Chris Dhooghe
Chris Dhooghe
Chris Dhooghe is a longtime financial services consultant and entrepreneurial specialist.
He is currently Vice President and co-owner of ZC Financial, a property and financial consultancy firm based in Kansas City.
He is also the President of Dhooghe Properties, LLC, a property investment firm with headquarters in Pittsburg, Kansas.
He was formerly President of Brooke Insurance & Financial Services, an independent insurance agency also based in Pittsburg, Kansas.
In 2009, he was charged with a sweepstakes-related scam.
Chris’ extensive range of skills encompasses varied areas, with finance, commercial production, and event marketing being only a few of his main areas of specialization.
He displayed an innate sales talent from a very young age, starting his first commercial enterprise at the age of nine.
While kids his age spent much of their time at play, Chris was making money gathering aluminum cans and bringing them to the neighborhood recycling facility.
During his teenage years, he also started a vending business, placing vending machines in several shops around town.
Chris would continue on in the entrepreneurial path even while attending Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma, where he enrolled in the school’s Mortuary Science program.
He would only stay at the University for one semester, as his then-fledgling home sales business began to take off.
Nevertheless, Chris did have a genuine interest in the mortuary business.
Combined with his natural affinity for the sales pitch, this would lead him to a new line of work: selling funeral insurance policies to senior citizens in the Midwest.
This proved to be a lucrative career for Chris, and it wasn’t until 2001 that he embarked on yet another career path.
Chris Dhooghe’s new enterprise came about as a result of a surprise call from a mentor in business, when he was told of an established insurance firm that was looking for new owners.
Located in Pittsburg, Kansas, the Steve Elliott Insurance Agency was changing hands for $500,000.
Chris managed to raise this amount with the help of a longtime friend, with whom he began continuing on with the firm’s operations.
With Chris at the helm, the then-floundering Steve Elliott Insurance Agency underwent a period of renewed profitability.
Although Chris and his partners started out simply by expanding on the company’s existing clientele, they quickly found themselves the owners of a hugely profitable venture, with more than 2,000 clients signed.
A 7,000 square feet retail center was acquired in order to accommodate the firm’s growing operations, and Chris himself purchased two mobile home parks that proved to be big money-earners as well.
The first decade of the 2000s saw Chris operating his own photo publishing website after the huge success of a 2004 photo contest that attracted as many as 20,000 visitors a day at its height.
The establishment of the site’s publishing division greatly expanded the company’s market scope, and soon orders of the company’s photography books came pouring in from all over the world.
Chris continued to operate the site until 2010, when changing interests resulted in its sale to a business supplier.
Today, Chris continues to be a leading authority in the entrepreneurial and financial services industry in Kansas City and its environment.