Professional services founders in Northwest Arkansas

Every company needs lawyers, marketers, tradespeople and advisors, and as Northwest Arkansas has added companies, the firms that do that work have had to keep up. Most of the agencies, law practices, trades operators and advisors on this page grew by following their clients. Nine conversations make this the show's joint second-largest industry group, and the range is wide: an event production company working national stages, a bootstrapped sampling business, a 46-attorney law firm, a business and private wealth law practice, a home services operator that grew tenfold, a national consulting firm for design and construction companies, a public relations agency, a site services contractor and an executive coach.

The operators grew fast. Charley Boyce joined Paschal Air, Plumbing and Electric in Springdale in 2010, when it had twelve to fifteen people, and bought it in 2012. It now runs more than 200 people, 80 vehicles and eight locations. Alex Blass bought a small landscaping company with an SBA loan and built it into Blue Ribbon Industries in Fayetteville, a site services, landscaping and trucking operation whose largest business, Blue Ribbon Outdoors, has about 80 to 85 employees. His wife Lauren joined later from a corporate consumer goods career. Cameron Magee started avad3 in Lowell in 2011 out of a dorm room and built an event production company that now works Fortune 500 stages. Joseph Reece co-founded RMP in 2005, and the Springdale business law firm now has 46 attorneys across four offices. Jim Smith and Rebecca Hurst co-founded Smith Hurst in Rogers in 2011, a business and private wealth law firm that bills by the hour rather than taking a success fee, so its advice never rides on whether a deal closes.

The advisory side is deep for a region this size. Mark Zweig founded Zweig Group in Fayetteville in 1988, built it into a national consulting and media firm for architecture, engineering and construction companies, sold it to private equity in 2004 and later bought it back. His companies have made the Inc. 500 or 5000 list four times, and he serves as an executive in residence at the University of Arkansas Walton College. Steve Graves has spent nearly four decades coaching chief executives and founders through Cornerstone Coaching in Fayetteville, has written more than twenty books, and holds ownership in about six companies. Andrea Ritchie and Mary Mickel run AM Group, the Fayetteville communications agency formerly known as Resplendent Arkansas, which specializes in hospitality clients and reports 60 percent year-over-year growth. Bethany Taylor left a corporate job to bootstrap Gratsy in Bentonville in 2019 and posted three straight years of triple-digit growth.

Every business on this page sells a service rather than a product, so many of these conversations come down to how they price, hire and keep clients. Boyce and Blass talk about recruiting tradespeople in a tight labor market. Reece talks about building a law firm partners actually want to work in, and Smith and Hurst about keeping their advice independent of the deals they work on. Zweig and Graves have each advised hundreds of companies and are blunt about what usually goes wrong. Taylor, Ritchie and Mickel talk about winning work from the brands and hospitality groups based here. If you sell your expertise for a living, there's a lot to learn from them. The nine conversations below run newest first.