Brandmeyer family's timing is money on sale of Enturia
Kansas City Business Journal - by Rob Roberts Staff Writer
Media
Timing is everything. Just ask the Brandmeyer family, which is celebrating the first anniversary of its sale of Enturia Inc.
Enturia founders Joe and Jeanne Brandmeyer and their eight children sold the Leawood-based company to Cardinal Health Inc. in May 2008 for $490 million. That’s 89 times more than Joe paid Marion Laboratories for the line of antiseptic applicators that he launched the company with in 1985.
If the family had sold a bit earlier, a significant portion of the proceeds probably would have been invested — and lost — in the stock market, said Bill Brandmeyer, former director of new business development at Enturia. If they had waited longer to sell, the recession would have scotched the deal, he said.
As it stands, family members are applying their uncanny sense of timing — and a boatload of cash — to a new round of entrepreneurial ventures, ranging from restaurants and real estate to collegiate recruiting and technology firms.
Bill Brandmeyer said he and each of his siblings received roughly 5 percent of the sale proceeds, “so it’s safe to say that we each feel like we won the lottery.” But the proceeds weren’t so great that family members no longer have to make good business decisions, Bill Brandmeyer said. Therefore, he chose an innovative path to his longtime dream of becoming a restaurateur.
B. Branded LLC, a Lenexa company he launched, will open two restaurants at The Legends at Village West in Kansas City, Kan., this month in partnership with K.C. Hopps Ltd., which owns or manages 10 other area restaurants. What’s unusual is that the partnership is reopening two closed restaurants with similar-but-improved decor and cuisine, Bill Brandmeyer said.
The former Corona Cantina #1 will reopen on May 5 as Los Cabos, A Mexican Restaurant & Rooftop Fiesta. The former Saddle Ranch Chop House will reopen May 18 as The Legendary Wild Fire Steakhouse & Saloon.
“Both of these restaurants closed for different reasons,” K.C. Hopps Chairman Ed Nelson said. “But they were both high-volume, premium locations in a successful retail-entertainment district, and our ability to come in and be second saved us a tremendous amount.”
Mark Brandmeyer, former senior vice president of sales at Enturia, also has entered the restaurant business through an investment in Zest, a trendy new eatery in Leawood’s Mission Farms development. But he is not involved in running Zest. Rather, he spends much of his time consulting for his father-in-law’s concrete business and looking for commercial properties to buy through a new company called Valmar Investments.
“We haven’t pulled the trigger on anything yet,” he said. “But we have some offers out there. It’s a good time to be buying real estate.”
John Brandmeyer, former director of business planning for Enturia, began investing in multifamily properties about three years ago, when he and a partner, Todd Ladish, bought an 18-unit apartment complex in northeast Kansas City.
The partners subsequently formed Celtic Property Management, which puts together ownership groups and manages the properties.
John Brandmeyer said he now has a stake in groups that own 150 units. A group he has a stake in is about to close on an 80-unit complex in Grandview that at least four of his siblings are investing in.
He also spends a lot of time working at Brandmeyer Enterprises, a business established to help manage his parents’ portfolio and to vet potential new investment deals.
Brandmeyer Enterprises is led by Steve Braun, a former Enturia CFO, and Diarmuid Boran, a former vice president of corporate development for Enturia. It forms a limited liability corporation for each opportunity that passes muster, and each family member can decide whether to invest.
John Brandmeyer said the family has used that mechanism to invest in three local tech startups: AthletixNation Inc., Mygistics Inc. and EcoFit Lighting.
Brandmeyer Enterprises is in the Pine Ridge Business Park in Lenexa, where Matt Brandmeyer runs College Coaches Network, an online service that helps get high school athletes’ recruiting videos in front of college coaches.
Matt Brandmeyer, a former marketing manager at Enturia who owns 20 percent of College Coaches Network, said it was launched three years ago and has grown dramatically through family investments since the Enturia sale. With 2,200 college coaches and 2,000 high school athletes now using the network, there is great potential for spinoff services, he said.
Other Brandmeyer siblings who have benefited from the Enturia sale are Robert Brandmeyer, who is investing in real estate in El Paso, Texas; Lynn Beaver, who has invested in her husband’s Johnson County landscaping business; Keisha Meeter, who is building a home and raising horses in Lake Quivira; and Becky Minion, who bought a ranch near Jackson, Wyo., and is working on a doctorate in psychology.
According to their parents, who split time between homes in Mission Hills and El Paso, most of their children seem to have inherited the entrepreneurial gene that Joe Brandmeyer inherited from his father, a wholesale meat business owner.
