When Wayne Weaver announced Tuesday that Shahid Khan will purchase the Jacksonville Jaguars, it wasn’t an unusual move in the industry.
Acquiring a sports franchise has been done many times over the years by successful, wealthy businessmen.
Many of them were entrepreneurs, including Khan.
Information released Tuesday by the Jaguars and research shows that Khan, 61, built his business after moving to the United States.
Born in Pakistan, Khan came to America in 1967 at age 16 to attend the University of Illinois-Urbana. While studying for a degree in engineering, he also had a job at a local auto parts manufacturer, Flex-N-Gate.
When Khan earned a B.S. in industrial engineering in 1971, he remained employed at the company and a year later, was assigned by its owner to develop a new one-piece automotive bumper.
Khan’s work led to what Flex-N-Gate calls on its website “the world’s first complete one-piece rear step bumper using the deep draw process.”
The product was so successful that Flex-N-Gate opened a second facility to manufacture truck bumpers for import makers.
Khan remained at the company until 1978, when, with the help of a loan from the Small Business Administration, he started his own company, Bumper Works, which began as a one-man, one-press operation.
Two years after the startup, Flex-N-Gate went on the market. Khan bought it and turned it into a company that by 2000 had captured more than 85 percent of the worldwide pickup truck and SUV bumper market.
Along the way, Khan’s company diversified its product manufacturing business into specialty off-road products for its original equipment customers, developing and producing brush guards, tube bumpers, light bars and winch mounts.
Flex-N-Gate also acquired firms that made other automotive components in metal and plastic. Khan expanded his manufacturing network by purchasing facilities first in Canada and Mexico and later in South America and Europe.
Today, Flex-N-Gate has nearly 50 plants and 9,500 workers worldwide who manufacture parts for automotive lines from Acura to Volkswagen. It’s one of the 200 largest private companies in the United States.
Khan and his wife, Ann Carlson Khan, who also is an Illinois graduate, have become among the university’s most faithful donors.
The couple has two children, Tony and Shanna.
The couple has supported academic programs in UI’s College of Engineering, College of Business and the College of Applied Health Sciences as well as athletic programs.
Among their most notable gifts was in 2007, when they gave $2.5 million to create five endowed professorships in UI’s Center on Health, Aging and Disability.
In 2000, Khan was invited to deliver the Cozad Lecture in Entrepreneurship, established in honor of Dale Cozad, a UI alumnus. The title of his talk was “Contrarian Thinking: Fumbling Your Way to Success.”
In the lecture, Khan said he borrowed his theory from Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, who in his book “The Art of War” asked the question, “why does the underdog win most of the time?”
Khan said he made slight changes in the answers to adapt the circa 2,400 B.C. philosopher’s conclusions to business including: never destroy the market while capturing it, keep information to yourself, make strategic alliances to maximize strength, play to your competitor’s weakness and get the maximum potential from your employees.
“Running a small company well requires that you observe a fine line between delegation and abdication. You can’t bet the farm,” said Khan.
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