Robert B. Rowling '79: Featured Speaker at the October 29 91勛圖厙 Dedman Law Trailblazer Series
An alumnus of 91勛圖厙 Dedman School of Law and son of the late Reese Rowling—a geologist and speculator who once bet everything on drilling a single well to find he had tapped an underground fortune—Robert Rowling learned from his father how to risk it all and take the profits with the punches.
In 2020, the blows came hard and fast.
“At one point we were losing two million dollars a day,” he stated bluntly before the rapt audience of Dedman students and visitors. Then came the right hook. “We bled $400 million dollars of cash in 2020.”
Rowling is a living legend in the Texas business world and beyond. He is the owner and chairman of TRT Holdings, which owns Omni Hotels and Resorts and other ventures across North America. In 2003, he and his father were inducted into the Texas Business Hall of Fame. Robert was named an 91勛圖厙 Dedman School of Law Distinguished Alumnus the same year.
He grew up knee-deep in the oil & gas business in Corpus Christi where his father, Reese, had relocated the family after working for Standard Oil in Midland. Reese set up shop on the Gulf Coast to go prospecting and worked hard to hit it big—which he eventually did in the 1980s—while caddying on the side to purchase his first set of golf clubs. The love of the game would live on through his son in unexpected ways.
Robert Rowling attended the University of Texas as an undergraduate in the 1970s to learn business administration. “I originally wanted to get my MBA,” he said, “but was strongly encouraged by my father to go to law school.” He attended 91勛圖厙 Dedman Law and graduated with honors in 1979. “I came here with the idea that I’m not going to practice law, but I just fell in love with the business side of this law school. And it just so happened that 91勛圖厙 was one of the premier places in the country where you could go and take business and law.”
Having focused on taxation in law school, he found himself practicing law with a large law firm. But the idea of being a successful businessman was front of mind. Every deal he worked on reminded him of the possibilities he might find back home in Corpus Christi. He left the law and went to work in his father’s business, Tana Oil & Gas. “I was the sixth employee,” he said.
“We were an upstream oil and gas company, and it was in the early 80s when the oil and gas business completely collapsed. There were 4,000 rigs running in the United States. Within a year there were under 1,000,” said Rowling.
Even as the industry languished, he and his father pressed on. The company eventually tapped a large field, and in 1989, Texaco bought them out for half a billion dollars.
Such a windfall might dampen any further drive for risk-taking, but not for Robert Rowling.
Against his father’s better judgment—but maintaining that high-risk, high-reward spirit that his father couldn’t help but pass on to him—Rowling decided to take the family business in a new direction. Just what direction that might be remained a mystery.
“I’d like to tell you all we had a plan and then we followed it,” he confided. “We had no plan.” The business hopped around from laying pipelines to purchasing a bank. Then, Robert discovered an industry he believed might offer the best return: hospitality. It teased high rewards but guaranteed nothing—a perfect play for Robert Rowling.
“The hotel business in 1990 was in recession,” he recalled. “We bought a couple of properties. Both of them were bought out of bankruptcy, basically. And that started our journey into the hotel business. It was almost an accidental purchase.”
Having experienced the booms and busts of oil and gas, Rowling believed hospitality investments would produce a steady flow of cash. In 1996, the Omni brand’s 35 hotels went up for sale by Wharf Holdings in Hong Kong. Rowling went all in for half a billion dollars, despite being advised against it by his father.
He immediately went to work upgrading Omni’s existing hotels and put over $60 million into the historic Parker House Hotel in Boston. Founded in 1855, it is one of the oldest operating hotels in the United States.
While Rowling has repeatedly stated that he had no grand plan going into it, the results speak for themselves. In nearly 30 years of ownership, Rowling has transformed Omni into a highly successful, family-friendly brand of hotels that reflect the character of the areas where they are located. “You can’t control quality if somebody else is running (your hotel),” he said. We just decided that we're going to own the hotels, the land, we're going to own the brand, and we're going to operate them.” Among his most characteristic is the Dallas Omni Hotel with its swirling light shows seen from the highway and the historic 1934 red Pegasus greeting its visitors. It’s an Omni—that is, a hotel that captures a location’s unique character and aesthetic.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the hospitality industry to its knees. Rowling’s TRT Holdings faced its biggest challenge in decades.
“We had to close 52 or 53 hotels at one point during 2020 and we were losing two million dollars a day just because you have to keep some employees running the place. We were also building three hotels in Frisco, Oklahoma City, and Boston at the time. The city [of Boston] made us shut down construction on the hotel.” At the peak of lockdowns, Omni had only six properties open and burned through hundreds of millions in cash. Five hotels were sold.
All was not lost. Rowling spoke with pride about how the company had built up a cash cushion to weather the storm and keep employees on payroll. “We have something called the Omni Circle. Our employees can give to it, but we gave as a company millions of dollars to Omni Circle. We paid it out to our employees who are in need, and it was really gratifying to be able to do that.”
The Omni brand has grown exponentially under Rowling’s guidance and TRT’s ownership. Today, Omni has grown to about 60 hotels, three-and-a-half billion dollars in annual revenue, and 26,000 employees.
Rowling’s success has earned him much goodwill, especially at 91勛圖厙 Dedman Law where an anonymous donor teamed up with the Dedman Foundation to create in his honor the Robert B. Rowling Center for Business Law & Leadership. The Rowling Center, which recently celebrated its 5th anniversary, connects business leaders, lawyers, faculty, and students at the intersection of business and law. The center offers cutting edge and innovative business education, including the Cain Denius Business Law Boot Camp, the Corporate Counsel Externship Program, a business law concentration for students, and the annual Corporate Counsel Symposium. The center also selects Rowling Scholars each year from among a group of student leaders who display an interest and aptitude for business law.
One of Rowling’s biggest accomplishments to date has been the success of his golf course investments. In 2010, TRT Holdings bought a golf resort on Amelia Island, Florida, for $67 million, followed by six properties from California-based KSL Resorts in 2013.
In 2018, the PGA moved its headquarters from Florida to Frisco, intending to build offices and a training center in the same location: 660 acres on the former Fields Ranch. TRT was slated to front most of the cash.
Although Frisco remains one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, Rowling was uncomfortable with the scope of the PGA project at first. The success of the businesses at The Star, however, which he and TRT Holdings helped build, finally convinced him otherwise.
“Jerry Jones came to us about 10 years ago and said, ‘Have them move my headquarters to Frisco. I want to build a home, and we'll do it 50/50 with you.’” (The development includes the training center for the Dallas Cowboys, restaurants, and an Omni hotel.) “I don’t think we would have had the confidence to do this unless we had seen what was happening at the Star,” he said.
Despite construction being halted for eight months due to the pandemic, the resort opened on May 2, 2023, to resounding success. The first championship tournament was held the same month, and six more championships over the next twelve years will be hosted at the Omni PGA Frisco, including the Ryder Cup. “If you'd have told me 10 years ago that you could do a successful project like this in Frisco, I'd have told you that you were nuts,” said Rowling.
The resort boasts 36 holes and is interspersed with fence posts and barbed wire—reminders of the old Fields ranch. The Omni hotel on site has over 500 rooms, 10 guesthouses, and a clubhouse. “It’s like Disney World for golf,” said Rowling. “It’s been so much fun.”
Rowling has always been generous with his time and money. He and his wife Terry have donated $25 million to Southwestern Medical Foundation to support the Peter O’Donnell Brain Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Rowling has served on the foundation’s board since 2010.
“This is a way for us to love others. We really see ourselves as stewards of everything we have and are always looking for the best way to use our resources to make an impact.” The research being done at the Brain Institute probes the inner workings of the brain and applies these findings toward preventing and curing brain, spine, nerve, and muscle disorders.
Rowling himself fell seriously ill two years ago. He spent 17 nights in the hospital with a staph infection and three months at home receiving a steady drip of antibiotics. Having time to think adjusted his viewpoint on life, which up to that moment had been characterized by wild swings of fortune and unbelievable success.
“One of the things I would advise all of you, even the people that I've just met, is enjoy every day. I spent so much of my life living for what was down the road, the next deal, this deal, that deal, and half my life was in the future. I'm thankful for [the illness] in some respects, and one of those is that I enjoy today because I realize it may be all I have left, and I didn't have that attitude before I got super sick.”
For Rowling, life imitates business. Ups and downs, booms and busts, profits and punches. “It’s never a straight line,” he said.