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Richard Casavant
The three Chattanooga men honored this year by the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame at UTC’s College of Business all share a common characteristic — perseverance.
The two living inductees — George Pettway and Anthony “Tony’’ Vest — along with the late Joe Engel, the former Chattanooga Lookouts owner, all showed persistent determination in making their respective businesses work, even when it was not easy.
“Perseverance is important in any field,” said Dr. Richard Casavant, dean of the College of Business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Dr. Casavant said many successful entrepreneurs experienced a time when they would have gotten out if they could have recovered their investment. Instead of selling out, they worked their way out of it and are now successful, he said.
Mr. Pettway, Mr. Vest and Mr. Engel were chosen by past inductees into the hall of fame and will be honored in a private ceremony Thursday night.
The hall of fame recognizes both entrepreneurial pioneers and contemporaries. Joe Engel, who led the Chattanooga Lookouts baseball team for 34 years, was a true pioneer, Dr. Casavant said.
Mr. Engel died in 1969 at age 76. During various Lookouts games he raffled off a house and had players enter the stadium atop elephants.
His promotions were such a success with fans that when he struggled finding the cash to buy the team in 1936, he convinced fans to invest the $125,000 he needed. The move tripled attendance.
Mr. Pettway spent his early career working for a Fortune 500 company, where he said he learned a great deal about what it takes to be successful in business.
“You gain experience — you gain experience dealing with people and your confidence is increased considerably,” Mr. Pettway said from his home in Naples, Fla. “With an entrepreneur you just have to hang in there, you go forever without a payday. How long can you stand that? If you don’t have the confidence to stay there and quit too soon, its not going to work.”
With River Associates LLC, the private equity firm he started in Chattanooga in 1989, four years passed before there was a dime of compensation, he said.
Mr. Vest experienced similar challenges on his way to owning several successful businesses, including a resort community in Jackson Hole, Wyo. The first generation in his family to graduate from college, he owes a small part of that success to a taunt from a buddy in high school in Kingsport, Tenn.
“Kind of on a dare, I decided to major in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee, mostly because my classmates kidded me about being a dumb football player,” he said.
Mr. Vest got that engineering degree and went to work for General Electric, where he spent 15 years. He took what he learned at GE and started his own engineering services firm, doing work on nuclear power plants. And though he said the timing was bad — it was just just years after the accident at the Three-Mile Island power station in Pennsylvania — he stuck with it and kept his business going. In 2002, he sold the 17-year-old business, which at the time had more than $50 million in annual revenues.
Today Mr. Vest and his wife, who divide their time between homes in Chattanooga and Jackson Hole, own the Teton Valley resort along with interests in a construction company and a realty company, both of which he started out of a need to have better service. The two companies today have annual revenues totaling more than $200 million combined.
“We kind of got into a lot of stuff we didn’t know anything about and asked a lot of questions of people who were a lot smarter than us and just kind of hung in there,” he said.
He learned that entrepreneurial spirit from his father Leon Vest, 85, who started a successful service station despite having only a 10th grade education.
His father taught him to always depend on himself, and he said that philosophy has served him well.
“One of my mottos is, there is nothing that happens that is not my fault,” he said. “So if you take that attitude, you’ve got a lot of control over your life.”
