2013 Lifetime Achievement in Business: Bill Foster

The secret is out on Bill Foster.

The entrepreneur who has been called “Springfield’s best-kept secret” received the Springfieldian and Missourian awards in recent years, and he is Springfield Business Journal’s 2013 Lifetime Achievement in Business Award honoree, following the likes of John Q. Hammons, Jack Stack and Sam Hamra.

Yet, Foster and his family business still manage to fly under the radar to a degree.

Foster Hospitality Group LLC operates eight assisted living properties under the Culpepper Place name, but only two are in Springfield – on East Cherokee Street and in Chesterfield Village. The company operates one each in Branson and Nevada, and four in Arkansas. A ninth facility is underway in Collierville, Tenn., outside of Memphis, an area that CEO Foster is targeting for growth, along with Oklahoma.

The corporate office resides on the third floor of a nondescript downtown building, 426 S. Jefferson Ave. Inside, CEO Foster shares a narrow but wide-open office with his son, John. A conference table, covered with engineering plans for senior living developments in Tennessee and Arkansas, divides the father and son’s workspaces.

Foster’s senior health care enterprise – which peaked at 15 facilities in 1997 and currently employs 270 with a $6.5 million annual payroll – started with the launch of a small laundromat on North Broadway Avenue at the ripe age of 22.

“I didn’t think much about that,” says the 85-year-old Foster, sitting at his conference table, about the evolution from Foster’s Help Yourself Laundry in the late 1940s to Foster Hospitality Group today. “I just needed to get up, go to work every day and do my best.”

Foster’s father encouraged him to respond to an advertisement for washing services, and the Springfield Senior High School graduate who just returned from a stint as a merchant marine invested about $8,000 to buy a parcel from the Ollis family and build a structure to house his eight Maytag washing machines.

“I put one of those little tubes out there so I could hear a car when it rolled in,” Foster says. “I would run out there and grab their basket of clothes before they could get away. I helped them out whatever way I could – carried all their clothes in, carried them out wet, whatever I could to get the job done.”

Soda stand lessons
By his late 20s, Foster also owned a nursing home and a soda stand. The Foster Nursing Home, which grew to 100 beds, spawned developments in hospitality and health care. However, his ownership of Sam’s Root Beer stand provided a big lesson for the young entrepreneur.

On Glenstone Avenue property rented from family friend Arch Bay, Foster says the stand was buzzing with sales and activity in its first year during the summer months. “I thought it would never end – until September and the kids went back to school, October rolled around and it started to snow in December,” he recalls. “I was out of business. I had to close it up. No one could get there; it was just frozen.”

To make matters worse, Foster says he received on offer to sell the business in August. The lesson learned: “When you have a buyer, maybe it’s a good time to make the sale,” he says.

Foster dabbled in the hotel industry, building four properties before selling them.

“It’s not the kind of business I like,” he says. “We’re dealing with people and people’s needs. It feels good when you’re able to help out.”

While Foster turns 86 on Aug. 29, he reports to the office daily and continues the same work ethic that got his laundromat business off the ground.

He wakes up at 3 a.m. each day to check the stock market and goes back to sleep until 6:30 a.m. “I own positions in dividend-paying stocks,” he says, noting he’ll check the markets again around their morning openings.

Foster says he depends on the monthly or quarterly dividend payments to recapitalize his business.

“Dividend stocks pay me to own them and I like that,” he says, rattling off tickers PSCC, PHK, AGNC and CYS. “They usually treat you well. Any other stocks, I always wind up a loser. I hate to say it.”

Noting he’s bullish on the housing market with positions in Lennar Corp. and Louisiana-Pacific Corp., Foster says he’s not much of a risk taker and he doesn’t trade that often.

“I buy something with the idea it’s going to go up. It never does. I buy it, it goes down. I sell it, it goes down,” he says. “But the dividend-paying stocks just ride along.”

Family affair
Foster relies on family members and longtime employees – such as development manager Chuck Wente and accountant Greg Smith – to keep business humming. Four of his five children with first wife, Eva, who died of a heart attack in 1975, work in the family business. John and Susan Foster manage facilities and hire staff, while Tony handles the company’s real estate and Kay Foster-Gibson oversees construction budgets. Foster’s son Mark helps out in a variety of areas, he says, and wife Juanitha serves as office manager. “I just walked through the door and never left,” she jokes.

On the development docket is the $9 million project in Collierville that will create 67 units across 63,500 square feet. Foster and Wente review construction photos daily, and when it wraps, the facility will be the largest in the Foster family business. The company also has 24 acres under contract in Bartlett, Tenn., on the west side of Memphis.

“We’re trying to build three in Tennessee,” he says, adding Edmond, Okla., is a target market and the firm plans to add a memory care facility alongside its 67-unit Fayetteville, Ark., assisted living home on 24 acres.

Foster says he has no retirement plans and will work “till they carry me out of here.”

“I enjoy it,” he says. “What we do is good work.”[[In-content Ad]]