoft Dynamics Canada, where he earned the Microsoft Platinum Club distinction for being among the top 1% across Microsoft in terms of performance, leadership, sales and innovation. “It aligns with the things that really matter to me.”
The award also brought Nilsen’s entrepreneurial journey full circle, said Nilsen, who got his start at Marion Labs and witnessed Kauffman’s business values firsthand. At one point, Nilsen was a district manager overseeing the Los Angeles market. He planned to become a lifer at the company but was laid off after a series of mergers and acquisitions.
“It was a really tough day, but it also ended up being one of the best days of my life as well because it gave me the chance to spread my wings and do something completely different, which was start my own business,” he said. “Bishop-McCann really was founded on the same values that Mr. K taught us.”
Deeper connections
The Mr. K Award winner is chosen from among the chamber’s Top 10 Small Businesses, and the awards process creates “cool collaborations” among the companies, Dowis said. They regularly ask one another for advice and help one another succeed, which “inevitably, helps Kansas City succeed.”
“You felt like you weren’t alone, which was such a great feeling to meet with all these other business leaders who were going through the same things we were,” Sunlighten’s Connie Zack said. “It was a really great outlet and excellent networking opportunity.”
Both Connie Zack and her husband and Sunlighten co-owner, Aaron Zack, have stayed in touch with the Top 10 Small Businesses. Aaron Zack said he’s met some of his closest friends through the process, including Tucker Trotter, CEO of Dimensional Innovations. For 10-plus years, the two have met monthly for lunch to catch up and talk about their businesses.
“A lot of times just hearing how he handles different things would give me ideas on what I could do at Sunlighten and vice versa. It was a fun way for us to cross-collaborate,” he said.
Motivation to survive
The award solidified Sunlighten’s relationship with its employees, which became vital as it navigated the Great Recession, a new business model and launching a product prematurely, Connie Zack said.
With the new product, the company encountered manufacturing issues, which caused shipment delays to customers. The company struggled to keep pace with demand, and the Zacks worried it would affect the company’s reputation. Employees trusted the company to find a way to overcome the challenges, he said.
“One of the elements that kept us really focused on perseverance and resilience — the keep going aspect — was in the past several years, we had received this wonderful honor,” she said. “And it was our responsibility to continue to fight through and make it to the other side of our challenges because we were not going to be one of those Mr. K winners that wasn’t able to keep going. We were going to fight through it, and we did. It was part of the fuel we needed. On the darkest of days where it was hard to see any light, that was one of the shining lights that kept us going.”
Sunlighten has since grown to 150-plus employees with offices in China, Vietnam, India and the UK.
During the pandemic, Bishop-McCann lost 90% of its revenue within two weeks and was faced with tough business decisions, Nilsen said. It’s easy to live out Mr. K’s values when things are going well, but it’s “so much more challenging” in hard times, he said.
“As you’re thinking about how we’re going to ensure that the company and the people are going to be OK, those values never go away,” Nilsen said.
The company embraced its values, and a litmus test for decisions became, “Is our intent right?” Adams said.
When Bishop-McCann furloughed employees to keep the company afloat, it still paid for health insurance. Although its employee base is down to 58, it plans to reach 100 again this year. Revenue is on track to grow 110% this year, and Nilsen and Adams are readying for a record 2022.
How did the company’s values pay off? Adams answered with two words: “We survived.”
