The Best of Both Worlds: Jack (’86) and Kathy Womack (’85) Use Planned Giving to Support UAB Students While Making the Most of Retirement

Jack Womack has always taken the long view. After earning his degree in accounting from The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 1986, he spent his nearly four-decade career in business evaluating companies’ strengths and weaknesses, seeking out new opportunities for growth, reducing inefficiencies, and, ultimately, positioning them for acquisition.

Together with wife Kathy (Class of ‘85), Womack is taking the same forward-thinking approach with their alma mater. The Jack and Kathy Womack Endowed University Scholarship in Business—which, once fully funded, will become one of the most significant forms of student support in the UAB Collat School of Business (CSOB)—is a long-term investment in UAB and its students, established through a bequest.

Bequests and beneficiary designations are deferred forms of giving through a donor’s estate. These flexible techniques enable a donor to designate future support without parting with needed assets today.

For the Womacks, an estate gift was simply the most logical option. By deferring their contribution, they will be able to enjoy their retirement before establishing a lasting legacy in the school that Womack credits with much of his success.

“We have what we have today because of UAB,” Womack said. “If it had not been for that, I wouldn’t have anything. I’d probably be working until I was nearly dead. I felt like they gave to me, and I should pay it back.”

Jack Womack receives an Excellence in Business Award from the UAB National Alumni Society.

A Path to Success

Womack transferred to UAB after two years at Snead State Community College, where he’d benefited from scholarship support. As Kathy pursued her bachelor’s degree in radiologic science at what was then the School of Community and Allied Health—ultimately launching a decade-long career in the outpatient radiology department at Baptist Medical Center Montclair—Jack was making the daily commute from his family’s home in Oneonta, Alabama.

Like many UAB students at the time, he took advantage of the school’s flexibility—working during the day and learning the fundamentals of accounting from faculty mentors like Debbie Tanju, Ph.D., and Ollie Powers four nights a week.

“The business building was brand new,” Womack recalled. “I can remember walking across sheets of plywood to get into the building so you didn’t get mud on your shoes. That was before they finished the grass and everything.”

While Womack is grateful for the lessons he learned at UAB, he’s also quick to point out that the school provided a direct path to his career success. The university’s career services program placed him as an administrative assistant at Warren Averett, Birmingham’s largest privately owned certified public accounting firm, where he spent the first eight years of his career following graduation.

“Not only did UAB give me a great education that helped me in my career, they also gave me my first job in the accounting field,” Womack said. “It just paid huge dividends. I’m where I am today because of UAB and what they had to offer.”

Re-Print, a client of Womack’s at Warren Averett, hired him to become the company’s chief financial officer in 1993. Originally an engineering supply company, Re-Print became massively successful after experimenting with sending direct mail catalogs to school systems in need of supplies. Womack was retained as CFO at the newly rechristened Classroom Direct even after the company was acquired by a larger firm in Wisconsin, but, within a few years, he was ready to move on from the corporate world.

“I always had a passion to either start companies or buy companies and build them up and sell them,” Womack said. “Even when I was at Classroom Direct, we were a division of a huge, publicly traded company, and I was on a mergers and acquisitions team where I would go around to look at companies to either buy and incorporate into us or sell off the pieces. I always had a passion to do that.”

Kathy (center) and Jack Womack (right) with UAB Collat School of Business Dean Christopher Shook.

Womack teamed with a former Classroom Direct shareholder to launch his own company, Teacher Direct, in 2004. As a senior at Oneonta High School, Womack had been in charge of the school store, and as CEO of Teacher Direct, he took pride in providing crayons, scissors, glue, construction paper, and other supplies to classrooms across the United States. He once again helped manage his firm’s acquisition by a larger company and once again was kept on after the transition because of his accounting acumen.

In 2018 Womack entered the final phase of his accounting career when he became CFO/COO of Business Interiors, a Birmingham-based office furniture company. In just over five years, Womack stewarded Business Interiors to revenues of more than $100 million—more than triple what it had been during its COVID-era low point. The UAB National Alumni Society honored Womack with its Excellence in Business Top 25 recognition in 2023 and 2024, fitting grace notes to conclude a remarkable career.

“I didn’t have enough years left in me,” Womack said of his choice to retire after orchestrating Business Interiors’ acquisition of another local furniture company. “Those acquisitions are about a three to five- or six-year process.”

Womack’s wife Kathy worked at JCPenney while attending UAB and then went to work for Children's Hospital upon graduation from UAB’s radiology department. In 1989 she had an opportunity to work at Baptist Medical Center Montclair Hospital Outpatient Radiology Department where her career grew from X-ray to mammography to CT and, ultimately, to MRI.

In 1999 she “retired” to pursue professional fishing in the Bassmaster's Women's Circuit. After three years of traveling away from home, she decided to fish only in local tournaments and she and her husband began fishing in many tournaments together, until 2017 when the couple decided to take up bowling. (As he points out, “It’s indoors and climate-controlled and doesn’t last all day, like fishing does.”)

Paying It Forward

By choosing to establish their namesake endowed scholarship through a planned gift, the Womacks are able to enjoy their shared retirement while still giving back to their alma mater.

“Those monies are generating our living income,” said Womack. “We have social security, but that’s never enough to keep up someone’s lifestyle. We need that income that it is producing, and we’ll give away the principal upon death.”

Once established, the scholarship will support hard-working business students who demonstrate financial need, with preference given to students from Womack’s hometown of Oneonta. Womack has never forgotten the impact that scholarship support made on his own educational journey, and he’s excited to pay that forward for generations to come.

“I think a lot of people believe that if you go to school to be an accountant, you’ve got to work for a CPA firm,” Womack said, reflecting on what advice he’d give a student considering a career in accounting. “It’s always good to get your CPA license and get that background about different businesses and how they operate—especially if you’re doing audits for an accounting firm—but being an accountant opens so many more doors. You can go into governmental accounting or into private industry and be a CFO. There’s so many things that being an accountant can offer.”

Like Jack and Kathy Womack, you can make an investment in future generations through planned giving. For information about your planned giving options, contact Kimberley Coppock, Sr. Director of Planned Giving, at UAB Office of Planned Giving at (205) 996-7533 or kcoppock@uab.edu today.