Pictured from left are Les Dreiling, Brenda McFadden, Rick Renfro and Jeff Sigler. Those four Lawrence business leaders will enter the Lawrence Business Hall of Fame as the class of 2025.

Four long-serving local business leaders — a banker, an accountant, a restaurateur and a pharmacist — will be inducted into the Lawrence Business Hall of Fame in 2025, Junior Achievement of Kansas announced on Thursday.

The four-person 2025 class consists of Les Dreiling, of Great American Bank; Brenda McFadden, of The McFadden Group; Rick Renfro, of Johnny’s Tavern; and Jeff Sigler, of Sigler Pharmacy.

Junior Achievement, a nonprofit that provides business and financial literacy classes for local K-12 students, has recognized local business leaders through the Lawrence Business Hall of Fame for years. The hall itself is inside the Lawrence Public Library, where there are photos and biographies of inductees dating back to the inaugural class of 2010.

The class of 2025 will be formally inducted into the Hall of Fame on May 1, 2025, at The Forum at the University of Kansas’ Burge Union. The reception will begin at 5:30 p.m. and the tribute dinner and awards begin at 6:15 p.m.

Here’s a little more about the four business leaders who will be honored, according to a news release from Junior Achievement:

• Les Dreiling was born and raised in Gorham, a small community in central Kansas. He graduated from Fort Hays State University in May 1979 with a bachelor’s in business administration. After working in Hays for a short time, he came to Lawrence in 1980 and began his banking career at Lawrence National Bank in April 1981.

Ten years later, Dreiling became an executive vice president with University National Bank and started its commercial banking division. He also served on UNB’s board of directors and was an officer of its holding company until September 2005.

In January 2006, he was part of a group of local investors that purchased Lawrence Bank, which is now known as Great American Bank. He became the bank’s CEO and president, titles which he holds to this day.

Along with his career in banking, in his 45 years of living in Lawrence, Dreiling has given back to the community in a variety of ways: he’s coached Little League baseball, served on the board of trustees for the Lawrence Memorial Hospital Endowment Association, helped found the Kansas University Baseball Diamond Club and was a member of the Trustees of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church.

• Brenda McFadden was born in Charleston, West Virginia, but moved around a lot as a kid before her family settled in the St. Louis area. She came to Lawrence in 1982 to attend KU, earning a bachelor’s in business administration.

McFadden had a couple of sales jobs, including one where she cold-called people to try to sell penny stocks, but she began to take classes in accounting after her first daughter, Grace, was born in 1988. She earned a degree in accounting and was hired in January 1991 by Ernst & Young in Kansas City to work in their tax department.

When Grace entered kindergarten in 1993, McFadden took a job in Lawrence to be closer to home. In 1995, she bought half of the firm she was with, which then became known as Hickman and McFadden; she purchased the whole company in 1998, and its name changed to The McFadden Group.

McFadden also served on the boards of multiple community organizations, including The Children’s Shelter, the American Red Cross of Douglas County and Junior Achievement.

• Rick Renfro grew up in Prairie Village and graduated from Shawnee Mission West High School in 1974. After briefly attending Ottawa University, he transferred to KU in 1976 and found his passion in life: rugby. But Renfro also found that rugby wouldn’t pay the bills, so he bought Johnny’s Tavern from Johnny Wilson in 1978 and learned the ins and outs of the hospitality industry on the job.

Eventually, the industry became his lifelong career. Along with opening the “Up & Under” club in 1982 above Johnny’s in North Lawrence, another Johnny’s was opened in Overland Park in 1991. Now, there are 13 separate Johnny’s locations along with the more upscale J. Wilson’s restaurant. In total, these restaurants now employ more than 600 people.

Along with his work with Johnny’s, Renfro has served in many community organizations including Tenants to Homeowners, the Ballard Center, the North Lawrence Improvement Association and Just Food.

• Jeff Sigler, while attending Emporia State University, went to work at Hill’s Apothecary, where he learned a lot about what it would take to run his own small business one day and keep customers happy. He and his wife, Suzi, moved to Lawrence in 1981 so he could attend pharmacy school at KU, and he worked at King Pharmacy while in school and Raney’s Drug Store after graduating in 1984.

He also started a publishing company with a classmate, Brent Flanders, to write and sell study guides for pharmacy students. Currently, the company is on the 38th edition of Sigler’s Drug Cards, which are sold nationwide.

Sigler and Flanders also opened a Macintosh computer store called MacSource in Overland Park in 1987, and eventually the store had two other locations in Manhattan and Lawrence before Sigler sold the company in 1994 and returned to the pharmacy profession full-time, managing the pharmacy at the Clinton Parkway Hy-Vee location.

In 2005, Sigler opened up his own pharmacy in the Internal Medicine Group practice on West Sixth Street. He now owns and operates three pharmacies: two in Lawrence and one in Lenexa.

Sigler has served on various boards, including for the American Cancer Society, Theatre Lawrence, the Douglas County AIDS Project and the Kansas Pharmacy Services Corporation.