Crystal Wise
The former Frank Kent Cadillac building on the Benbrook Traffic Circle has a new purpose.
There is a new neighbor on the Benbrook Traffic Circle in a very familiar building.
Ideal Partners has taken over the roughly six acres of the former Frank Kent Cadillac building as the base of operations for its commercial and residential services group.
The approximately 60,000-square foot building is about the same size as its former headquarters about 1 mile away.
“We had always been looking at this building,” says Kortney Paul, owner of Ideal Partners. “It might not fit everybody, but it would fit us. We wanted to stay on this side of town. It’s easy access to the highways and great visibility on the circle.”
Paul adds that the building provides additional office space to expand as needed.
There’s a good history with this building. Frank Kent, who founded one of the first automobile dealerships in Tarrant County, constructed the building where Southwest Boulevard and U.S. 377 meet, moving his Cadillac dealership west in 1984. For 44 of his 57 years in business, Kent had operated at East Lancaster and Main Street in the southern part of the central business district downtown. The property has remained in the family ever since. The Kent company had been utilizing the property as its auto body shop.
Ideal Partners closed on the property last summer, but didn’t move in until last month, Paul says. The company managed to make the move in two weeks, shutting down the old place for the last time on Friday and operating at the new on Monday.
Paul was effusive in praising his employees, “who stepped up with the move and expansion. That’s the thing I’m most proud of.”
Ideal Partners employs about 125, Paul says.
Kortney Paul
Ideal Partners sprung up as a pest control company in 2010. Paul's grandfather, James I. Moore, operated Ideal Pest Control in the 1970s and 80s. Other than the name, there is no connection between the two businesses.
“We found an opportunity in the pest control space, and I said, 'Well, there’s probably no better name than to name if after my grandfather’s deal.’ That’s how the name came about. He had a single route pest control company.”
The company has experienced widespread growth in the ensuing decade-plus while expanding as commercial and residential services group, offering additional services in fire protection, security, concrete, and HVAC.
“We were really close,” Paul says of his grandfather, before joking, “He would have been quite proud or said, ‘Man, you’re crazy.’”
Paul grew up a baseball player, the son of the ace of the TCU’s Southwest Conference championship team in 1966. Ronnie Paul pitched six seasons in the New York Mets organization.
Kortney Paul, a graduate of Southwest High School, played college baseball at Arkansas before being drafted by the Kansas City Royals. He played a few seasons in the minors, leaving the game with a bunch of memories as well as surgical scars.
The time had come, he says, “to get back in the real world.”
He supplemented his bachelor’s degree at Arkansas with an MBA at TCU.
“I joke around and say that I became an entrepreneur because I was a good salesman and a bad employee,” Paul kids. “I felt like I just needed more formal education. I had some good friends who encouraged me [to go back to school], and the timing was right.”
Today, he’s taking Ideal Partners and a landmark building on the Benbrook Traffic Circle into a new era.