John A. Kuelbs
John Kuelbs grew up the seventh of eleven children in Minnesota. There was no money. What there was, was a small engine shop in the family garage — snowblowers and mowers brought in by neighbors, fixed and returned. It was not a company. It was closer to a habit: things arrive broken, you work out how they run, you send them back working.
He arrived in Texas in a 1977 Firebird with a frozen engine block, and started Texas Harley-Davidson.
He has been building businesses ever since.
Chrome Specialties
In 1984, John and his brother founded Chrome Specialties. What began as a line of custom Harley-Davidson parts grew into one of the largest aftermarket businesses in the world — more than 12,000 products, a 900-page catalog, over 3,500 retailers, and distribution across dozens of countries. It arrived at exactly the moment American riders began treating a motorcycle as something to be made personal rather than simply bought.
Inside it the company built Motor Factory, Highway One and Dallas Leathers, and acquired the Jammer name. Chrome merged with Global Motorsport and Custom Chrome in the late 1990s. Several of those brands are still on shelves four decades later. Years afterwards, the family bought the Harley-Davidson dealerships in the Twin Cities — the business arriving in Minnesota by way of what had been built in Texas, rather than the other way around.
The businesses that followed rarely looked alike
John became an owner in Worth Bancorporation, the parent of Worth National Bank, which grew to nearly $400 million in assets across five Tarrant County branches before BOK Financial acquired it for $127 million and folded it into Bank of Texas.
He joined Gen Fukunaga and fellow investors in the 2011 purchase of Funimation and served as chairman through its sale to Sony. Under that ownership the company grew to more than $100 million in annual sales, with a catalog spanning hundreds of titles — Dragon Ball Z, One Piece, Attack on Titan, My Hero Academia — and became the route by which a generation of Americans found anime.
He partnered with Bill Foley in the ownership group behind Whitefish Mountain Resort, the 3,000-acre Montana ski mountain that has remained independent while much of the ski industry consolidated, and has served on the board of Winter Sports Inc.
He was an early equity holder and chairman of Ecosphere Energy Services, built to commercialize the patented Ozonix water treatment technology and point it at the wastewater produced by oil and gas operations — a business whose technology went on to treat and recycle more than four billion gallons of water across more than nine hundred wells, and which drew Fidelity National in as a growing institutional partner.
He has invested across insurance, consumer products, media, biotechnology and entertainment; produced film with country artist Kix Brooks; and, most recently, co-founded Latin Gin with Ivania Sher and Nick Kuelbs.
A consistent preference
Across industries with almost nothing in common, John's approach has stayed the same: back capable people, understand what actually makes the business work, and structure capital so the people closest to the company can keep doing what they do best.
He has been a member of YPO since Chrome Specialties, and was later inducted into the Chief Executives Organization. For more than twenty-five years he has spoken to business students at universities across Texas and at Harvard.