YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY

Springfield, MO

Log in Subscribe

Gourley name added to Glass Hall

Posted online

Last edited 1:26 p.m., Oct. 26, 2015

Missouri State University is investing tens of millions of dollars in its College of Business with the support of donors who launched their business careers from the Springfield school.

Among 21 donors who have collectively pledged $5.4 million to expand and renovate David D. Glass Hall – the home of MSU’s College of Business – is a naming-level gift from the Robert Gourley family to create The Robert Gourley Student Success Center.

Gourley, a 1960 business organization and management graduate at MSU, has owned several businesses, including a Coors’ distributorship, Lawrence Photo-Graphic Inc., Heartland Imaging Cos. Inc. and a startup bank in Kansas City. He’s also the author of “Make Money for Bob: The Bottom Line on Entrepreneurship.” Announced as part of an Oct. 15 groundbreaking ceremony, the donation for an undisclosed amount would fund the 37,000-square-foot Robert Gourley Student Success Center planned for the east side of the nearly 30-year-old Glass Hall.

“Having this type of student success center where there are interview rooms, there are a lot of laboratory spaces – will help in all facets of their business education,” MSU Foundation Executive Director Brent Dunn said, adding companies that have sponsored meeting rooms and lab spaces are O’Reilly Automotive Inc., American National, BKD LLP and BKD Wealth Advisors, Central Bank of the Ozarks/Central Trust Co. and Marlin Network.

Dunn said Gourley has been known to donate money over the years to support scholarships at the university, but this is the first time he’s presented the school with a naming-level donation.

Who is Gourley?
Gourley’s first decade in business was spent in corporate sales in Kansas City. But the culture wasn’t for him, and he entered the first of a series of entrepreneurial ventures.

“Like a lot of entrepreneurs, we were told, ‘The sky is the limit.’ But there is a limit to the sky when you’re dealing with corporations,” said Gourley, who first bought a food-brokerage firm.

He grew Lee’s Summit-based R.B. Rice Co. Inc. from a local sausage company to a national business through private labeling. He and partners sold the business, and Gourley pursued a hard-won Coors distributorship in the late 1970s, marking the Golden, Colo., brewery’s entry in Missouri. That business was sold in the early ’80s.

“I was 43 years of age, and I thought I could retire,” Gourley said.

 “Financially, maybe I could, but mentally I couldn’t.”

He bought Lawrence Photo-Graphic in Springfield, and at the time it sold cameras and distributed printing supplies and products. Next was developing Heartland Imaging, a sister company to sell printing supplies. Gourley said it grew from a $25 million business to one worth over $250 million.

“As my wife says, I went from computers to pigs to beer to cameras,” he said.

He later sold Heartland to Fujifilm and with the proceeds started First Business Bank. It would change names and eventually sell to a Canadian firm, said Gourley, who lives in Lee’s Summit.

The business moves led to a book.

“‘Make money for Bob’ is a terrible name for a book,” he said, but he felt obligated because of a story he tells about a frustrating experience he had while trying to grow Heartland.

“I would meet with these major suppliers – Kodak, 3M, people like that – and they’d have a meeting and always spend about two hours telling you about their mission, vision and value statements,” he said.

Gourley said he wasn’t interested in all of that; he was focused on how their companies could make money together. After another meeting where executives belabored its company culture, he told them his employees would share their mission statements in a follow-up meeting. And they did: “We all turned the lapels of our jackets out and the employees had pins that said, ‘Make money for Bob.’ I had a button that flashed and said, ‘I’m Bob.’”

Gourley credits the MSU College of Business for the foundation of his dynamic career.

“This wasn’t just dumb luck,” he said.

“This was the fact that when I got into the business world, I found out that the basic disciplines that I’d been taught of accounting, finance, economics and marketing at the business school at (Missouri State) were as good as anybody taught at Harvard, Yale or anywhere else.”

Transformation from the inside
To continue that trajectory, the Gourley Student Success Center includes a simulated New York Stock Exchange trading floor, entrepreneurship and sales labs, a boardroom, career placement and business advisement center, corporate interview rooms and recruiter space, advertising agency lab and a production studio.

MSU Business Dean Stephanie Bryant said new meeting space was a priority for its 5,300 students – one of the largest public university business schools in the Midwest.

“That’s been probably the single most requested thing by students,” Bryant said. “Students will be able to use those for team meeting rooms.”

With roughly nine business advisory councils throughout the department, she said they typically can’t meet in Glass Hall, which is maxed out with COB classrooms.

“One thing that we heard loud and clear from employers was that they want to be able to interview students on campus after the career fair,” Bryant added.

On Oct. 16, the MSU Board of Governors voted to approve a $26 million construction bid by DeWitt & Associates Inc., as well as several optional action items. The approved upgrades include:
• infill work for executive MBA offices;
• converting second-floor classrooms to offices;
• site work and landscaping;
• turning a closed parking lot into a natural turf area with a sidewalk;
• replacing a cooling tower; and
• energy-efficient LED light fixtures.

“It’s really a transformative project. It is going to transform the experience for our business-school students,” Bryant said. “If you are learning about cyber security in a lecture, that is very different from learning in a cyber-security lab, which we will actually have.”

Comments

No comments on this story |
Please log in to add your comment
Editors' Pick
Open for Business: The Kebab Shack

The Kebab Shack opened; Hitch Goods launched; and The War Zone Springfield moved.

Most Read
Update cookies preferences