Jill HATTAN

MELINDA SCHNYDER

It took Jill Hattan a few years to embrace the family business, but once she did, she has made her mark on the oldest car dealership in Wichita.

Her grandfather Don Hattan was a Chevrolet Motor Division accounting manager when he got the chance to purchase a Chevrolet store. He opened Don Hattan Chevrolet in 1949 in Valley Center and rebuilt on North Broadway after a fire. Her father Jim Hattan worked with his father and assumed operational duties in 1979, running the dealership until he retired in 2010. Jill Hattan joined the dealership in 1995, became general manager in 2002 and dealer principal in 2010.

Under Jill’s leadership, the mothership location moved to a new building in 2003 off I-135 in Park City, and one dealership has become four in the Wichita area with the addition of Don Hattan Ford in Augusta and two used car dealerships at Don Hattan Derby and Don Hattan West.

“I grew up in the business and I said I would never be in the business, so having more than one dealership certainly wasn’t something I intended,” she said. “But I want to provide more opportunities for our great employees, and expanding the business is one way we can provide upward growth.”

Hattan said honoring the family legacy by staying family-owned in an age of consolidation drives her, along with challenging the status quo and providing opportunities—for her family, employees and the greater Wichita community.

Learning Through Osmosis

Whether you’re interested or not, Hattan said, you learn through osmosis when there’s a family business. She remembers tagging along with her dad to the dealership and overhearing business conversations, as well as her dad driving her and her twin sister to school in a Corvette while he listened to tapes of mystery shoppers they’d paid to call in to the dealership.

“Inspect what you expect was the lesson from hearing him listening to the tapes,” Hattan said. There were other lessons though she didn’t realize she was learning at the time.

“I learned from my dad the value of relationships and specifically with our employees,” she said. “Dad was always approachable, he genuinely cared about how the employees were doing and had an open door policy. He knew the importance of keeping good people happy and engaged. I spent a lot of time growing up attending picnics, parties and events he had in appreciation of the employees. I carry a lot of this forward and am grateful for those lessons.”

As a teen, Hattan spent time working at the dealership, from washing and shuttling cars to answering phones. When it was time for college, though, she wanted to create her own path.

Change Of Heart (And Career)

With no plans for a career in the car business, Hattan left Wichita and spent time in Denver, Colorado, and Lawrence, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature at the University of Kansas.

Working a temp job in Denver after graduation, she came up with the idea to open a clothing and housewares boutique. When she sat down to write a business plan, she realized her degree hadn’t prepared her, so she decided to return to Wichita to get an MBA at Wichita State University.

She worked at the dealership while taking her first business class and quickly realized she was getting more real-world business acumen there.

“Dad had me calling customers and asking how their experience was,” she said. “I was chatting with customers, getting feedback on what was good or what was not good. That was my fuel to go to dad and say ‘I’ve been hearing this a lot, can I fix this?’ He’d say, ‘Yeah, go fix it.’ It was really fulfilling to hear directly from the customers and then to be empowered to go solve their problems.”

She decided to put her MBA on hold temporarily and work full time at the dealership. Working there as an adult for the first time, Hattan saw her fellow employees’ passion for the industry and their commitment to learning and growing.

“I saw things differently than I had when I was a kid,” she said. “I started thinking I could probably help with this and do a good job. So I kinda got sucked into the car business after all.”

Making A Difference

One of the first projects Hattan undertook when she became CEO in 2010 was to make the dealership more comfortable for more people—both employees and customers—and to combat the industry’s negative reputation. She thought about what she would want as a female customer during the buying and service experience.

The dealership launched Ladies Day, offering discounted service appointments on Tuesdays along with complimentary seated massages and manicures while customers wait. The promotion turned their slowest day of the week into one of the busiest, and the incentive continues today at all locations with a service department.

“It’s about more than just having a day,” Hattan said. “It’s about hiring the people who can provide the service and make women feel comfortable at our dealership.”

As part of the initiative, the sales and service teams also trained to provide a hassle-free buying experience customers can trust with transparent pricing that embodies the Don Hattan Dealerships motto, “Shop us last, you’ll love us!”

As the dealerships have grown from a single location to four dealerships, Hattan and husband Ben Thomas have developed an internal leadership program to ensure their hometown values culture stays intact. The couple, who have four children ages 8 to 20, teach the emerging leaders five-month series of classes that is required of new managers and optional for other employees.

Hattan also wants the dealerships to provide opportunities in the communities in which they operate. Employees at each location connect with schools in their communities, support the YMCAs and are active in chambers of commerce.

In 2019, Hattan finally got a version of the boutique she once wanted to open several decades ago. She noticed several shops in Wichita were changing hands or closing, so she proactively reached out to the owner of Pink Saloon, an upscale women’s boutique in Waterfront Plaza.

“I shopped at the store and besides being a fun passion project for me, I get to help keep what I think is an important business in Wichita.”

MELINDA SCHNYDER

Todd Lair had his career path mapped out by the time he was a sophomore at Wichita State University working toward a business degree.

He would continue working in composites manufacturing, an industry he’d first gotten a taste of as a 14-year-old making composite airplane parts as his summer job at Precision Composites Inc. (PCI), the company his father founded.

He loved the process of getting to see and touch what he was creating and the near immediate feedback of whether what he produced worked or needed further adjustments.

He’d worked for PCI every summer leading up to college, when his father sold the company and it became the composites division of a plastic extrusion business. He continued to work there part-time while going to school, enjoying the fact that he was no longer seen as the owner’s son. After graduation he worked full time in the business and at 24 years old he had set a goal to be running the composites division by the time he was in his thirties.

“I wanted to run it someday, that was my whole vision,” Lair said. “So I was pretty shocked to get a call from the manager one night telling me that the division had sold to a competitor.”

Lair was savvy enough to realize the new owner planned to run the composites business himself, so while he would likely have a job, he wouldn’t have room to grow.

The call came in while he was playing ping pong and drinking beer with his brother Tim. His brother encouraged him to go out on his own, but Lair told his brother, who was studying medicine, that he didn’t understand what it would take to start a manufacturing company. His brother continued to challenge Lair’s reasons for not doing it and by the next week Lair had resigned.

“Part of my resigning so quickly was my worry that if I stayed any longer, I wouldn’t end up leaving because I had such a deep emotional connection to the business since I had worked there as a kid,” Lair said. “Somehow I came to that conclusion that if I’m going to try something, I need to force myself to do it.”

That was 1993, and Leading Technology Composites, Inc. (LTC) started with two employees, 900 square feet of space, rented time to use an autoclave to cure parts and had no initial clients.

Now in its 30th year of business, LTC has 441 employees, 421,000 square feet of manufacturing capacity across three facilities, owns seven autoclaves along with other specialized equipment and has a roster of recognizable clients in three markets: personal protection, vehicle protection and aerospace.

Bold Decision

Now with 30 years’ perspective, Lair better sees the factors at play for him to make the bold decision to start a company without a full plan.

“I couldn’t have been luckier, more fortunate or more blessed to have had at such a young age a pretty technical depth of knowledge,” he said. “It started with my dad telling me when I was 14 that if I was going to work I wasn’t getting an office job, I was going to make parts. I knew how to physically make product myself, I knew how to run an autoclave. I also knew how to negotiate a contract and my last job at the company my dad had started was in sales and marketing.”

The second thing Lair said he had going for him was the support of his parents and their entrepreneurial examples. In addition to PCI, his dad had started, grown and sold two quality assurance firms. His mom had handled financials and human resources for PCI, then purchased a preschool that she ran successfully.

Finally, Lair had a bold idea that he felt confident he could produce though he’d not yet proven it: take the composite technology used to produce aerospace parts and apply it to developing lighter, better composite armor products for at the time small, niche law enforcement and military markets.

He wanted LTC to be diversified to avoid the dramatic cycles of the aerospace industry, so he limited development in the first year to the personal protection market. Lair got a big break when The Safariland Group, a distributor of innovative lifesaving equipment to law enforcement, military, outdoor recreation and personal protection markets, accepted his pitch for an exclusive line of handheld, ballistic SWAT team entry shields and body armor plates.

“The important thing is they said yes without coming to visit us because if they had seen the 900 square feet we were operating out of there’s no way they would have said yes,” Lair said.

Delivering that first product was not an easy process. Lair said they quickly learned they didn’t have enough law enforcement experience to understand the application as well as they needed to. He reached out to Wichita’s police chief, who had previously led SWAT teams in Dallas, and formed a partnership to evaluate their products.

Using some of the same products they’d developed for personal protection, LTC next targeted the commercial vehicle protection market. They landed a deal in 1996 to develop an armored car system for Toyota.

“To meet Toyota’s needs, we came up with some innovative concepts that led to a couple of patents,” Lair said. “That led to us gaining a whole bunch of technical experience that we otherwise wouldn’t have gained. We learned so much on that project that helped us be a better supplier to other automotive applications. That was huge, huge, huge for us.”

Around the same time, LTC finally entered the aerospace market. Today LTC’s customers include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream and Textron Aviation, to name a few.

The company continued to grow and keep a healthy mix among its three markets. Lair credits a loyal group of key managers and the organization making operational and management system changes to be able to scale a 10-person company to 50 employees, then 100 to 200 and, today, more than 400.

Giving Back

Lair is married to Julie, who has owned Lyndon’s clothing boutique in Bradley Fair since 2016. Together they have four children: Sam, Sydney, Sallie and Shelby. The couple created the Lair Foundation in 2008 motivated by the verse in Luke 12:48 “to whom much is given, much is required.” The nonprofit contributes to Wichita charitable organizations as well as groups dedicated to serving veterans.

LTC and the foundation started the Wichita State 9/11 Veteran Business and Engineering Scholarship in 2010, awarding a scholarship annually to a soldier who has served in the armed forces following 9/11.

Lair said as he’s started to reflect more on 30 years of leading LTC, he’s realized how helpful mentors and peers have been throughout his career as part of the Young Presidents Organization and other informal relationships. He is paying it forward through YPO participation and by mentoring personal friends who are starting enterprises.

“I look back and I can see more clearly now how in quite a few cases there were successful business people who took an interest in me at a time when they didn’t have much to gain from their relationship with me,” Lair said. “I didn’t fully realize the kindness and the help they were giving me at the time, and now at my age I feel the responsibility to give that back to others in the way that it was so generously given to me.”