Entrepreneur Of The Year 2026

StartKleen Founder and CEO Rick Kimbrell has been named a finalist for the Entrepreneur Of The Year 2026 Southwest Award by Ernst & Young LLP (EY US). An independent panel of judges selected Rick among 44 finalists representing North Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma across industries including professional services, consumer products, health, mobility, and food safety.

Now in its 41st year, the Entrepreneur Of The Year program recognizes bold leaders who build long-term value: founders, transformational CEOs, and multigenerational family business leaders. Judges evaluate finalists on entrepreneurial spirit, purpose, growth, and impact.

The Southwest regional award winners will be announced on June 20 during a special celebration at Gilley’s Dallas. Regional winners advance to the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Awards in November, presented at EY’s annual Strategic Growth Forum in Palm Springs.

Three generations of legacy work in food safety

Rick Kimbrell is a third-generation food safety professional. He founded StartKleen in 2009, building on a family legacy in sanitation that began with his father, Ray Kimbrell. The philosophy Ray passed down (what we call Legacy Work) still shapes every decision StartKleen makes today.

Legacy Work isn’t a tagline. It’s the idea that what you build should outlast you. That the people you train, the programs you invest in, and the standards you hold are the real measure of a business. Not the quarterly numbers. Rick has spent 17 years as a Vistage member, was named a Vistage Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, and has led StartKleen through the kind of steady, principled growth that the Entrepreneur Of The Year program was built to recognize.

That promise is the through-line from Ray to Rick to the site managers leading crews in plants across the country tonight. The Entrepreneur Of The Year program recognizes three types of leaders: original founders, transformational CEOs, and multigenerational family business leaders who reshape a legacy model for the future. Rick fits the second and third categories. He’s been doing exactly that for 17 years.

What 97% retention and 1,500+ team members actually means

EY judges evaluate finalists on growth and impact. For Rick, those words have specific numbers behind them.

StartKleen provides turnkey contract sanitation, chemistry solutions, and food safety training to 200+ USDA and FDA-regulated food processing facilities across the United States. The company has 1,500+ team members, 30+ years of combined leadership experience, and a 97% client retention rate. None of those numbers happened by accident.

• 97%
  Client retention means plants renew with StartKleen because we do what we say we’re going to do. We don’t chase business; we keep the work we have by earning it every shift.
• 1,500+
  Team members means we’re a people business first. Sanitation is done by humans, at night, under pressure. The work is only as good as the crew doing it.
• 200+
  Facilities means we’ve built consistency across plant types: protein, produce, bakery, RTE, confectionary, soup, sauce, spice. Every environment has its own chemistry, its own audit standards, its own rhythm.

The programs behind those numbers have names. Dos Amigos pairs every new hire with a mentor from their first shift, not as an afterthought, but as the structural foundation of onboarding. WINS is a quarterly leadership training program for site managers and emerging leaders. Red Card/Yellow Card gives every crew member a shared language for handling incidents: a two-minute conversation for a yellow card, a fifteen-minute conversation for a red card, every one documented.

A message from Rick Kimbrell

And the winner is…

The Southwest regional winners will be announced on June 20, 2026, at Gilley’s Dallas South Side Ballroom. Whether Rick advances to the National Awards or not, being named a finalist puts StartKleen among a group of Southwest businesses being recognized for building things that last. That’s what we’re celebrating.

The Entrepreneur Of The Year program was founded in 1986 and has since celebrated more than 11,000 business leaders across nearly 80 countries and territories. Past honorees include Ashli Blumenfield of Standard Meat Company, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, Eric Yuan of Zoom, and Kendra Scott of Kendra Scott LLC. National award winners will be announced in November at EY’s Strategic Growth Forum in Palm Springs, California. The national overall winner will go on to represent the United States at the World Entrepreneur Of The Year competition in June 2027.

Follow along on our news page as we head into the June 20 celebration, and learn more about the programs and people behind this recognition on our Who We Are and Dos Amigos pages.