COVER STORY
The ABCs
of Tom
Kivisto
Arts, business and charitable
giving help define the
founder of the fifth-largest
privately held company in
the United States — and our
Tulsan of the Year.
by Maridel Allinder
In a citywhere old oil
names have
dominated the business and philanthropic
communities for a century, there’s a new guy
in town, and he’s hard to miss.
In November 2006, Forbes magazine
ranked the Tulsa-based company he co-founded, SemGroup L.P., fifth on its list of
America’s Largest Private Companies. SemGroup was the only Oklahoma company
among Forbes’ Top 25.
When business growth of this magnitude
is matched by an equally aggressive commitment to giving back, the result can be transformational to a community. No city knows
this better than Tulsa, a boomtown built on
the largesse of oil industry pioneers.
Unlike those city forefathers, many of
whom made their fortunes drilling for oil,
Tom Kivisto, co-founder, president and
CEO of SemGroup, is making his mark at a
different stage of the business, in what is
known as energy midstream services: buying,
selling, processing, storing and transporting
fuel.
While perhaps not as romantic as the
iconic image of hitting a gusher in the glory
days, this strategic niche has produced a
gusher of a success story for SemGroup —
and a gusher of good fortune for Tulsa.
TulsaPeople’s Tulsan of the Year, Kivisto is
helping put the city back on the map — in
the arts, business and charitable giving. He is
an uncommon leader who combines fierce
competitiveness with an intense caring for
others.
A focused competitor
Kivisto grew up an athlete and the son of
an athlete. He played basketball at East
High School in Aurora, Ill. His father, Ernie
Kivisto, coached high school basketball for
50 years, amassing 1,002 wins.
Like his older brother, Bob, Tom Kivisto
went on to play basketball for the University
of Kansas, where he was captain of the Jay-hawks’ 1974 NCAA Final Four team. He still
holds the KU record for most assists in a
game — 18 against Nebraska in December
1973. His brother played in the 1971 Final
Four.
While Kivisto no longer navigates the
courts of what was then the Big 8 conference,
he remains a focused competitor. The qualities that made him an effective point guard
now make him an extraordinarily successful
businessman. And in typical entrepreneurial
fashion, Kivisto’s path was not linear.
A pre-med and psychology major at KU,
Kivisto worked several jobs — KU men’s and
women’s tennis coach, head pro at the
Lawrence Racquet Club, university athletics
fund-raiser — while doing post-graduate
studies in urban planning. He says his decision to take a position with Koch Industries
Inc. surprised some. But he saw it as an opportunity to learn something new outside of
the sports arena.
After 15 years in Wichita with Koch Oil,
Kivisto was ready to be his own boss. He did
his research, weighed the needs of his family
— wife Julie; son Blake, now 26; and daughters Lissa and Kelsey, now 24 and 15 — and
decided to establish his company in Tulsa,
moving here in 1993 and founding Eaglwing
L.P., a crude oil marketing company.
“Julie and I loved the trees and rolling hills
of northeastern Oklahoma,” Kivisto says. The
couple met when Julie was an undergraduate
at KU and Tom was in graduate school; he
was her little sister’s tennis instructor.
While Eaglwing weathered the bargain
barrel oil prices of the mid- to late 1990s,
Kivisto and his partners were thinking big. In
2000, Kivisto partnered with Greg Wallace,
Kevin Foxx and other minor investors, who
negotiated a business plan with the Bank of
Oklahoma and subsequently received a $65
million loan. That loan launched Seminole
Transportation and Gathering, which eventually became SemGroup L.P. During this
time, Eaglwing also became part of SemGroup.
