Derrick Evers

Derrick Evers has had a couple of comebacks in his lifetime, both professional and personal. He was CEO of Neal Richards Group, and grew it from a start-up to a company with almost $1 billion in real estate assets, mostly luxury hospitals. But when one of its portfolio companies, the Forest Park hospital chain, fell apart in 2015, former partners Drs. Wade Barker and Richard Toissant took control and fired the other executives before pleading guilty to multimillion-dollar patient-referral kickback scheme. 

Evers went on to launch Kaizen Development Partners the same year, getting initial backing from Jim Williams, founder of LandPlan Development Group. The firm specializes in urban, mixed-use projects, with its most notable being the development of The Link at Uptown, a 300,000-square-foot trophy office building. Atlanta-based Cousins Properties bought the office building for $218 million in 2025, making it one of the area’s top office transactions of the year. 

Evers survived a shooting as a freshman in high school and recovered to graduate from Texas A&M University, where he played basketball and studied construction science. He got his Dallas chops at Staubach Company before it became part of JLL, and Trammell Crow Company before it became part of CBRE. 

— Jess Hardin