Education has always been important to Fred Klipsch. It was important in 1964 when, as a Purdue graduate, he was the first in his family to earn a college degree. And it was special in the 1990s when he became part of the Educational Choice Charitable Trust to help fund scholarships for low-income Indiana students.
Klipsch was honored this fall with the Seton Award from the National Catholic Educational Association (NECA) for his dedication to Catholic education. His work with the Trust (now the Institute for Quality Education, a non-profit organization) and as an advocate for Indiana’s voucher and tax credit scholarship program has helped tens of thousands of students gain access to a quality education.
"In the 1990s, I began to understand that the public education system was failing too many of our children," Klipsch said. "I was concerned about not just raising money to take kids out of an inadequate system, but also how to improve it." His passion to improve education across the state led him to take leadership roles in a variety of efforts. In addition to the Institute for Quality Education, Klipsch is chairman of the non-profit Network for Quality Education and the political organization Hoosiers for Quality Education.
As the previous owner of two companies, Klipsch is comfortable taking leadership positions. In 2006, he merged his public acute care real estate investment trust company with HealthCare REIT. In 2011, he sold his second company, Klipsch Group Inc., to VOXX International. He continues involvement with both companies as a member of their boards of directors.
This successful career of running companies started with his industrial education degree and ROTC experience at Purdue. Following graduation, as a lieutenant in the Air Force, Klipsch worked with an elite group testing weapons systems in space. After serving four years and and earning an MBA, he left the Air Force with the rank of captain to help sell IBM’s first integrated computer system to businesses.
“Both of those environments required the best and the brightest,” Klipsch said. “As a result of being part of both organizations, my professional career and personal capability was forever shaped.”
In 1972, he changed direction, bought his first company and entered the entrepreneurial world. He first focused on healthcare facilities, such as nursing homes and assisted living facilities, through his companies National Guest Homes and Windrose Medical Properties Trust. He entered the consumer electronics realm when he purchased a boutique loudspeaker company in 1989, moved it to Indianapolis and renamed it Klipsch Group Inc. The company’s products became the best-selling high-performance line sold in the United States, and the company was a global leader as well.
It has been 50 years since Klipsch left Purdue University, and he has had a career filled with successes. He often gives advice to current college students about having a successful career. The most important traits, he says, are integrity and effort.
“If you fail along the way, and if you handle it in an ethical way, you learn. Ethics is a starting point,” he tells them. On the importance of effort, he says, “I believe that if you don’t put forth a significant level of effort, you limit your success. You have to be thoughtful in how you incorporate your family and work responsibilities.”
The balance seems to have worked for Klipsch. In addition to his NECA award, he was named Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2000 and he was inducted in to the Central Indiana Business Hall of Fame in 2006. He received an honorary doctorate from Purdue and the College of Technology in 2007.