Larry Korkmas was born in Tyler, Texas and graduated from East Texas State University in 1968 with a degree in business administration.  He served in the United State Army from 1968 to 1970.  He met his wife Carolyn at East Texas, they married in 1968 and lived in Europe for a year and a half.

They returned to Texas and Larry became the fiscal officer for the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program as a result of Hurricane Celia hitting Corpus Christi.  First hand observation of the results of Hurricane Celia and the Los Angeles Earthquake made him keenly aware of the challenges of business recovery and disaster planning.

After a year in Corpus Christi, they moved to Denver with SBA and shortly thereafter, Larry became a real estate appraiser and broker and had his own company until 1981 when he went to work for the Pittsburg and Midway Coal Company, a division of Gulf Oil Corporation.  He was transferred to Beckley, West Virginia in the heart of Appalachia for the purpose of acquiring other coal companies and coal reserves.

In 1983, he was transferred to Houston with the promotion to Manager of Leasing for Gulf’s worldwide real estate operations. He was also part of the team that developed and maintained Gulf’s disaster and business recovery operations.  He worked with the Chevron merger team when Gulf was acquired by Chevron and then crossed the street and spent over seven years as Manager of Real Estate for Cooper Industries.

In 1991, he decided to do something daring at 45 years and enrolled in the executive MBA program at Houston Baptist University and graduated in 1993.

After graduating from HBU Larry, seeking a career change, sought the advice of a number of friends, clients and business associates.  He was advised to consider the emerging profession of mediation, primarily because he had been able to avoid incurring a single lawsuit during his entire career and settled many other suits brought against the companies he worked for.

In addition to mediation and real estate, Larry is an advisor to several mid-size businesses and provides them with updates on changes in negotiation strategy, banking, insurance, power, technology, business politics, continuity planning and emerging trends.  In the late 1990s, he was called on again to develop disaster and business recovery plans and is still involved in this activity.

Several years after graduating from HBU, Larry was invited back to teach in the business school and the graduate human resources program.   He still teaches there as an adjunct professor.

A prolific writer, a number of his articles have appeared in various real estate publications including Red News and he has authored a number of MCE commercial real estate courses.

Larry is the owner of Commercial Dispute Resolution Associates, a mediation and arbitration provider and is still active in the commercial and industrial real estate business.