Rogers, AR founders on the NWA Founders podcast

Rogers is where a lot of Northwest Arkansas's operating businesses live. It isn't the headquarters city or the university city. It's the city of companies that sell, build, staff, bank and roast. With thirteen conversations, it's the show's second-largest city archive, and five of the ten most recent episodes came out of Rogers. Seventeen founders on the show are based here.

The Walmart supplier world is well represented. Ross Cully of Harvest Group, an agency past 250 employees, was the show's very first guest. Allisha Watkins built Paradox Retail, a certified women-owned agency for brands that sell through Walmart. On the consumer side there's Onyx Coffee Lab, the roaster Andrea Allen co-founded, ranked the top coffee shop in North America in 2025, and Hubbard Clothing, the menswear shop Donny Hubbard has grown by buying other local stores. Eric Howerton built and sold WhyteSpyder here and now runs AdFury.ai from Rogers.

Real estate and construction run deep here. Marshall Saviers leads Cushman & Wakefield | Sage Partners, a sponsor of this show. Clinton Bennett runs Focus Commercial Real Estate. Collier and Associates grew from two people to 250 agents across four offices in about ten years. David Harris has built custom homes since 1994.

Then there are the institutions. Generations Bank, led by Jon and Max Harrell, has been family owned since 1907. Taylor Faught's TRS Healthcare staffs nurses nationwide from its Rogers headquarters. PBS, an office technology company, was founded in 1986 and has been owned by the Mawby family since 1996.

Very few of these are startups in the Silicon Valley sense. They're operating businesses with payrolls, fleets, branches and long client lists, and that's what Rogers brings to the Northwest Arkansas economy. If you want to understand how the region works day to day, start here. The thirteen conversations below cover seven industries and run newest first.