Our guest for the January 24th edition of Playmakers Talk Show: Owen Hannay, Founder and CEO of “Slingshot” and “Five Smooth Stones“

Born in Dallas, Owen is a fourth-generation native Texan, with stories from both sides of his family about running away from Pancho Villa while they lived in the LRGV (Lower Rio Grande Valley).

Owen attended Cistercian Prep School in Irving after three years of living in Tokyo with his family. His family agreed to pay for college if he attended the University of Virginia, and he says he “left a flaming trail” from Dallas to Charlottesville.

After graduating with an Architecture Degree and, deciding that he did not want to be an architect, he returned home to get an MBA at SMU. After failing to get a job in Real Estate development (it was the late 80s) he took a job at an advertising agency and unexpectedly fell in love with the business.

Owen started his first company, Slingshot, in 1995 at the advent of Interactive Marketing and has been at the forefront ever since. Slingshot ran the first HTML Banner on the Internet, developed the first updatable banner, negotiated the first online awareness guarantee, and much, much more. Today, Slingshot (advertising agency) and its sister company Insite (development company) serve clients including UT Southwestern, Bimbo Bakeries and Omni Hotels

The growth of Slingshot led to the purchase of the Awalt Building in the Dallas West End in 2000 to house their offices. Classified at the time as “Demolition by Neglect”, the building was restored during the following year. Since that time, Five Smooth Stones, Owen’s real estate company, has renovated, repurposed, and sold over 600,000 square feet of historic space. In 2023 Five Smooth Stones purchased the Landmark Center in the West End for the second time.

Slingshot.com

Insite.net

LandmarkDallas.com

Phone: (214) 634-4411

Guest Owen Hannay, Host Steve A Klein

Our guest for the January 10th edition of PlayMakers Talk Show: Peter S. Brodsky, Investor & Owner, Shops At Redbird

Peter S. Brodsky is an investor and business executive who, through a majority-owned company, owns the Shops at RedBird (formerly known as Southwest Center Mall and, before that, Red Bird Mall). Peter is investing in the property to restore it to a place of pride and quality in the community.

Despite many challenges over the years, RedBird is a comeback fighter, proudly reclaiming its title as the center of activity and the place to be in southern Dallas.
Like many shopping malls built from the late 1970s through the 1990s, the world changed around Red Bird Mall through a series of recessions, demographic shifts, the rise of online shopping, and the decline of American mall culture. From its heyday in the 1980s, Red Bird Mall had fallen on hard times, losing its ties with the community with a name change to Southwest Center Mall and bankruptcy in 1997. For a time, it looked like it was going the way of other dying malls.
Over the last seven years, Brodsky has grown the development and the investors and rebranded the transformation to The Shops at RedBird.
Before acquiring RedBird, Peter was a founder and partner of HBC Investments LLC, a firm focused on investing both third-party capital and the capital of its principals in growth-oriented companies. Before co-founding HBC, Peter was a partner at the private equity firm of HM Capital Partners and its predecessor, Hicks Muse, where he was employed for over 15 years.

At HM Capital, Peter focused on the media industry, was responsible for deploying or managing over $2.6 billion of equity investments, and completed over 100 transactions. In the civic and non-profit arenas, Peter also serves on several boards.

ShopsAtRedbird.com

Phone: (972) 296-1491

Host Steve A Klein, Guest Peter S. Brodsky