Like many young people raised in rural Texas, Gary Mizell got anxious about seeing the world outside of the confines of Eastland, home of Old Rip, the horned lizard said to have been found in a time capsule in 1928.
As the story goes, he had slept off the previous 30 years in hibernation.
Suffice to say, there was nothing sleepy about Gary Mizell, who wanted to go do things — to borrow a sports metaphor, to dive for loose balls. Hustle. In the 1990s, he started traveling the country working, mostly industrial work.
“The economy was booming,” he recalls.
Pursuit of a living brought him, among other places — to all 10 states and other countries around the world — Alaska, Pennsylvania, and California.
He founded Kore Systems Inc. in 2007 in the Silicon Valley. It’s a professional services organization providing process automation and control systems integration services to industrial settings.
He moved the company to Fort Worth-Dallas in 2015. Today, Kore Systems is headquartered in Bedford. Rather than Eden, the state of California is more like quicksand for business or its employees.
“I wanted to get out of there pretty bad,” Mizell says. “We still have a lot of work in California, but I was in Silicon Valley. I was across the street from Nvidia and right down the street from Apple. I would bring engineers over from India and train them, and then they would take them. All day long.
“Plus, the quality of life out there for employees on a normal salary, it’s pretty low. Coming out here, my staff is happier on the salary we’re paying them. They have a better quality of life, which is a better [work] culture.”
He found his “gift” in industrial technology as a young man right out of high school. He went to work for a big petrochemical company. There he was sent to trade schools. He was soon programming systems for big chemical plants.
“Some people take years to find their gift, but I kind of found it,” Mizell says, “and it just took off.”
Who was your most influential mentor? Probably Chris Smith. He was the CEO of Ahtna. I was the communications manager designing the systems to stop nuclear materials from moving in and out of the shipping ports, all airports, all shipping ports, and all border crossings around the world. He’s the one who sent me overseas to build these systems and trusted me to do that, and really just threw me into the fire.
What was your first job? Mowing lawns in junior high. My dad was a service writer in the automotive industry. When I was 14, he got me a job at a body shop. I learned how to do paint and body. My dad was in the automotive industry. He was a service writer out there, so he got me a job at a body shop. I learned how to do paint and body, and then I met a guy who had just moved there and bought a shop. He said, “Hey, Gary, anytime you want to paint any cars, you can bring ’em to my shop and just pay me a fee.” So, I started painting my friends’ cars — either they had a car they wanted painted, or they wrecked it and I fixed it. I started doing that on the side.
Gearhead? Yeah, yeah. I’ve got a ’71 Chevelle. It’s got a 454 in it. I’ve got a ’71 C-10 with a 502 in it. I’ve got the new Cadillac Blackwing — 670 horsepower with the supercharger.
Do you take them to shows? I don’t. I take them to mechanics. I beg the mechanic, “Will you please finish this?” [laughs]
Do you have weekly or daily habits? I do two things. When I get up every morning, I get on the floor and meditate. And then I do hot yoga at least every other day. I see Troy Aikman there twice a week! I made a big switch right after I moved to Texas … a big shift. My dad got me into hypnosis meditation, all this other stuff. My whole life changed. I went from more analytical to more energy frequency spirituality. It’s made all the difference. I got to this level [of business] through my analytical [capabilities], but I needed more.