Why I Created Morgan’s at the Little Red

Charles D. Morgan

After 50 years as a CEO, I'm on a new mission.

MORGAN’S AT THE LITTLE RED is the face of a sprawling personal initiative, a no-holds-barred effort by one serial tech entrepreneur to apply the lessons learned over 50 years in the CEO’s seat to the task of creating one more group culture of pride and accomplishment. The tools at hand are cutting-edge technology, availability of capital, a lifetime of leadership, and the inherent can-do spirit of the stars of this bold narrative, a team of rural Arkansans who were living their lives and minding their own business—and then I moved into what was supposed to be my weekend/retirement house, on the south bank of The Little Red River.

A native Arkansan myself, I spent my boyhood in Fort Smith in the heady years just after World War II. I was a geeky kid, always either tinkering with, or dreaming of, some kind of machine or motor, and how I could make it do things even more spectacular than it was already being used to do. When I was about 12, a guy on a bulldozer was helping build a subdivision near us, and I would go over and watch him all day long in the summer. One fine day he motioned me over to let me ride on his dozer and it was the greatest experience of my life to that point.

I grew up and got my mechanical engineering degree at the University of Arkansas, then went to work for IBM. But through a quirk of fate, I declined to hitch my wagon to IBM’s traditional businesses—instead, I chose to apply my engineering talents to the company’s newest frontier: computers. I stayed with IBM for several years, thoroughly enjoying the work—until one day I realized I was about to get promoted into a life I didn’t want. A new path opened just when I needed it: It was the early ‘70s, and I joined an old friend as co-CEO of a small Conway “service bureau,” which meant that our 25-person company rented space on our computers to help clients do payroll and other everyday business tasks.

Jump ahead to early 2008: Our little service bureau had long since grown into the behemoth known as Acxiom Corporation, the $1.5 billion, 7,000-employee, Little-Rock-based world leader in data management and database services, with some 1,500 separate pieces of information on more than half-billion people around the globe. After 35 years, I was forced out in an ugly proxy battle, but I had already faced the fact that the fun was gone. I remember thinking that running a company that size was like herding cats, which in hindsight doesn’t even come close to capturing the hellish baggage of stockholder, lawyer, and administrative headaches that comes with an enterprise that large.

And yet leaving it was a shock to my system. Feeling lost, for a while I burrowed in and concentrated on maximizing the returns in my stock portfolio. But in time I missed working with a team, missed leading smart people toward greater and greater goals. It was time to find meaning in my life again.

I discovered it by following a lead I had received while I was still at Acxiom. In July 2008, I became the major investor in a Boston startup—called First Orion—based on the general idea of telephone call blocking. The guy heading up the new company was terrific at phoning me with reports of “great feedback” from the various telecom carriers, but after a too-long period with no real progress accompanied by more and more requests for additional investment on my part, I had to step in and take over the company. We moved it to Arkansas and I, at age 65 and still thinking of myself as “semi-retired,” set about the task of figuring out how to make this company a success.

For the next 16 years, we taught ourselves to negotiate the murky, uncharted world of mobile technology. We hired the best people we could find, and our teams invented innovative systems for, first, scam and spam call protection, and, more recently, for branded communication. The major telecoms responded with contracts—we just renewed our long-term agreement with T-Mobile, making us the provider of call protections and branded business solutions for many millions of mobile customers across the United States.

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I BEGAN IMAGINING OUR HOME in the country a few years ago, long before I ever thought of it as a “retirement” house. For nearly three decades, my wife, Susie, and I had owned a place on the tip of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, and we usually spent the month of January there. It was a trip made easier with our private plane—but “easier” compared to what? As our grandchildren came along and grew older, Susie began lobbying for a weekend home that wasn’t so much trouble to get to. We had friends who owned homes on the Little Red River near Heber Springs—about an hour and a half’s drive from Little Rock—and they all seemed to love it, so eventually I called some Realtors in the area and made appointments for us to look at potential properties.

At first, we were just shopping for a house to buy, but nothing we saw ticked all our boxes. We finally tried another Realtor who took Susie up one day when I couldn’t go, and the agent showed her some parcels in a development called “Wildflower Estates.” Susie came home very excited about it, and we drove up together just as soon as I was able. When we finally got to this lot, it felt isolated—as in comfortably private. And yet it wasn’t really all that far from the shopping and restaurants in and around Heber Springs. I liked everything about this location.

Eventually, we bought several adjacent lots, some on the river and some not, and I settled into the soothing process of designing our house. Meanwhile, we hired a rock and dirt guy to do the clearing and grading of our property, and, later, the rock work around the house and along the riverbank. During the couple of years that our house was under development, Susie and I occasionally drove up to check on the progress. On those visits, I found myself once again bitten by the big-machine bug. I loved watching the bulldozers at work, and on the weekends an impressive young man who worked part-time for our rock and dirt guy operated the heavy machinery. The young man’s name was Blake Gray, and he was very good at placing those heavy blocks of stone along the bank with speed and precision.

At the time, Blake was 29 years old, had two years of college, spoke well, and wanted to stay in the area. For three years, he’d gone off and worked on a pipeline, during which time he’d made a lot of money but realized that’s a horrible life. So he came back home and ended up becoming a dad, and he didn’t want to leave again. But the job options in this part of the state are pretty limited, so he was kind of stuck. Blake told me he wanted to start his own business, and I was convinced that he could do anything he set his mind to. I was very impressed with his work ethic.

In 2020, after we were in the house, I began feeling an inexplicable need to buttress our position there on the riverfront. I loved our privacy and didn’t want to take a chance on losing it, so I convinced Susie that we should add more lots to our holdings. Once those purchases were complete, things began to progress organically. I’ve got a pretty good size property here, went my thinking. I’m going to need some equipment to keep it up….

The first piece of machinery I bought was a small Cat excavator. Then I bought a Skid Steer, the machine on a rubber track that runs around with a bucket on the front of it. Now I’m going to need somebody to operate and take care of these machines….That last thought quickly evolved into the idea of hiring Blake Gray to take care of the property as a whole. “I’ll pay you a really good salary,” I said. “And you’ll also have time to do other outside work.” Blake came aboard in September of 2020.

That same month, in my capacity as Chairman of ACDS—the Arkansas Center for Data Sciences, now Apprenticely—I attended the grand opening of the Tech Depot in Newport, Arkansas, an innovative repurposing of an old railroad station for the 21st century mission of bringing technology knowhow—and well-paying careers—to rural areas and smaller communities.  A partnership of ACDS, Arkansas State University, and the Newport Economic Development Commission, the Tech Depot and its potential for changing the lives of folks in that part of the state made a strong impression on me. And when I got back to my house by the Little Red River, I began to see that property—and my “retirement”—through fresh eyes.

For all of my business career I’ve known that Arkansans, no matter where they live, are very, very smart—they just need to be trained. But rural America especially has been left behind in every economic revolution. It got left behind in the Industrial Revolution, and it was left behind again in the whole technology and computer revolution. And now here we are in the early stages of the A.I. Revolution, which I believe will be more impactful than any of the economic revolutions our society has ever encountered. With that in mind, I began to see that my place in the country could become a laboratory of sorts.

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FOUR YEARS LATER, we’re putting state-of-the-art technology to work in multiple ways, but our flagship effort is the executive retreat facility now called Morgan’s at The Little Red. This extraordinary meeting center is managed by people from this area—many of them family and friends of Blake Gray—and to me it provides the perfect balance for this next stage of my long career: allowing me to employ my deep knowledge of how and why executive retreats work—and the qualities required of a first-class meeting facility—while sharing what I’ve learned about technology and teamwork with a group of engaged and deserving Arkansans.

We’ve built 10 two-bedroom, fully furnished cabins for participating executives. A short golf-cart ride from cabin #1 is the just-opened Brandimore Conference Center, a two-story, three-bedroom home and meeting facility where we’ve just hosted our first three business planning retreats, accommodating groups as large as 35 people and as small as eight. Meanwhile, just up the road, a work crew is remodeling and expanding a spacious three-story log home which, when it opens in June 2025, will be called The Lodge and will be our main meeting site for executive retreats, while Brandimore will continue to host smaller conferences. When The Lodge is finished, we’ll have a rear-facing 2,000-square-foot deck overlooking a 5,000-square-foot patio, where meeting participants can mingle in the morning over breakfast and coffee and in the evening during cocktails and dinner, their off-site camaraderie reflected in the unruffled surface of a beautiful 24-foot-deep pond.

These good people working with me up here have a deep sense of place for this land in the Ozark foothills and along the Little Red River, and I’m gratified that my place in the country provided me an introduction to them and to their innate gumption and grit. Together, we’re going to prove that technology and A.I. have a place in the country too.

I invite you to come see what we’re doing, come enjoy the beauty and tranquility, come experience the ongoing business benefits of time to relax, recharge, and re-imagine. Our team looks forward to welcoming your team to Morgan’s at The Little Red.