Donald Kenneth Weir

LITTLE ROCK — The story of Arkansas and frozen yogurt is a dramatic one.

It opens in the early 1980s with a former insurance salesman sampling the treat at a department store in Dallas, returning home and opening a yogurt store that then, practically overnight, morphs into a national franchise. The story of Arkansas and frozen yogurt ends in 2000 with TCBY, short for The Country’s Best Yogurt, cooling off after its explosive start and being sold to a company in Salt Lake City.

The story of Donald Weir is one that’s tied up with TCBY but didn’t end when the company moved to Utah.

The company, founded by Frank Hickingbotham, was once headquartered in Little Rock. Weir now owns the one remaining TCBY location in the capital city. In all, Weir has four TCBY franchises, including two in Arkansas.

“I do enjoy the business,” says Weir, a former accountant and operator of truck and trucking businesses. “Sure, it’s hard. There’s always something you have to manage.”

Two of Weir’s locations - Little Rock and Harrison - have been chosen as test sites for fresh yogurt - TCBY’s first venture into fresh, rather than frozen, yogurt. Now in its 30th year, TCBY is trying to break into the breakfast business with Yovana, the fresh yogurt. Weir’s Arkansas locations open at 7 a.m. for the breakfast crowd.

“[Don] has the great respect of his employees and a work ethic and integrity that you need when operating a store,” Hickingbotham says. “So many people back in the days of franchising, and I guess even today, see a store as an investment and turn it over to other people. That doesn’t always work.You’re going to have high times and low times. He’s made the full commitment you need to have.”

While Weir has an office in his home, he often can be found in his TCBY on West Markham Street in Little Rock. He is happy to proselytize about the health benefits of his store’s yogurt and will even lend a hand serving when needed. On those occasions when he’s loading up a waffle cone with strawberry yogurt, he’s a 67-year-old man with two grown children working beside teenagers.

The yogurt business remains strong. TCBY was recently named by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette readers as Best of the Best in 2011 for frozen desserts in central Arkansas.

Along the way, Weir has developed some rules to navigate the rough waters of owning a franchise.

“You got to have a good product,” Weir says. “We have the best. You have to have a clean environment. Above all, you have to have customer service. This is where I think I do a pretty good job. You have to look at a customer and find out what they want.Say, ‘Here. Try this. Sample this.’ It works.”

He sees long-term value in gaining a customer’s trust.

“If you don’t get the customer on your side, you might serve them once but they won’t come back.”

EARLY SHOCKS

The first 12 years of Weir’s life were marked and ultimately shaped by two untimely deaths.

“My mother passed away when I was 4,” Weir says. “She died of double pneumonia here in Little Rock.”

Weir, an only child, feels as if he never met his mother.He clings to letters from his father’s friends that describe the loving relationship his parents had. The shock of his mother’s death was compounded when he lost his father eight years later.

“My father died of congestive heart failure when I was 12,” Weir says. “He had served in both world wars. Not many can say that. He was around long enough to put something inside of me. Whatever I have become - good, bad or indifferent - I owe to him. And he did his best to take care of this poor 4-year-old child and get me in good environments.”

Not long before his father’s death, Weir was taken in by the United Methodist Children’s Home in Little Rock.

“It wasn’t necessarily an orphanage,” Weir says. “There were residents there whose parents couldn’t take care of them. Pretty good kids. Some of them without the home would have wound up bad kids. A lot of them grew up to be solid citizens.”

Despite the turmoil of losing his parents, Weir doesn’t feel he was cheated out of something or that he had to become an adult more quickly than the other kids around him.

“I can’t say that I had to grow up faster,” Weir says. “That maturity was is in me when my father died. I made very good grades in grade school. I made my first D at Westside Junior High School after my father died. When I got that D, I sat back and said, ‘This is not gonna work.’ I understood that was my father speaking. I turned it around quick because I knew he would have been disappointed.”

At the children’s home, Weir lived among 80 or so other kids, from 5 years old to high school seniors. He found a father figure in Connor Morehead, the superintendent of the home. Weir felt there was mutual respect.

“He was a former First Methodist church minister,” Weir says. “Dr. Morehead had a way of looking at you and, boy, you knew. I think he had a lot of respect for me because I made the grade. I didn’t get in trouble. I made good grades in school.”

The children’s home made Weir feel safe but not free. He says he was shy in high school - a situation compounded by living at the home.

“At the children’s home you are under somebody’swatchful eye,” Weir says. “You are always guilty of something you didn’t likely do. That’s because of house parents who probably can’t get much of a job anywhere else. I know they have improved that dramatically. But I felt almost as a prisoner. I don’t have a car. I can’t date. I couldn’t take a girl on a date.”

NEW FAMILY

Things changed radically for Weir when he went to college just up the road in Conway. Hendrix College turned out to mean more than an education.

“At Hendrix I found a whole new family,” Weir says. “I was an athlete. I ran track. I was pretty good at it. Back then Hendrix was part of the [Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference]. I still hold the AIC record for the 100-yard dash. They gave me the nickname Wilma. You remember Wilma Rudolph? I earned that name because I was fast.” (Atthe 1960 Olympics, Rudolph won three gold medals and was dubbed “the fastest woman in the world.”)

Weir started out as a math major but that changed after a baffling Calculus 2 class.

“I converted to business and economics,” Weir says. “I decided I was going to become an accountant.”

Hendrix was the place where Weir would find friends and slowly start to break out of his shell. By his senior year, a cheerleader named Susan was the object of his affections. The romantic campaign began with some letters and soon became serious.

“There was a rumor going around that we were already engaged,” Weir says. “We weren’t but there was that rumor. Susan and I were sitting in front of the [administration] building and I said, ‘Have you heard about this rumor?’ She said, ‘Yes, I have.’ She didn’t ask me what rumor. I said, ‘What would you like to do about it?’ She said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Would you like to make it for real?’ So that’s my proposal. It wasn’t romantic. I’m still shy at that point and the fear of getting turned down terrified me. Anyway, I made the right, right choice.”

SHORT SELLING

After graduate school at the University of Missouri, Weir and his new wife moved to Little Rock and he earned his Arkansas Certified Public Accountant license. He eventually went to work as a CPA for Frank McLarty, who was building a small empireof auto dealerships from his home in Hope.

“Here is a guy with a thirdgrade education but I probably learned more from him than anybody in the business world,” Weir says of McLarty. “I learned how you negotiate and not how you take advantage of people but how you make money and make them like it. Frank was sharp as a tack. Boy, he could take your shorts off and sell them back to you and you would have loved it when it was through.”

Weir put the business experience gained working for McLarty to use when he anda partner bought a Kenworth Truck Co. store. It was the first of a couple of business partnerships for Weir.

“I always felt I could run any business from the management point of view,” Weir says. “I might need help with the technical part.”

The good times selling trucks were very good but, by the late ’80s, Weir had to face a sudden gush of red ink.

“A deal came down where I had more liability than I was supposed to have,” Weir says. “So in 1989, I had to start all over. When you are on top of the world and have done a half-million-dollar deal, yeah, it was very sobering.”

Next up for Weir was a trucking outfit based in Bald Knob that hauled goods “from coast to coast.” Weir and another partner slowly increased the size of their company. Around that time, Weir’s son was working at aTCBY.

“He came to me and said, ‘Dad, I’d like to own a store of my own,’ Weir says. “I said, ‘Find a deal and I’ll see what I can do to help you.’ A wealthy family had stores in West Memphis and Paragould but they wanted out. So I put on my negotiation hat and I cut a fat hog.”

Weir was particularly excited about the purchase of the West Memphis store.

It was a new store “and only open six weeks and looked great,” Weir says. “So I thought we can’t lose. But we couldn’t keep the volume up. In this business you must have volume.”

It wasn’t long before Weirgot out of the trucking business and put all his energy and resources into his TCBY franchises. He had nine stores at one point, including locations in Branson, and Sarasota, Fla., but he soon figured he needed to cut back.

“It’s only taken me 10 years to realize that if you’ve got nine stores and four are making money and five are losing money, that if you close the five you might have some left over.”

Weir is especially proud of his West Markham TCBY, which he notes he spent more than two years renovating and cleaning up.

What is most interesting is that Weir finds himself in the position of a father figure to the young employees working behind the counter at his frozen yogurt stores. The man who lost his parents as a youngster and was guided by caring adults along the way is returning the favor.

“You have to deal with youth in what I do,” Weir says. “They have no idea what responsibility is. You have to teach them that. A lot ofthem have their heads down in the interview. That doesn’t scare me. I enjoy the teaching. I want to be something to those kids.”SELF PORTRAIT Don Weir

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH Nov. 11, 1943, Little Rock.

I CAN’T START THE DAY WITHOUT Retrieving the prior day’s sales activity from my stores.

MY FAVORITE PLACE TO VACATION IS With my brother-in-law bass fishing in Florida where he lives.

THE BEST PIECE OF ADVICE I’VE BEEN GIVEN ABOUT BUSINESS IS Be honest and truthful, and treat your customers and employees with respect and courtesy.

THE FOUR GUESTS AT MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY WOULD BE Dr. Connor Morehead (former superintendent of the United Methodist Children’s Home); Coach William S. Montgomery (former head track coach at Hendrix College); Frank Hickingbotham (founder of TCBY); and my father, William Thomas Weir.

A SUCCESSFUL RESTAURANT HAS TO HAVE Absolutely, positively tremendous customer service along with a quality product and a clean, inviting environment.

WHEN I AM NOT WORKING YOU CAN FIND ME Exhausted.

MY FAVORITE FLAVOR OF YOGURT IS Peanut Butter topped with peanut butter sauce and mixed nuts.

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Compulsive.