Stephen Hightower Sr. faced many challenges when he first launched the company. But now, he’s ready to take the business to the next stage of growth, and is looking to EV stations and renewable diesel to make that happen.
In the 1980s, the popular CBS drama Dallas introduced us to J.R. Ewing, the flamboyant and cut-throat president of Ewing Oil. In this glamorous fictional depiction of that era’s petroleum industry, the main characters were all powerful white men like Ewing and Cliff Barnes, rivals who wielded their authority and deal-making in the energy sector from the cushy settings of glass towers and the Ewing family’s Southfork Ranch.
When Stephen Hightower, Sr. started the Hightowers Petroleum Company in 1982, he found an energy industry that looked a lot like Dallas: white, insular, family-controlled, and oil dependent. As a Black man from southwestern Ohio, it was difficult for Hightower to imagine himself in these circles or in the meetings he now attends as a member of the powerful National Petroleum Council, which makes recommendations to the Department of Energy from the oil and gas industry.
“It’s a very incestuous business,” Hightower says. “It’s typically family-owned companies that have fathers, grandfathers and on and on that started the businesses and then handed them down. I was just one of those wildcatters who knew how to sell.”
Like the main male characters in the TV show, Hightower had a father who got him started an entrepreneur. In 1957, while working the swing shift at the American Rolling Mill Company, Yudell Hightower started a family-owned janitorial company that grew to 175 employees before it was sold in 1983. Growing up, Hightower followed his father on jobs, dusting baseboards and performing other minor tasks. At 16, he was running his own truck crew, and by the time he finished high school in 1975, he had negotiated his first commercial contract.
After high school, Hightower flirted with the idea of either joining the Air Force to become a pilot or working at ARMCO, but he quickly settled into a long career as an entrepreneur and founder. In the janitorial business, Hightower cut his teeth as a dealmaker, landing lucrative contracts to clean construction sites and supplying cleaning chemicals to large manufacturers. He sourced whatever he could for companies until he seized an opportunity to get in the fuel business.
Since earning his first contract to deliver fuel to the state of Ohio in 1982 through a state-supported set-aside program for minority enterprises — which historically had no participation in commodities like fuel — the 66-year-old father of four has grown the Hightowers Petroleum Company into the largest African American-owned downstream petroleum wholesale marketer in the U.S. The Middletown, Ohio-based company sells gasoline and diesel to automotive giants like GM and Ford, grocery chains, the steel industry, railroads, utilities, and universities. In fact, Hightowers supplies the four gallons of gas that go into every GM car that rolls out of the automaker’s North America plants. Operating in 48 states and Canada and Mexico with 45 employees, the company — which brought in $450 million in revenue in 2022 — delivers a load of fuel every seven minutes, seven days a week.
Yet with three generations of the family working at the company, including Stephen II, who runs the day-to-day operations for his father, Hightowers Petroleum is making shrewd new investments in renewable diesel and EV stations. The investments are part of a pivot to grow the company’s alternative energy business in a move that would have seemed unimaginable in the early 80s, when Dallas helped position oil as the center of the universe in both popular culture and the real world of the global energy economy.
“We’re always looking at how we stay ahead of the game,” Hightower says. “Find out where the hockey puck is going, not try to chase it.”
Despite the company’s current success and aggressive agenda, Hightower has faced obstacles common for many entrepreneurs, but particularly for Black founders, who raised about 1 percent of the $214 billion allocated in U.S. venture capital in 2022, according to Crunchbase. For years, Hightower couldn’t get a bank loan to help finance his operations.
“The banks had no confidence in me because they looked at me as a janitor in a janitorial business,” he says. “I had to grow my business all the way up to $250 million in revenue before I got my first commercial loan.” Before Huntington Bank gave him that first loan in the early 90s, Hightower relied on a funding instrument called the lockbox that allows the customer to send money to a bank, which then disperses the money to the supplier. Only then was Hightowers Petroleum paid. “You have to be creative or you’ll be stopped,” Hightower says. “One of the things that I have never really done was take no for an answer.”
It’s this determination, ingenuity, and forward-looking mindset driving the company’s expansion into alternative energy. With an eye on emerging state and federal legislation offering incentives for innovations to reduce the use of fossil fuels, Hightower launched Hightowers EV in 2021. To lead this new business, he hired Ken Cartwright, a veteran business development and logistics specialist. The new entity recently reached an agreement to provide EV charging stations to 1,500 hotels in North America for a global hotel chain. Cartwright says they are laying the foundation at these hotels for the expected increase in the need for EV charging stations as electric cars become more popular (they are expected to reach 40 percent of total passenger car sales by 2030, according to S&P Global Mobility).
“Hightowers EV has the capability of going and slivering off two slices of this trillion dollar market because no one entity is going to monopolize the industry,” says Cartwright. “We’re trying to position ourselves for how we contribute to that next level of sustainable energy solutions.”
Cartwright is also leading the charge to help minority business enterprises participate in this energy transition. As an MBE itself, Hightowers is well positioned to engage other MBEs to join its network and grow opportunities and capabilities in this new ecosystem, Cartwright says. “I want to be able to sit at the table early on and build that super infrastructure as opposed to 30 years from now, having to come in and slide in through the back window or the back door.”
While the EV project develops as a standalone business, the company is also developing the infrastructure to distribute a product called renewable diesel, which is completely made out of non-fossil fuel feedstock that could cut carbon output by 80 percent. A fleet that wants to make the transition to the product can do it without buying new vehicles.
For Hightowers Petroleum, the success of these new initiatives doesn’t come without challenges, particularly as a Black-owned company struggling to break the glass ceiling across multiple industry sectors.
“I think the biggest challenge is for people to perceive us and judge us on the value that we make and not classify us as a Black-owned business,” says Stephen II, the COO of Hightowers Petroleum. “We are proud to be a Black-owned business and we do a lot in the Black community to support other businesses, but when we go to automotive or utility companies we want to have our value and service and quality speak for us, not the color of our skin.”
Stephen II goes on to add that too often, organizations want to grant them a small piece of the pie that is reserved for Black businesses, despite the fact that they have earned the credibility in the industry to show that they can handle the whole pie. “If you’re a business owner and you’re only relying on set-asides or minority participation goals, you’re not going to be successful for very long,” says Stephen II, who is 43. “I think this was a lesson that my father learned early on that you have to stand on your own and put your hat in circles that are not dependent on your diversity status.”
Stephen II was raised at the Hightowers Petroleum Company. During the summers when other kids were at camp or sleeping late, Stephen Sr. made sure that his children were in the office every morning. By answering the phones and taking orders, the Hightower children learned both the business and how to be professional. Stephen II and two of his siblings, Stephanie and Quincy, now work with the company, along with a first cousin and two other family members. Under Stephen Sr.’s leadership, they are a part of a succession plan that is deeply intertwined with the value created by the new sustainability projects in renewable diesel and EV.
“For the next four to five years, I can build more value in my company than I did in the first 40 years in business,” Stephen Sr. says. “I’ve been on this trajectory to become a billion-dollar company for many years. But it just takes the time that it takes to get there because capital has never been readily available. I finally found that capital provider, and we’re just now implementing our strategy to move into that next level.”
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