Lloyd McCracken • CFO | Fowler Foods Inc. | Jonesboro
Lloyd McCracken Jr. may have devoted his career as a CFO to one man, Wallace W. Fowler, but you’d need a spreadsheet to track all the business ventures he’s served and even the physical offices he’s had.
“It’s a good thing my desk chair had wheels so I could roll from place to place,” McCracken said after being honored for lifetime achievement in finance.
Since 1981, he has toiled in nine different offices and four separate buildings for Fowler, the northeast Arkansas fried chicken king who made another fortune in banking.
Along the way, McCracken has facilitated transactions worth more than $525 million, starting with a $37.7 million sale of 83 KFC franchises in 1985. Then came a new direction as Fowler pivoted to buying, building and selling banking companies.
McCracken oversaw multiple mergers and private stock offerings for North Arkansas Bancshares Inc., Southwest Bancshares Inc. and Liberty Bancshares Inc. over the next few decades. At the time that Liberty merged with Home Bancshares in 2013, the deal was the largest in-state banking transaction ever, worth $320 million.
“When I went to work in a bank, I didn’t have a clue about banking,” said McCracken, 63, a Jonesboro High School graduate who got his accounting degree at Arkansas State University. “But maybe not knowing was a good thing, because we weren’t biased by the way things had always been done. Mr. Fowler always asked what we could do to help the customer, expanding services, late hours, posting all-day transactions.”
Those innovations also pressured competitors, and McCracken and Fowler soon found success. “It’s like any other business, except instead of buying chicken and selling chicken, or buying shirts and selling shirts, you’re borrowing money from customers and lending money to other customers. You just have to serve people well and make enough on the margins to be profitable.”
He and Fowler, whom McCracken unsurprisingly calls his “No. 1 mentor,” remain in the restaurant business: Fowler Foods operates 79 KFC locations in six states.
“There’s not a nicer person to work for,” McCracken said. “You want to do what he wants, because he’s sharp, cordial and probably the best motivator around. Obviously he’s entrepreneurial, but his team approach focuses on getting things done. In banking, it was always how can we find a way to make this loan, to meet that need? That’s his style.”
Accounting was a “practical and useful” field for McCracken, who was good with numbers and an exceptional student. In getting his MBA at the University of Memphis while working full time for a commodities firm and a Memphis retailer, McCracken kept a 4.0 GPA. “Good grades don’t mean you’ll do a better job, but they can open doors that would have been closed,” he said. “There are plenty of people with great grades that you wouldn’t want doing your personal taxes.”
After seven years in Memphis, including a stint at Touche Ross & Co., then one of the “Big Eight” accounting firms, McCracken returned to northeast Arkansas, where his ancestors first put down roots in 1835. He and his wife of 43 years, Rebecca, also dug into genealogy and the region’s history, co-authoring “The Early Banks of Craighead County.”
The couple’s four grown children and seven grandchildren all live within a few miles of Jonesboro, where McCracken served on the Metropolitan Area Planning Commission. He is also on the boards of the Craighead County Historical Society in Jonesboro and Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge, and a past president of the Northeast Chapter of the Arkansas Society of Certified Public Accountants.
Asked if felt inhibited by spending so much of his life working for Fowler, McCracken laughed. “I’ve had a very enjoyable time, and I’m fortunate that he took a chance on me.”
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