The origins NextGen Ventures date back to 1933 when Perry Wayland "P.W." Pierce opened his first garage in Kansas City, MO.  P.W. 's family moved from Texas to Oklahoma during the Oklahoma Land Rush of the late 1800s where they fed their 10 children from the food they grew on their farm.  The oldest boy in the family, P.W. quit high school to work on the family farm.  Once his brothers were able to take his place on the farm, P.W. left for the promise of the growing Kansas City where he opened his first auto mechanic shop.  However, a few years later the family farm was hit hard by the dustbowl and depression and P.W. returned to Oklahoma to help his family.

 

To earn money for the family outside the farm, P.W. became a welder on the Panhandle Eastern Pipeline, which stretched from parts of Oklahoma to outside of Springfield, Illinois at this time.  While working in Springfield in 1933, P.W. got a call from a former Kansas City business partner asking him to join him is in building an oil recycling  plant.  The two of them build the first three such plants Kansas City, Louiville, KY and Springfield, IL. 

 

Also while in Spingfield, P.W. met Twylah Marie Utterback, the love of his life and wife of 66 years.  So he could start a family in Springfield, P.W. sold his interest in the other two plants and became the sole owner of the Springfield plant and called it Pierce Refined Oil. As the plant expanded, P.W. brought up his three brothers--Jack, Jimmie Lee and Ed--to run the plant.  

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As his family began to expand, so should the family business.  Along with another partner, P.W. established an oil deliver and retail channel called Harper Oil Co. With the development of each new gas station, P.W. would bring up another brother from Oklahoma to run it. After the fifth gas station, and no more brothers left to recruit, P.W. sold Pierce Refine Oil to his brothers and asked his son-in-law, Ken Sommer, leave his position in the US Air Force to take over the expansion of  Harper Oil Co. Ken quickly built the company to 26 gas station and convenient stores throughout Illinois with over 300 employee.  Ken's oldest son Chris Sommer, joined the company as CEO in ____.   

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The oil embargo of 1972 had a significant impact on the family business. Ken experienced first hand the risk of the family's dependency on the health of one industry. At his direction the company quickly started investing in other assets, primarily real estate and farm land.  Ken also grew up on a farm and very much appreciated the tangle nature of assets, especially in challenging times. This lesson has allowed the family business to flourish through to the fourth generation it is today.

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In 2010, the Harper Oil sold the majority of its retail convenient store assets to Casey's General Store.  Meanwhile, Ken's youngest son, Bruce Sommer, had started and sold three companies in the Boston area during the dot-com boom. Immediately following he started and help lead four different angel Investing groups in New England and the Midwest. Using the proceeds from the successful business transaction, Bruce and Chris Sommer pooled their resources to create a family office investment platform to access the best talent and strategies in the industry and further diversify the families collective exposure. 

 

After a decade significantly beating market benchmarks across a variety of asset classes and recognizing the significant power of further pooling assets, Greg Turk joined Bruce to expand their performance even further through the creation of a institutional multi-family office strategy inviting other families to pool their assets to gain access to the resources and talent's from which the Sommer's have greatly benefited. 

 

Bruce continues to lead the private equity and direct investing arm of the business. Chris leads the real estate and farm management arm. 

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