College of Business

Jaymes Winters needed to be pushed, and “Captain Midnight” was happy to oblige.

That was Winters’ nickname for Prof. Steve Lawton, who lit a fuse on the 1985 College of Business graduate’s lucrative career as an entrepreneur.

“He was a very, very powerful speaker,” Winters said of Lawton, associate professor emeritus of international business. “We called him Captain Midnight, he was piling on the work so hard. It was like he was saying, ‘I see your talent, but I’m going to challenge you.’ He was an inspiration.”

Winters’ career began as a staff accountant for Climax Portable Machine Tool in Newberg. He spent two years at Climax and then moved on, first to California and then to Texas, working for an accounting firm, a construction equipment distributor and finally a small oil company, always with an eye on being self-employed.

That focus sharpened after the oil industry endured an epic bust.

“The seven biggest banks in Texas failed,” recalled Winters, who went back to California to regroup. “I lived on the beach in my car for a couple weeks. The Pacific Ocean was my bathtub.

“I was not going back to work for somebody else,” he said. “I used my savings, my credit cards, borrowed some money from my parents, took on a partner.”

The result was United Energy, which launched in Portland on Sept. 11, 1991.

“We sold aviation fuel, gasoline, diesel,” Winters said. “In the beginning, we couldn’t afford a driver, so I did that too. When that started going good, we bought 11 Taco Bells and some retail gas and service stations.”

In particularly cruel irony, United Energy’s 10-year anniversary was marked not by celebration but by tragedy: 9/11. And not only did the attacks plunge the U.S. into mourning, the ensuing 72-hour grounding of aviation traffic threatened Winters’ livelihood.

The company persevered, however, and Winters took a trial run at retirement after liquidating his assets in 2007; the decision to sell his holdings was based both on changes in his personal life and the belief that the economic bubble was about to burst, which it did.

He spent two years mainly traveling, “and now I’m back trying to make a living,” he joked. He founded Blue Leopard Capital, a private equity fund in Portland, and is the CEO and managing partner.

Brought up to date on Winters’ career, Captain Midnight was pleased and unsurprised.

“I told him, ‘I know you were a big man at your high school’ – he won a state basketball title at Benson Tech as part of a team featuring another future Beaver, A.C. Green – “but success is discipline, and you have to be creative,” Lawton said. “It’s about working hard every day, being organized and getting things done.”

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