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