Hightower daughter wants her dad's job
Stephanie Hightower has been a part of her family's enterprises since she was 14,
so it feels natural to her to be at the center of the business as a young adult.
She and her father, Stephen Hightower, say they make
a good team.
"It's obviously an asset to have someone in your family who - No.1 - you can trust, who works hard and who has an interest in accomplishing work the way it should be done," Stephen Hightower said. "That allows me to be out of town and have someone handling the business effectively."
Stephanie, 27, is the second of seven children and the only one employed in one of the four Hightower companies - as customer-service manager for Hi-Mark Group Inc. and corporate secretary.
A brother and her sister were involved full time for a while but have returned to school to finish their educations.
Hi-Mark Group is a national distributor of industrial supplies, food-service equipment and food to corporations. The Hightowers also own Hi-Mark Construction Group, which provides construction management; Hightowers Petroleum, which supplies gas and diesel fuel across the country, and Hi-Mark Building Group, a design-build general contractor.
"When we were growing up, my father brought us in, and we worked summers," she said. "He introduced us to the family business and grounded us in it."
After attending college for a year, in 1997 Stephanie had an opportunity to join the Hi-Mark Group as a customer-service manager. She has worked her way up, complementing her father's entrepreneurial nature with her own grasp of business fundamentals and attention to detail. She has successfully negotiated contracts with Procter & Gamble and Aramark, the State of Ohio, and several Indiana casinos.
"Stephanie has a good base of understanding of the business and how it should be run," said her father. "I see her developing into a business owner in time, but right now she's more of a nuts-and-bolts individual, hands on. She sells well over the phone and manages the systems, and that's where she finds her level of comfort."
The Hightower family owns several interrelated businesses that have grown from a janitorial-supply company launched by Stephen's father, Yudell, in 1957. Like Yudell, Stephen Hightower has instilled an entrepreneurial spirit in his children.
"My father has always shown us that we can work on our own," Stephanie Hightower explained. "Since we were in elementary school he entered us in oratorical contests, in addition to having us work in the company every summer. He made sure we had what we needed to prepare for successful futures."
"I've been fortunate to have good kids, and the synergies with them have always been good," said Stephen Hightower. "Maybe that's because the synergy between my father and myself has been good all these years. We don't conflict, we work well together, and we take care of any differences without creating problems."
Stephanie's goal? To own and run Hi-Mark Group Inc. someday.
"My dad followed in his father's footsteps," she said. "I have always wanted to do the same."
Jenny Callison
A successful business model
When Steve Hightower got into the fuel business in the 1980s, his was a "minority company," a designation that helped it bring in state money set aside to help people like him succeed.
That particular program is no longer in place.
But Hightower is.
As is his Middletown-area company, Hightowers Petroleum Co., which has seen success that transcends any label.
"Many people failed," said the CEO and president of Hightowers Petroleum, reflecting on the fate of the minority companies that went under once the government money ran out. "Companies like myself are now in a more mature state." Hightowers Petroleum actually grew out of the family's large janitorial business that was founded in the 1950s.
To Hightower, a 48-year-old who grew up in Middletown, this is part of what will help the black communities in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky grow and thrive in the coming years: Black business owners have reached a stable point where they can now serve as role modells and employers for young black people, beginning a cycle that could run infinitely.
"Because you now have that mature sector of small African-American businesses and then you have a few at the very top," he said, "now you have a basis of bringing other people in. We're at a stage now where we can hire people out of our community, [and] people of color who worked in our company now go out and start their own companies."
So Hightower expects another surge of black business owners to come along, a wave that will inevitably inspire another, and so on.
"Once you know that you also can have a 10-story office building full of people and be African-American, then you've got something to strive for," Hightower said. "The more role modells and the more successes in our community, the more opportunity for other people to modell our successes."
Fusing concepts can open doors. (Dec 21,2003)
That has certainly been the case with Hightowers Petroleum Co., a Middletown-area business that has taken off since president Stephen L. Hightower fused the power of e-commerce with the principles of supply chain management.
Hightower inherited his entrepreneurial mind-set from his father, Yudell, who ran a large janitorial company in Middletown. He started his own construction site cleanup company in 1979. About a year later, when the State of Ohio enacted a minority set-aside program for vendors, Hightower established a second company, Landmark Supply, that bought and sold goods and services to the state. Fuel was part of that contract. Landmark built a relationship with Lykins Oil in Miami Township, which supplied fuel for the minority-owned company.
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