In today’s fast-paced business world, many companies are on a seemingly never-ending quest for groundbreaking tools and ideas that will take them to the next level.

The modern entrepreneur has the ability to fuse endurance with ambition and ingenuity with hard work to build a sturdy foundation for future endeavors.

Nevertheless, while contemporary tactics are essential for the growth of any enterprise, successful businessmen like J. Philip Knight-Sheen additionally recognize and value some of the more traditional business approaches.

Founder and Chairman of the Board for Medrec Inc., J. Philip Knight-Sheen has successfully built the therapy staffing and recruitment firm from the ground up with the help of a devoted staff and current president of the company, his son, Peter Knight-Sheen.

For the past 35 years, the elder Knight-Sheen has been dedicated to assisting physical, occupational and speech therapists to find proper venues to display their talents. His ambitious mind-set and commitment to excellence stems from his beginnings as a young lad in England.

Born in Liverpool in 1935, Knight-Sheen was brought up during World War II, a conflict that eventually bombed his family out of his hometown. After relocating to Chester, England, Knight-Sheen, the middle child of three brothers, attended boarding school outside of London where he indulged in the sport of cricket and nurtured aspirations of one day working in the medical field.

“I really wanted to be a doctor and I ended up being a nurse,” Knight-Sheen says. “I didn’t have the brains or the money to be a doctor so I settled to be a registered nurse. I had asthma and bronchitis and was in hospitals a great deal at that time so I admired what the people did. I think that was the primary motivation for pursuing those goals.”

After graduating as a registered nurse in England, Knight-Sheen worked in Switzerland for a time before being offered a job in Bombay, India (modern-day Mumbai.) Adventurous and confident, he instead retreated to John Sealy Hospital in Galveston after a recruiter from the hospital took notice of Knight-Sheen’s experience with pediatrics.

“I had taken a specialty course and they were looking for registered nurses to come work with pediatrics,” Knight-Sheen says. “They told me it was a great opportunity and that it was this beautiful island off the coast of Texas with palm trees and hula girls so I came over here, although it wasn’t exactly what I expected it to be.”

Still, while the image of the tropical island in the sun was slightly different from what Knight-Sheen had originally envisioned, the impact of his year-and-a-half tenure there was long lasting. Nearly 30 years after working at John Sealy, the triumphant entrepreneur landed a spot on the board of directors for the hospital.

Knight-Sheen additionally met and married his first wife in Galveston before the two briefly relocated to Minnesota for four years to work for a pharmaceutical company.

In 1968, the northern cold fronts swept the couple south to bask in the sunlight of San Antonio and start Piccadilly Films. Knight-Sheen enjoyed an abundance of success in the commercial film industry, producing films for Green Giant, Honda Motorcycles and various other training videos for institutions like the American Dental Association.

“Frankly, I went to Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, California, part of UCLA and Universal Studios, for film and television training,” Knight-Sheen says. “I went out there primarily to learn how to make films because I wanted to make travelogues so I could go back and see my family.

“That was a reason for learning about filmmaking but it never really materialized. While in Hollywood, I got to work on The Carol Burnett Show and we were participating in the filming of Planet of the Apes with Charleston Heston in the Mojave Desert. Apes were leaping all over the place.”

While Knight-Sheen found both fulfillment and success through Piccadilly Films, he was eager to commence an enduring and captivating career related to the medical field once again. After selling the company to Southwest Films in Dallas after four years of continued accomplishment, the savvy go-getter utilized his filmmaking skills to propel his 1974 business endeavor forward.

Originally started as a means of recruiting nurses, Medrec Inc. was kick started solely by Knight-Sheen whose then wife was busy teaching at Texas Military Institution and raising the couple‘s two sons, Christopher and Peter.

“At the time there was a big shortage of nurses,” Knight-Sheen says. “There still is today, in fact right now there are over 256,000 vacancies for registered nurses in this country, somehow, they just can’t get them but currently, Medrec recruits physical, occupational and speech therapists. We’re the largest agency in Texas and the only one that’s got accreditation, so we’re accredited like a hospital which for an agency is very rare.”

According to Knight-Sheen, Medrec Inc. is the oldest company in Texas that’s been specializing in the same recruitment endeavors, headquartered in the same location and under the same ownership. Thoroughly enveloped in the recruitment business, the company supports job fairs and career days, offers scholarships and works with future therapists to find the environment, salary, schedule and accommodations that best fit their needs.

The rock solid foundation that Knight-Sheen laid for Medrec Inc. successfully propelled the company forward and provided a reassuring consistency through seemingly endless patterns of economic change. However, the already thriving business was transformed in 2004 when Peter took the reigns of Medrec Inc. and built on his father’s lucrative ideas.

“My son coming on board was a big change,” Knight-Sheen says. “His enthusiasm, strength and knowledge has helped us quadruple the business in the past five years. We finally started to operate like a big company, first opening up an additional recruitment center in Houston, followed by Dallas, Chicago and next year, we’ll open up a center in San Francisco.”

While the business blossomed and his son utilized innovative recruitment methods, the able entrepreneur met and married Judge Carol Haberman Knight-Sheen, the first female judge to be appointed to a state position and a committed member of the San Antonio City Council.

Philip Knight-Sheen is semi retired and is enjoying his carefree lifestyle at Independence Village Resort-style homes for active adults 55+. With no more maintenance and upkeep of a home he now frequently travels to the corners of the world by train and is actively involved in Freemasonry. With his feet kicked up and his head held high, Knight-Sheen’s fierce work ethic, thirst for experience and abundance of victories can be attributed to a philosophy he’s kept in his pocket throughout his life.

“Be the first in, last out and the lowest paid,” Knight-Sheen says. “If you can manage those three things, you’ll be successful in your endeavors.”