Steven Wayne Clark: Conversation starter

Steve Clark, the entrepreneur behind Propak, Inc., and Rockfish Interactive, was named Entrepreneur of the Year in April by the University of Arkansas. On July 17 he will help lead the Winthrop Rockefeller Institutes' Entrepreneurs Bootcamp.
Steve Clark, the entrepreneur behind Propak, Inc., and Rockfish Interactive, was named Entrepreneur of the Year in April by the University of Arkansas. On July 17 he will help lead the Winthrop Rockefeller Institutes' Entrepreneurs Bootcamp.

MULDROW, Okla. -- From the crest of his 1,400-acre cattle ranch, Steve Clark is having a conversation. With you, me, himself -- history.

photo

NWA Democrat-Gazette

Steve Clark, the entrepreneur behind Propak, Inc., and Rockfish Interactive, was named Entrepreneur of the Year in April by the University of Arkansas.

photo

NWA Democrat-Gazette

Steve Clark, the entrepreneur behind Propak, Inc., and Rockfish Interactive, was named Entrepreneur of the Year in April by the University of Arkansas.

"I can remember watching the Apollo" launch, he says.

Steven Wayne Clark

Date and place of birth: July 2, 1964, Dallas

My first job was mowing lawns for The Floral Boutique in Fort Smith.

My worst job was [as a] janitor in college. The Champion Paper building.

What’s always in my refrigerator: Sweet pickles

A talent I covet: Oh, art. I covet anyone that can put what they see in their mind onto paper in a manner that motivates and moves others.

My motto is there’s no cavalry coming. Depending upon the kindness of strangers is not a plan.

I’d like to visit Florence, Italy.

You might be surprised to know I’ve visited Winston Churchill’s bunker. I sat at his desk. The map was still on the wall of Europe and the holes from the pins of where the ships were in the ocean at war’s end. Those [represented] men and women in harm’s way. That all the way to a pig slaughter house in Iowa.

Behind my back they say Who is this guy? What’s his right to do what he wants?”

I’d give anything to have met Sam Walton. And not because I’m an Arkansas homer, but here’s a guy with a vision, who executed that vision, provided millions of jobs — an incredible social example in terms of support to his community. [After him,] Mark Twain and General [Robert E.] Lee.

If I’ve learned one thing in life it’s that people want to know how you do what you do — there’s never a good answer. There’s so much that can’t be explained. So, the degree of success … should be equal to the humility that that person should exhibit.

My friends like me because I’m genuinely interested in what they’re doing, and I usually buy dinner. They probably like me for that. I want to be the friend a friend would want. Consistency.

The one thing women should know about men is that most of us are making it up as we go.

A word to sum me up: Curious

Ahh, the moonshot. That was an epoch. Not like this one -- digital revolution, Great Recession, jobless recovery, blech! Well, wait, let's have that conversation.

"If I can encourage you to think less about the job you'll get versus the job you can make, then I think that begins that conversation," Clark says, and by doing, clues us into what he means by "conversation."

Clark is the entrepreneur behind Fort Smith-based Propak Corp., a provider of commercial warehousing, transportation, packaging and shipping. About the turn of the millennium when he started it, his business plan figured to steadily build the logistics company into a $20 million operation within five years. Propak hit that scale (annualized) before it turned 1.

He went on to co-found Rockfish Interactive, a digital innovation agency, in Fayetteville 10 years ago, and more recently, Noble Impact, a secondary school curriculum based on entrepreneurship. He has an ownership stake in a construction company, and when asked to name a favorite item of clothing, says, "Well, you know, I own a couple of men's and women's clothing stores." (He feels fondly toward his tuxedo.) He's a founding member of the Malala Fund Champion's Circle (as in Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot by the Taliban for wanting girls to go to school), which supports secondary education programs for girls.

Of this brave new world, there is on the one side innovation and billionaires and global connectedness; on the other, receding manufacturing jobs, hourly wages, strength of labor and personal security. Clark doesn't have an answer, but he does have advice: "The people who are counting on the kindness of strangers are going to get their feelings hurt."

This conversation of his is different. Different from other conversations, to be sure, but different even from your notion of conversations. This isn't talk. This is play-by-play for a paradigm shift. In fact, at one point he calls it "conversation casting," as in fishing for the future.

"I can remember when I was the remote control for my dad."

Businesses succeed building us a better remote control. Entrepreneurs imagine the world after remote controls.

Just a few years after Propak -- about the time Clark's $20 million five-year business plan was four years obsolete -- the entrepreneur had lunch across from Kenny Tomlin, who'd started Rockfish. Clark, Tomlin said, had acquired a similar agency, The MacIntosh Group, but was looking to transform it. He had the capital and business acumen and Tomlin the operating vision. Today, Rockfish has nine locations in seven states coast to coast, and roughly 250 employees.

"He lent plenty of business knowledge and business expertise" to Rockfish, says Mike Malone, director of the Northwest Arkansas Council, the regional business and community roundtable.

Carol Reeves, the associate vice provost for entrepreneurship at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, has seen more Rockfish alumni successfully stake out their own firms than people who worked for Wal-Mart. (This is anecdotal. Tomlin himself came up through Wal-Mart.) Clark's "known for mentoring these young people. Like, he's really known for that."

"You find, a lot of time, motivation without talent, or talent without motivation," says Clark himself, "and when you can find that rare breed where talent intersects motivation, that's where you bet. That's where you double down. I would say with a straight face that the principal key to my success is being able to attract talent around me, and keep it around me, at a level far greater than I deserve."

"I asked Steve once if he'd ever done a tree," Reeves says, "like a family tree from Rockfish, because I think he'd be just be shocked at how many startups came from people who worked for [him]."

TAPROOT

Clark will tell you "there's never a good answer" how he got where he is, how he made Propak or Rockfish or Noble Impact. He simply can't explain himself. There's just what you see -- the tree.

He was born in 1964, at the very tail end of the great upswing in American might and innovation. From automobiles to aerospace, and polio vaccination. Men worked a lifetime at leviathans like IBM and RCA and wore white shirts, or aspired to; women enjoyed the "benefits" of increasingly circumscribed domestic chores, such as laundry and cooking. We had the Russians, sure, but we had the best armed forces in the world, and the bomb. Rock 'n' roll and fast food and Hollywood were ascendant. We had the Kennedy presidency -- and the assassination. The world outside looked increasingly fraught with hazards, but in our own neighborhoods and our own clans, it was highballs and high hopes.

Clark was the son of two farming families, although by the time he came along, neither parent worked the land. Jerry Clark was an airman who got into trucking; Kay was a school secretary, St. Scholastica Academy. Sundays meant church, slow-roasted beef, and America's Team on the telly. In high school he got involved in the Future Farmers of America.

"As a youngster he was always well-behaved and did his best to please his mom and dad," says Jerry Clark, who never imagined his son would be a wealthy businessman, and can't explain it.

"Never really gave it a thought. I just worked all my life and assumed the children would do the same."

In a favorite childhood memory, Steve Clark can recall walking in on his mother ironing one day, and she was talking aloud. She was saying a prayer for the wearer of the shirt she was pressing. She did that for everyone in the family -- interceded on behalf of the souls of the bearers of her laundry.

"I can remember reading True Grit at my grandmother's house and talking about the boys coming home from Vietnam."

Clark went to the University of Arkansas and graduated just adequately and moved to Little Rock to work at finance for a trading subsidiary of Stephens, Inc. He married Jamie Moore of Fort Smith and after a couple years her father offered to fold him into the executive ranks at his small trucking company. By 26, he was the guy making presentations to large trade-conference rooms. That company was sold, and he joined the executive ranks of the parent company.

In his early 30s, he was hopping airplanes Monday morning and returning Thursday or Friday. One of those Fridays, he and his colleagues missed their flight home, and "I'm sitting" at an airport bar "kind of facing them ... and the light from the window's hitting them. I loved those guys, but I just had this epiphany -- these fellows who are 15 years older than me, [they are] the future me. This is it."

Not long after, he told his wife that he was leaving the company. Her father, Doug Moore, was going to put up some money, and the couple were, too. Clark was going to start a company, a company that kept him grounded, and home nights for dinner.

"I told Jamie, 'Look, I feel like I can fall backwards over a living,'" and the "kids are young enough that if I'm a terrible disaster, a failure, they'll be too young to remember" and, too, Jamie's "a pharmacist, so that's a backstop."

Today, of course, he would have thought twice about it. We become conservative with age, he posits, "more guarded."

"I've said in other talks, whatever success I've had as an entrepreneur has less to do with some kind of special power and more to do with an underappreciation of the risk at hand."

Then he says, without acknowledging the contradiction, that young people too often "focus on what can go wrong," that "hope and optimism" are not given equal airtime in the mind.

Huh.

Clark is right. There's never a good answer for success.

FORT SMITH FUTURIST

Still, he's asked a lot. A lot. On Friday, he'll give the keynote presentation to the inaugural Winthrop Rockefeller Institute Social Entrepreneurship Boot Camp. Nearly two dozen participants and teams have been invited to Petit Jean Mountain to meet with a half-dozen mentors and incubate their business ideas.

Social entrepreneurship is a business startup for a social good. It's the for-profit handling of a nonprofit mission. Reeves offers Toms shoes as a prominent example; also Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank and microfinancing, providing small startup loans to the poor.

Clark's Noble Impact is an educational curriculum for social entrepreneurialism and business startups that Clark recently got approved by the state Board of Education. He hopes to peddle it to school districts, not just in this state but nationally -- internationally, if the opportunity presents itself.

The practicum kicked off two summers ago with a two-week summer institute for about three dozen students from seven central Arkansas high schools. The students met with business and nonprofit representatives from the Clinton School of Public Service, the Oxford American magazine, the Central Arkansas Library System and others, to brainstorm novel answers to social concerns and create business pitches for them.

"Entrepreneurial education," Clark says, "is this generation's welding."

If that comparison seems unlikely, consider it in the context of Clark's other big social project -- his hometown of Fort Smith. Arkansas' second biggest city once boasted big production plants, transportation yards and gainful employment. It still has the "bones" of that economy, just not the economy.

"I can remember when you had to call the office to get your messages." Today, with laptops and smartphones, your messages get you.

Clark's no atavist, though. A few years ago he saw, through the enthusiasm of his son Andy, that Fort Smith could be a destination for skateboarders. The two built Boardertown Skate Shop and park -- the former a 3,000-square-foot equipment retailer, the latter a 10,000-square-foot indoor course designed by Team Pain (so, um, you know it's good?).

"I was intrigued by the skateboarding scene because these kids are naturally creative, natural risk takers -- not anarchists -- but good at creating their own environment," and his young son could learn every aspect of running a business, from inventory and spreadsheets to dealing with vendors.

The attendant art -- canvas, concrete; medium, spray paint -- got Clark further thinking about making the hometown of Judge Isaac Parker and lawman Bass Reeves a destination for street art and murals. This September, Clark and his people are planning something called The Unexpected Festival that, among other things, will showcase plans for public art projects. The festival will "create an art experience" for the city that, at least momentarily, in spirit, will challenge the supremacy of the big art museum an hour up the interstate.

"I'm anticipating half of you won't like it, and I'm OK with that, because then we have a conversation."

Recently, Clark bought the three-story Friedman-Min­cer building in Fort Smith and hopes to move his Propak management team into the top floors just before the festival (leaving the ground floor for retail). It was a $2 million-$3 million renovation, and Propak's first "home." It was also a business move with social motives: a vote of confidence in downtown. In a news story last year announcing the plan, he used the word "conversation" -- as in, this purchase takes the conversation about Fort Smith in the right direction.

Not everyone can have a conversation about entrepreneurialism. It's unlike welding because it requires more than vocational training and state certification to call yourself "an entrepreneur." You need drive and smarts, but also luck and secrets, too.

Wait, secrets? No.

"So many people are disappointed when they find out [there's no secret]. If you can help other people achieve their goals and do it in a manner that is casual and conversational, it comes back in [on you] wave upon wave. It's being able to understand another person, what gets them out of bed in the morning.

"Everybody has an idea."

NAN Profiles on 07/12/2015

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