Adventure is Out There

Throughout Columbia, there are people whose passion for adventure infuses their work with energy and vision. They’re at their best when jumping out of a plane from 13,000 feet or swimming with great white sharks — but they also thrive in the workplace. When you peel back the layers, you’ll find what makes them tick: an insatiable curiosity to explore paths that are scary, unpredictable, exhilarating and rewarding. These are five business leaders who thrive at the fault line between the ordinary and extraordinary.

Stephen Shinn, The Fitness Company

It’s not surprising that Stephen Shinn, who walks across the top of bridges for fun, would need something more imposing than triathlons to satisfy his competitive fire.

After two years as a sponsored triathlete, the races were proving to be too predictable. He could count on a lot of wear on the body and maybe an occasional flat tire or broken chain.

Shinn wanted a bigger challenge. He wanted a thrill like reaching the summit of a 40-foot bridge truss in Ralls County. He found it in adventure racing.

“I want to find things that test my adrenaline,” Shinn says. “Adventure racing is tough physically and mentally, and it’s more fun because the unexpected happens.”

When Shinn crossed over into adventure racing, he found some familiar disciplines. Each race includes cycling, running and water sports as base components, but adventure racing ups the ante. Instead of swimming, adventure racers might find themselves facing rapids in a canoe. Instead of biking on pavement, adventure racers often navigate single-track trails on a mountain bike. Instead of running a marked course, adventure racers typically have to orienteer and hike through dense forests.

No one adventure race is the same as another. Some last several hours, others span several days. Some might be a few miles, others can stretch on for hundreds of miles. And because there are no set courses, racers, who compete in teams of two to five people, must reach a series of checkpoints strictly by a compass and a map.

Shinn, 32, has become one of the uber-dedicated crazies who thrives on adventure racing. He was hooked from his first race, eight years ago, in Kentucky. Even though he had learned to orienteer two days earlier, and even though they ran out of water and had to drink iodine-infused creek water, his team finished second.

This intensity is most evident when Shinn describes his desire to qualify for the USARA Adventure Race National Championship.

“I’d love to get to the national race,” Shinn says, before cutting himself off, “wait, sorry, that’s a negative. I will get there.”

Shinn is an entrepreneur who puts the same level of discipline and tenacity into making his two-year-old business succeed. He founded The Fitness Company with Jeff Carr, a friend and training partner, as a way to deliver higher quality training and educating in Columbia. The dream started in two separate garages. For more than two years, Shinn and Carr saved up money by training 50 clients each out of  their two garages. In 2013, they were able to open a studio without taking out a loan.

“When we moved in here, my clients told me they missed my garage,” Shinn says. “I was like, ‘Do you remember the summers and the winters?’”

Shinn, whose passion for fitness developed at Culver-Stockton College, also hoped building from the ground up might inspire others that goals are achievable.

“We don’t want to set people up for failure,” Shinn says. “We try to be as positive as possible and build great healthy habits.”

The Fitness Company has experienced accelerated growth, highlighted by a recently expanded studio, 360 active clients and the training they provided for MU’s Golden Girls.

Shinn says reaching this point is a testament to sharing the load with Carr. They pushed each other, especially in those early days when they were turning the dream into reality.

“I was scared crapless,” Shinn says. “We thought we’d be successful, but you have no idea, especially when the bills started coming and you put most of your savings into this thing.

“But it’s great to have a partner. It takes some of the fear out of it. The Fitness Company wouldn’t be this big yet if I had done it on my own.”

Since adventure racing emphasizes teamwork more than individual achievement, Shinn is determined to find like-minded partners to compete with him in three-person, co-ed races.

Of all the qualities he could want in a teammate, one in particular rises to the top: Are they all in? Will they put their whole body and mind into a race? Halfhearted or casual won’t cut it. If they’re in, Shinn has no doubt they can work together to conquer a grueling race and go as far as the national competition.

“I’m very competitive,” Shinn says. “I’m not in it just to finish the race. I want to win.”

Stephen’s Fun Fact: Every adventure race incorporates paddling, biking and running. The rest varies. For instance, at one physically and mentally exhausting checkpoint, Stephen Shinn and his teammate couldn’t move on until they sang “I’m a Little Teapot” without any mistakes.

 

Leighanne Lamb, Landmark Bank

Leighanne Lamb is not one to turn down a dare or an invitation to adventure.

When she was 5 years old, Leighanne’s two older brothers urged her to stand on a tree branch without using her hands. An already blossoming competitor, she wanted to prove her toughness.

Her valiant attempt resulted in two broken wrists.

“I always wanted to keep up,” Leighanne says. “I always wanted to be better.”

Now 35 years old, Leighanne, vice president of real estate lending at Landmark Bank, is still up for a good challenge, especially ones initiated by her husband, Zach Lamb, 35, who’s also the youngest of three siblings.

For two former William Woods University athletes, who can be found at the gym five days a week, events like a Tough Mudder or an Urban Challenge force them to stay in shape while also tapping into their competitive sides.

“Now we’re has-beens, so we had to find something else,” Leighanne says.

Leighanne agreed to participate in the couple’s first Tough Mudder last October. The 12-mile race in Shamrock, Missouri required them to overcome 18 obstacles, including climbing a 3.5-meter wall and running through electrified water.

“I don’t like running, but put obstacles in there and tell me I might get hurt? Yeah, I’m in!” Leighanne says. “It was hard, and you don’t know if you’ll finish. But your adrenaline gets going, and by mile eight, I was thinking, ‘This is a really fun date.’”

Nothing about her competitive and passionate spirit surprises her husband of nine years.

“She has always been into pushing the envelope, whether it be roller coasters, water slides, hiking in the Smoky Mountains, or wave runners at the lake. She likes to go big and go fast, which was fine with me, so I married her,” Zach says. “If she is going to commit to something, it is going to be 100 percent.”

Leighanne launched Landmark Bank’s Home Mortgage Center on Chapel Hill Road in November 2014 with similar expectation and intensity.

Add four motivated loan originators, one who played football at MU and another who was a Tiger cheerleader, into the mix, and Leighanne is not surprised the endeavor has resulted in an increase in home loan volume. The camaraderie and drive reminds her of playing volleyball at William Woods.

“They’re young and they’re hungry,” Leighanne says. “They want to do well. They go out and build new business. They don’t just sit there and wait for it to come in.”

Leighanne also prefers to be out in the community instead of staying in a 1,500-square-foot office doing paperwork.

“I love sales because there’s always something new and exciting,” Leighanne says. “People are going to buy a house, and they’re happy. Then there’s the next one and the next one. You have a goal, and something is always driving you.”

As much as getting the next deal gives Leighanne a boost, she discovered her favorite adrenaline-inducing activity in July, when she joined her husband for a business trip to California.

One morning Zach called to ask if she wanted to go skydiving. He figured she would need to think it over, but he got an immediate, “Yes!”

When he asked if she would be scared, considering they have two young daughters at home, she said, “Not really. I have a higher chance of getting in a car wreck and dying. Let’s go jump out of a plane.”

After a 20 minute plane ride to 13,000 feet (the highest of the three options they could choose) the doors opened, and Leighanne was the first one to soar over Pismo Beach, California at 120 miles per hour. Sixty seconds later, when the parachute was released, Leighanne took in the expanse of cliffs, beach and ocean — which beat the alternative of jumping over cornfields in Missouri.

“It was the best thing I’ve ever done,” Leighanne says. “I can’t even compare it to anything. When we landed, we were like, ‘Let’s do it again.’ It was probably three hours until we finally came off the high. I will do it again many more times.”

Even their two daughters, who are 4 and 6 years old, want to get in on the action. Of course, Leighanne says — but not until they’re 18.

Fun Fact: Leighanne Lamb’s Tough Mudder race involved obstacles like the Boa Constrictor: racers crawl through pipes full of freezing mud so small that racers can only use their arms to crawl through. Then there’s the Gauntlet, where runners climb a steep, muddy hill while being high-pressure hosed from two sides.

 

Dan Burke, White Wolf Home Construction and Inspection

The remarkable views and the uncommonly blue skies are not what entice Dan Burke back to British Columbia.

He returns because of his affection for Whistler Mountain. With 70 world-class downhill mountain biking trails, including the chance to descend 7,000 feet in under 20 minutes, Whistler dares Burke to stay away. He can’t.

Burke’s mind is especially preoccupied with the simple pleasures, like soaring in the air for more than 60 feet off an 8-foot jump or navigating a 40-foot, near-vertical drop by leaning back so far he can barely reach the handlebars. It’s common for Burke to reach speeds over 40 mph and for his brakes to glow bright red by the bottom.

“There are places in Whistler you can’t walk down but you can jump your bike off it and be fine,” Burke says. “When you say ‘epic,’ there should be a picture of Whistler behind it.”

When Burke, 44, is not bounding down mountains on a bike, he builds, remodels and inspects homes in Columbia and across Missouri as the owner of White Wolf Construction and Inspection. It’s a business he started in 1997 and brought to Columbia in 2008.

His favorite part of any project is the custom finish work, what he calls, “the wow stuff.” He developed this fondness as a teenager in his first job, at a cabinet shop in Oregon. His boss valued fine-tuned, detailed work and didn’t use power tools. What some call the “old school” equipped Burke with principles and ideas that have allowed him to complete tasks and solve problems others might avoid.

“What really struck me was he loved what he did,” Burke says. “He was passionate about it, and at the time I didn’t understand what that really meant. But now I’m the same way about my craft. I absolutely love what I do.”

Burke learned his work alongside a skilled craftsman, and he learned mountain biking in much the same way. On his first visit to Whistler, Burke rode up the chairlift with a commander from the U.S. Navy. The commander was an experienced rider who frequently docked in Vancouver just to ride the trails, and he volunteered to guide Burke down various runs. Burke’s first ride was Freight Train, a black diamond trail, the second most difficult rating a trail can receive.

“He said, ‘Don’t look at anything but the back of my bike,’” Burke says. “I remember the first jump. It felt like the closest thing to flying.”

Burke quickly realized that arriving at the bottom in one piece was contingent on the ability to manage fear. Overthinking a landing or hesitating while approaching a jump would increase the chances of getting into trouble.

“What can get you hurt is stopping,” Burke says. “Your fear is usually 90 percent worse than what could possibly happen. Fear makes you go back when you should have gone forward.”

Some might think trying to launch a home construction company in a new city during a historic housing crisis would elicit enough fear to cause a small business owner to turn back, but Burke’s experiences on Whistler conditioned him to push on. Besides, when you have a passion and a gift for something, you can’t just sit and calculate. You have to go after it. Sure, he collected some bumps and bruises along the way, but he trusted the process and it’s paid off.

While other contractors have come and gone, White Wolf has built and maintained a steady workload. Burke says he is booked out through the beginning of 2016.

“We do good work, and that’s why people keep calling us,” he says.

But Burke also knows to nurture his passion for what he does. He has to travel; he has to get back to Whistler, or at least the best the Midwest has to offer. This too is an imprint left by his first boss, who told Burke not to wait to do the things that make life fun.

The more you listen to Burke, the more you realize just what the trips give him in return.

“When I’m on my bike, there is no room for thinking about the next project,” Burke says. “I like that it’s so intense it shuts everything out. It’s forced and active meditation.”

Fun Fact: Before Dan Burke started White Wolf Construction, he made bows for archery by hand. His bows sold worldwide, including a specially designed one for a Spanish Olympian, and once received praise from Earl Hoyt, the founder of the modern-traditional style bow.

 

Chris Nyenhuis, Eyes on Freight

Don’t wait until tomorrow to do something if you have opportunity today. This live- in-the-moment thinking is how Chris Nyenhuis and his wife, Anita, ended up swimming with great white sharks off the coast of Gansbaai, South Africa.

Chris’ decision meant reneging on a promise he made with his dad before the honeymoon: not to get into the water with sharks. But an opportunity popped up, and he couldn’t resist the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

The dive took place on a dreary day in the channel between Dyer Island and Geyser Rock, popularly known as “Shark Alley.” They saw several baby great whites.

“They were so huge and, if they wanted, they could have destroyed the cage, but we didn’t worry about dangers or anything,” Chris says. “We wanted to enjoy and experience as much of it as possible. It was amazing.”

Chris developed his fascination with sharks as a child growing up in Cape Town and in costal areas in Brazil. Being so close to beaches and oceans, it was only natural for the creatures hidden below to embed themselves in his imagination.

With one dive down, Chris, 33, has set his sights on making dives off the coasts of California and Australia.

“Long term, I want to do a dive to see great whites at every major point in the world,” Chris says.

This goal was temporarily put on hold earlier this year after Chris made another promise, this time to Anita. She wanted Chris to suspend all diving plans and focus on getting his startup, Eyes on Freight, off the ground. It’s a promise he intends to keep.

“We have a joke between the two of us,” Anita says, “that I’m his handler and help him determine whether it’s reasonable or not.”

If only starting a business had been as easy for Chris as getting into the cold Atlantic water with great white sharks.

Chris had always wanted to be an entrepreneur, and for years after graduating from the MU, he would throw out possibilities to Anita. But he wasn’t sure how to move forward.

Finally, Anita stepped in and gave him a dose of courage. She didn’t want his ideas to shrivel inside of him. You only live once, Anita told Chris. Let’s jump off a cliff and start a company.

This encouragement, combined with Chris’ experience in the logistics industry, led to the launch of Eyes on Freight in 2012, a matching platform for logistics and supply chain services.

“We’re a lot like the Match.com,” Chris says. “We build profiles for the shipper and the shipping company, and then simply match them with one another on a domestic and global level. Our platform focuses on the needs, preferences and budget of the shipper, and we focus on the ‘ideal’ client for the shipping company.”

By November 2014, Chris and Anita quit their full-time jobs in Kansas City, sold their house and relocated their budding company to Columbia to work with the Missouri Innovation Center. In July, they moved to San Francisco to join 500 Startups, a 4-month business accelerator that provides resources and support to take a startup to the next level. Eyes on Freight still maintains an office locally at the Missouri Innovation Center.

Today, Chris can’t help but look into the future. There is something addictive about starting a company, he says. You can’t get enough. You want to see how far you can go. It reminds him of another motto that’s influenced his life, something he heard regularly from his mom during his childhood: “Jump as high as you can and see where you end up.”

“When we initially took the first steps, it was absolutely terrifying,” Chris says. “But with each step it has become more intriguing and exciting.”

Even Anita, his wife of eight years and the Midwest girl who thought she’d live there the rest of her life, is eager to see where this can go.

“He takes risks others aren’t willing to take and he’s seeing it pay off,” Anita says. “We are definitely never bored.”

 

Fun Fact: During a shark dive, the instructors asked for the most experienced divers to go in the cage first, which Chris Nyenhuis admits he was not. But his friend volunteered the two of them anyway, and Nyenhuis was the first one in the water and into the cage. “Needless to say, my heart rate was going off the charts,” Nyenhuis says.

 

Russ Duker, Mastertech & Trade-Serve

Almost every week, you can find Russ Duker soaring 700 feet above Columbia and the surrounding areas in his “lawn chair.”

The ritual starts from a pasture near the Missouri River bottoms. With 100 pounds strapped to his back and a wing resting on the ground, he puts the paramotor, which looks like a giant fan attached to a chair attached to a parachute, into action and walks off into the sky. Before long, his tension fades with the evening light, and the city he has called home for 30 years comes alive in new and beautiful ways.

“When I was younger I always had dreams of being like Peter Pan and flying,” Duker says. “With paramotoring, I get that complete sense of freedom — flying above trees, skimming across grass or going up near clouds.”

Sure, he had similar experiences serving four years as a pilot in the Air Force, but paramotoring is particularly meaningful to Duker, 54, because it’s something he shares with his 24-year-old son, Nathaniel. The two embarked on the new pursuit more than a year ago. Unfortunately, Nathaniel had four knee surgeries during that period, and they didn’t complete their training until August.

Paramotoring might look dangerous, but Duker, who also likes to whitewater kayak, is used to handling nerve-testing situations. He proved as much during his first paramotor training run, when his engine died around 100 feet in the air.

“The instructor was able to see me and talk me through my first emergency landing, which just happened to be my first landing,” Duker says.

Duker’s pursuits have not only offered family bonding and relief from work, they have also provided powerful insights to enhance his business leadership, especially in 2008, when the housing crisis put a strain on MasterTech Plumbing, Heating and Cooling, the company he founded out of a canary yellow van in 1991.

“We were a little smug at the beginning of 2008 because everybody was getting hammered and we were rocking,” Duker says. “But by November, it came home to us. It was like someone turned off a faucet.”

With a significant loss in revenue, Duker wrestled with how to make cuts and reshape his business. Kayaking gave him clarity about what to do when life roars and pounds.

As Duker describes it, small rapids are easy for kayakers to navigate because they can be seen from far off. Large rapids are another story. Because kayakers sit low in the water and because the river changes abruptly, you cannot see large rapids until they are seconds away, and just before you see them, your senses are assaulted with the noise of unseen pounding water. As the thundering becomes louder and more intimidating, the heart, the eyes and every muscle prepare for what’s ahead. You start back-paddling, only to realize you’re still being sucked in. It’s inevitable. Retreat is not an option. You must go forward.

“All the worries of the world — what you’re going to do tomorrow or what you did yesterday — disappear in that moment,” Duker says. “I’m alone in a small ship. There’s nobody to come help me. It’s just me and the water crashing on the rocks. My focus comes down to charting my course.”

Duker says your objective cannot solely be to avoid the rocks. You have to find the hole, take the drop, let the waves wash over you, roll back upright, if necessary, and celebrate on the other side.

Applied to his situation at MasterTech, Duker realized he was spending too much time analyzing the consequences of problems and forgetting to focus on finding a way out.

“So I sat down with my profit-loss statement and said, ‘Where’s the exit?’” Duker says. “I came up with a solution and pulled out almost 50 percent of the budget, ignoring the consequences and throwing overboard what wasn’t necessary to getting through the rapid.”

MasterTech has navigated calmer waters in recent years thanks to Trade-Serve, a company Duker started in 2011 to help increase efficiencies in a field that Duker says is 75 percent inefficient on a good day. Now MasterTech is performing three times better than similar-sized businesses across the nation, according to a peer evaluation from Nexstar Network, a member-owned association of contractors.

Some might label this willingness to bring in new ideas and technologies to disrupt an organization as risky, but Duker has never been one to hold back when he can reach new heights.

“Because business owners are willing to go through change, people say it’s risky,” Duker says. “But it’s measured risk.” CBT

Fun Fact: Russ Duker started kayaking in 2003 after printing off a piece of paper with six photos about how to do a kayak roll. He would go to Finger Lakes State Park to practice — get in, turn upside, get out, pour out water, repeat. “I did that for a whole summer and finally learned how to do a kayak roll just because I wanted to learn how to do it,” Duker says.