- December 13, 2025
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Jerri and David Hoffmann were about to graduate from college when a job opportunity presented itself.
It was in San Francisco and the young Kansas couple was eager to go. David had been offered a position at Kaiser Aluminum and Jerri had taken on job as a teacher.
The money was good — really good, about $18,000 a year in 1973 — and as they readied to move west they bought a car, a used cobalt blue Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan with a white leather top.
“It was gorgeous,” says Jerri.
This, of course, was long before the Hoffmanns built what has become the Hoffmann Family of Cos., an empire — its hard to imagine another word for it. This is a business that at last count owns more than 120 companies with 400 locations in 30 countries and employs 17,000 people. A family business run out of Naples, Chicago and St. Louis with interests in (take a deep breath): agriculture; aviation and transportation; financial and professional services; hospitality and entertainment; manufacturing; marine; media and marketing; and real estate.
Just how entrepreneurial and active is the company? Between February 2024 and June 2025, The Hoffman Family of Cos. bought 18 companies ranging from an Illinois dairy to two ferry operators in Michigan.
That, says a spokesperson, isn’t even counting their real estate transactions over that time. (Hoffmann Commercial Real Estate, a division of Hoffmann, manages assets worth more than $1 billion.)
And now Jerri is preparing to open her second The Augusta Clothing Co. retail store.
It will be in a recently purchased building in Naples’ Fifth Avenue shopping district. The upscale boutique will, like its original location in Augusta, Missouri, specialize in clothing and accessories personally curated by Hoffmann.
The location is being renovated and plans are for it to open early next year.
This being the Hoffmanns, though, there are already plans to expand the chain to new locations. Jerri is looking at Avon, Colorado, and says David is already thinking about growing it to 100 stores.
“This is not the end,” she says standing in the new store, bare but in her mind’s eye. “This is a jumping off point.”
But, as most entrepreneurs know, as glamorous as it all may look getting to the point Jerri Hoffmann and the company are is now was not a straightforward path. Or an easy one.
That gets us back to 1973.
As the move west quickly approached that April, a confirmation letter hadn’t arrived. Nervous, David reached out to Kaiser and learned there was no record of his employment. Not only that, the person who had hired him had been fired.
David scrambled and eventually landed a job with Clark Equipment. It was in Gwinner, North Dakota, decidedly not San Francisco. As for the money, it was far less — about $11,000 per year.
As for Jerri, she went to work at a school about 20 miles outside of Gwinner in a town named Oakes that needed an English teacher. She started a Spanish department at the school and taught language arts to eighth graders.
“It was such a such a good lesson in life, too,” she says of what she learned and how it has affected her life and the business.
“You think you're set on this path and when the path changes, you can turn. You can do it.”
Jerri Hoffmann’s first lessons in entrepreneurship started long before she met David in high school.
She grew up in Washington, Missouri, a small, rural town west of St. Louis.
Her father, Alfred Noelke, worked in the family’s business, Altemueller Jewelry Store, and eight people lived in her house growing up, including her grandmother.
“At one point time,” she says, “we had one bathroom and two bedrooms with an unfinished attic where we had cots lined up. That was when my parents were just getting started.”
Alfred wound up buying his brothers out of the jewelry store and kept it until retirement.
Her mother, Doris, was a stay-at-home mom who would work odd jobs. But when Jerri got to the eighth grade, Doris started her own business selling Holiday Magic Cosmetics.
Doris, who died in January at 96, was also essential to the family business.
Her obituary says she shared her husband’s entrepreneurial spirit and helped build the store into “a thriving retail operation.”
“She was instrumental in spinning off the Hallmark card counter into its own separate business and was a creative force in planning events and promotional activities for both locations.”
“I will tell you that growing up as a young girl it was always business around the dining room table — the kitchen table,” Jerri says. “We didn't have a formal dining room, but it was business around the kitchen table 24/7.”
She met David in high school and they began dating not long after. (She adds, almost as an aside, that they dated other people as well.)
After graduation, Jerri’s parents demanded they go to separate schools “to make sure this is the real deal.”
She went off to the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg.
But it wasn’t long before David transferred to UCM and they got engaged, marrying between their sophomore and junior years.
In late 1974, David left North Dakota for a job in Chicago. Jerri stayed behind “in the middle of a blizzard” to finish out the school year.
He found himself in the executive recruiting business and in 1989 founded DHR International, known as DHR Global today. It has 50 offices and is No. 14 (out of 175) on this year on Forbes’ list of America’s Best Executive Recruiting Firms.
DHR, which Jerri calls the “mother ship,” was the catalyst to all that was to follow.
Today, their son Geoff runs the private equity side of the company in Chicago. Their other son, Greg, runs the commercial real estate business in St. Louis. They are officially co-CEOs the Hoffmann Family of Cos.
Their daughter, Alison, is not in the business.
Jerri and David, who are based in Naples, have 13 grandkids.
Hoffmann, who was pregnant with Greg when David started DHR, says there was obviously some trepidation about going out on their own. But it was the perspective that came from growing up in their hometown, and the daughter of entrepreneurs, that made it easier to take the risk.
“I told you, it was like a village and we were happy there,” she says. “And I think we both looked at each other and said, ‘Okay, if this doesn't work, we can always go back to Washington. It'll be fun there, too.’”
At 73, Jerri Hoffmann makes you feel like you are the only one in the room when she speaks with you and when she finds that thread of commonality there is genuine care and interest.
And while entrepreneurs, like politicians, are gifted with the ability to make connections, to make the listener feel as if they are the most important person in the world, she comes off as an acquaintance you’d meet on the street in, say, Washington, Missouri.
That doesn’t seem to be an act.
Despite the company’s success, she credits David for all that happened in the years since they went out on their own, calling him “the engineer behind all this” and saying “I've just been very lucky to be with him and helping him, supporting wherever I can.”
“Dave has always been a visionary. He's always reached for whatever was inaccessible to me. I'm thinking, ‘How can he possibly even think of that?’ And he does,” she says.
“I tell everybody that there were doors where I didn't know there were doors that Dave opened. And it was just like, ‘Oh my, this whole world is here.’”
Though she downplays her role, Jerri Hoffmann, like her mother before her, is a key part of the company and what it’s become, her acumen essential to the company’s success.
Rachel Berkowitz, Hoffmann’s Chicago-based vice president of marketing and communications, recalls a meeting a couple of months back. David Hoffmann and the team were working on a what she calls a huge deal, everyone was stressed as decisions needed to be made.
That’s when Berkowitz, who’s been in the finance industry for 11 years, says Hoffmann did something she’d never seen before. “He stopped and said, ‘I want to pause this and I’m going to go call my wife. I just want to talk to her and get her perspective.’”
“There something special about that,” Berkowitz says. “And really rare.”
“She’s not only my partner in life, but also in business — and when she sets her mind to something, she makes it happen,” David Hoffmann says in an email.
And what Jerri Hoffmann wants to make happen today is The Augusta Clothing Co.
The first store opened in Augusta April 2022 inside a 150-year-old wine hall. The idea came to her during Covid and she chose the historic location, which is just east of Washington where she grew up, because “it was a time capsule sitting right there.”
Naples, once the original store was established, was the natural place for the initial expansion.
The commercial real estate branch of the company bought a former real estate office at 601 Fifth Ave. S. for $6.5 million July 1. It is now in the early stages of transforming it into a boutique. The plans is for the store’s decor to be a nod to old Florida, with a modern twist.
Right now, it is an empty space with desks still in the former offices (but, interestingly, no chairs.)
The focus is going to be on attracting women starting in their late 20s and through their 70s “that have a kind of a professional look about them and mission about them,” Jerri Hoffmann says.
“But I also want them to be fun. And, you know, we do things that are on trend and on point, but we also do things that they can build a wardrobe out of.”
But this being the Hoffmanns, The Augusta Clothing Co. is not just about selling clothes. Nor is it about expansion.
It’s about family.
“I asked my 9-year-old granddaughter the last time I saw her, if she would be my business partner,” Jerri says. The granddaughter’s name is Izzy. She lives in St. Louis and Jerri calls her a fashionista.
How did Izzy respond?
She’s a Hoffmann née Noelke. How else would she respond?
“She said yes.”
