Finance founders in Northwest Arkansas

Finance in Northwest Arkansas grew up around the companies that built the region. The capital here was made in retail, poultry, trucking and land, and the firms that manage it were built to serve families and companies that plan in decades. You can hear that in the five conversations on this page: a bank chartered in 1907, a wealth management firm founded in 1982, a venture-backed farmland platform, a fund raised to keep Arkansas capital in Arkansas, and a software company that sells to community banks.

The institutions come first. Generations Bank in Rogers, led by Jon and Max Harrell, has been family owned since 1907 and is now run by its fifth and sixth generations, with about $1.06 billion in assets across ten branches as of 2026. Brock Gearhart leads Greenwood Gearhart, a sponsor of this show, the Fayetteville registered investment advisor founded in 1982 that manages about $2 billion. Neither episode is really about markets. They're about who leads next in a family business, and how a firm keeps its clients' trust when it passes to the next generation.

The newer money will be more familiar to anyone who follows startups. Carter Malloy founded AcreTrader in Fayetteville in 2018 to make farmland investable the way securities are, raised a Series B of more than $60 million in 2022, and built Acres.com alongside it. Brad Henry runs Natural Capital, a private investment firm co-founded in 2019 with Brock Gearhart, Marshall Saviers and the Simmons family, all of whom appear elsewhere on this show. Its second fund closed at $80 million in 2023. Joe Ehrhardt started what became Teslar Software in Springdale after the 2008 financial crisis, and it now sells lending and portfolio workflow software to community banks across the country.

Together they show how money actually moves through a region this size. Gearhart and the Harrells talk about the problems that only show up after decades in business. Malloy and Henry talk about raising outside money for assets most funds pass over. Ehrhardt talks about building software for an industry where every release has a regulator on the other side. Finance here is much wider than this page, and several of the region's banks, insurers and family offices haven't been on the show yet. The five conversations below run newest first.