Answering the Call
By David Jackson • Photo by Nino Cocchiarella

For weeks before the news broke in January that the national shoe retailer, Shoe Carnival Inc., had decided to launch a $40 million expansion project in Evansville, Evan Beck knew how fragile the deal was.

Economic development officials in Kentucky had been aggressively wooing the company for months, attempting to lure it across the river and away from the city where its founder, David H. Russell, had launched the multimillion-dollar empire from its modest beginnings as a single shoe store in 1978.

Beck, president of Woodward Commercial Realty, had helped put together the deal to keep Shoe Carnival in town, but was operating under a confidentiality agreement. He couldn't say a word publicly about the deal – or his fears that the city might lose it – until the morning of a special meeting of the Vanderburgh County Council, called to approve a tax-incentive package key to the project. While the council had earlier indicated its support, Beck couldn't rest easy until Shoe Carnival's Chief Executive Officer Mark Lemond laid out details of the project.

Shoe Carnival, Lemond told the council, was ready to build a new corporate headquarters and a 410,000-square foot distribution center that would more than double the size of its current facility and add 150 new jobs to its payroll. It was build or move, Lemond said, since Shoe Carnival – which had tripled the number of its stores in less than a decade, had maxed out the number of shoes they could process in the current distribution center. Shoe Carnival's plan to again triple the number of stores hinged on the expansion project.

Beck's company had done more than just offer to find some land. To pull off the project, the 35-year-old Beck and his partner, Woodward's Vice President of Development Steve Kahre, had convinced Shoe Carnival that their company's development arm, Woodward Development and Construction Inc., could build the facilities to its specs. The two also created a new entity, Big-Shoe Properties, LLC, to act as a real estate holding company that would own the land and the buildings to be leased to Shoe Carnival.

A year earlier, Beck had chaired an ad hoc business committee that helped the County Council craft a scoring system to evaluate requests for the kinds of tax incentives Shoe Carnival was seeking. Beck had also made sure the new guidelines contained enforcement provisions to deter companies granted the incentives from breaking their promises to provide more jobs in exchange for the tax breaks. Two weeks after the guidelines were adopted, the Metropolitan Evansville Chamber of Commerce honored Beck as its Businessperson of the Year at its annual meeting. He was hailed as an advocate and a leader, someone who went "above and beyond the normal call of duty," to promote the cause of commerce.

After Lemond's presentation to the County Council, Shoe Carnival's tax-incentive package was unanimously approved. Two months later Beck was still operating under a confidentiality agreement, and declined to talk about details of the deal or his role in it. But at the Chamber awards meeting last year, his peers – many of whom had witnessed how Beck had guided his company after the tragic death of his predecessor – praised him. Reviewing his success, many may have been thinking: Not bad for a guy who moved to Evansville to teach golf lessons.

Beck was 23 when he arrived in Evansville in the spring of 1994 engaged to his soon-to-be wife, Allison, and recently graduated from Murray State University, to take a job as the assistant golf pro at the Evansville Country Club. A business management major who'd played golf for the MSU Racers, Beck thought he'd found a way to meld his love of golf and his newly minted degree into a career. Within six months, he realized he was in the wrong profession.

"What I learned was that while I enjoyed playing golf, I did not enjoy ‘working' golf, " Beck says. "Everything has a purpose, though, and I was fortunate to find out early that working as a golf professional wouldn't allow me to fulfill my aspirations for being involved in the creative side of business."

What golf did do was to create relationships, and open the doors to other opportunities. Beck says six months on the ECC golf course lead to a network of invaluable contacts in the city. By February of 1995, he was in the management-training program at Old National Bank. He rotated through the various business units there, eventually landing in the commercial lending division. Beck soon became the point man for the bank's business with a commercial real estate company owned by Bob Woodward Sr. and his son, Bob Jr. The elder Woodward had started Woodward Commercial Realty in 1987 as a real estate sales and auction company, after taking early retirement from his job as a comptroller and regional manager for Sears in Chicago.

The relationship between Beck and the Woodwards grew as Beck lent financial guidance and support to a series of real estate acquisitions – most notably along the Interstate

164 corridor just east of Evansville. In essence, Woodward Commercial Realty was staking its future on an area that was mile upon mile of uninterrupted farmland.

"It was an exciting time for the company's growth and I spoke with Bob Sr. and Jr. on almost a daily basis," Beck says. "I was very hands-on and we developed a very deep relationship."

Then one day, in the spring of 1999, Bob Woodward Jr., asked Beck to meet him and his father at O'Charley's restaurant on Evansville's East Side for lunch. "I didn't think anything about it because we were meeting all the time," Beck says.

This meeting would be different. Woodward Sr. was looking to ease into retirement and his son, who'd taken on the mantle of president of Woodward Commercial Realty, had recommended Beck be brought in as a minority partner and vice president of development.

The elder Woodward at first blanched at the idea. "I told Junior that the worst thing you could do was bring in somebody you couldn't fire, and Evan and Bob Jr. had become very good friends,'' Woodward Sr. recalls. "He convinced me that Evan was the guy, though."

The offer caught Beck off-guard. "I was stunned," he said. "We'd just sat down to eat and Bob said, ‘We're not going to talk about projects, we're going to talk about your future.' It was a total shock. I saw myself as a lifer at ONB."

Soon Beck realized that the Woodwards were offering him what he'd long wanted: To become involved in the entrepreneurial side of business.

It hadn't been easy for Woodward Sr. to let go control of a company he was building into a major player in commercial development. It'd been a long road getting there. Woodward Sr. had dropped out of high school at the age 15, when he thought he needed a job more than an education. There were no doubt times during his five-hour turns of shoveling coal into the stoker at the local Sears retail store that he reconsidered his move, but with the encouragement of his employers, he finished high school, took some college classes and ultimately worked his way up to a management job in the Sears Tower in Chicago.

Daily commutes to the Loop from his suburban home, as well as his future responsibilities as a regional manager working out of Evansville, demanded huge chunks of Woodward's time, he recalls. But he devoted his weekends to his only child.

"Bobby and I always had a terrific relationship," Woodward Sr. recalls. "My work required a lot of travel and there was a lot of time I wasn't home, but the weekend was ours. We'd go camping or hiking or flying – whatever he wanted to do. It didn't matter what it was. The only important thing was that we were doing it together."

It was just before Bob Jr. graduated from college that Woodward Sr. decided life was too short to continue on the career path that had taken him so far. He took an early retirement buyout package from Sears and established Woodward Commercial Realty in partnership with his son.

"We talked about how we'd get out of the business if there ever came a time where it affected our relationship," Woodward Sr. says. "By that time we had become more friends than father and son and there was nothing in the world that was worth jeopardizing that. Looking back, it was never really an issue."

The two built their business upon a relatively simple concept: The person who has the land gets the deal. Woodward Sr. shaped the company with the same philosophy embraced at Sears. "I thought you had to have full shelves to be able to make the sale," he says. The concept was a simple one: If a potential customer is shopping around for somewhere to build his business, the chances of making the sale are dramatically increased if he can be shown a ready listing of available properties. The company flourished, and by the spring of 2001, Woodward Sr. was spending more time at his vacation home in Florida, and had taken a back seat in the company's operations, having entrusted it to his then 32-year-old son and the 31-year-old Beck.

Then the call came. Late in the afternoon of March 24, 2001, Beck's cell phone rang. On the other end was Woodward, Sr., struggling to speak.

"I knew who it was because I saw the number on my cell, and when he couldn't bring himself to talk I knew what had happened," Beck recalls. "Everything changed immediately."

What had happened was the death of Bob Jr., killed that afternoon in a crash while piloting a single-engine Cessna plane. He'd rented the plane at the Evansville Regional Airport earlier in the day to check out some family-owned farm property near Dixon, Ky. When he left the airport, he said he'd be back in a half-hour, well in time to get home before dark to his wife Gayla, and their three young children. He never made it home...

Read the rest of this story in the April/May issue!