https://youtu.be/UYCjT5YBTHs
Ryan Kauth, Business Coach, Facilitator, and Coleman Chair in Entrepreneurship at Marquette University, is driven by his mission to rekindle growth in family enterprises and serial founder-led businesses by helping owners develop strategic leadership.
We learn about Ryan’s journey from educator to business coach, working with family business owners and serial entrepreneurs to overcome growth plateaus and succession challenges. Ryan explains his five-category framework for rekindling growth, which includes leadership development, customer creation, culture, finance, and operations. He emphasizes the importance of moving from functional roles to strategic leadership, empowering teams, and preparing the next generation to lead family businesses successfully.
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Rekindle Your Growth with Ryan Kauth
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest today is Ryan Kauth, a business coach and facilitator for serial founders and family enterprise owners, as well as the Coleman Chair in Entrepreneurship at Market University. Ryan, welcome to the show.
Well, thank you, Steve. I really appreciate being here.
It's great to have you, you've got some great ideas on growing companies, which we are all about. But I'd like to start with the question about your personal “Why.” So what is your personal “Why” and what are you doing in your practice to manifest it?
Yeah, so my “Why” is simply to serve business owners. That might not be the best sounding one, but what I tell my students in my classroom is, teaching students doesn't get me out of bed in the morning. But teaching future CEOs, and current and future business owners, that gets me out of bed in the morning. So that's my very simple “Why.” And what do I do about that? Well, I do some teaching, but then I also do some coaching to serial entrepreneurs as well as family enterprise owners. And, typically, when I'm working with a serial entrepreneur, it's a business in a different industry and they're trying to grow it like they did their past companies and it's just not working. With family business owners, I work a lot with founders and their children who want to own the business someday or very near future. But I also have some interesting clients where it's maybe Gen 4 and they've got Gen 5 and 6 in the business and things like that. And, typically, the challenge that starts out is if I'm the founder of the business, my children are not going to run this business like I did. And I'm not sure I like that. So we go from there.
Yeah. So what's exciting for you about helping business owners?
Well, I mean, I think, again, kind of looking at the family enterprises, it's certainly having that next generation of owners take control, still allow their parents to have a say in what goes on in the business, like on their board, but then keep that business going forward and moving it through how they know things are going on in the marketplace, as the marketplace changes, as their customers expect different things from them. And then if I'm looking at a serial entrepreneur, again, the typical case is they've built several companies, they're in a new industry now, it's not going the way they built it before. And most of the time, it really has nothing to do with, I'm in a new industry, that might be what they think, but really it has to do with how the markets and the customer landscape is changing and their customers are expecting different things from them.
Yeah. Well, I think this is a very tricky thing to be a successful family enterprise for various reasons. I think it's a super hard thing to do.
It is.
Not just because your parents or one of your parents is a dominant founder or a dominant owner of that organization. They have their ideas and they feel like you should be just following in their footsteps. That's hard enough. But then the other thing is you are coming into a mature business and don't get the benefit of actually growing the business and making the small mistakes in order to learn how to not make the big ones. You're falling at the deep end and now you have to avoid making big mistakes from the get-go, which is, I think, super scary.
Yeah, exactly.
So we'll talk more about family businesses, but let's talk about frameworks first. So you are working on a book called, we don't know what the title is, but it's about rekindling the growth, which is a very interesting topic. Let me ask you first this idea, why does growth need to be rekindled? Because that concept suggests that growth actually plateaus and atrophies, so it needs to be rekindled. So is this a natural thing that grows, tails off, and every now and then you have to rekindle it?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, growth doesn't happen at a 45 degree angle like on that pretty of a graph, right? It happens, it looks more like a staircase. And so when something plateaus, whether that's your sales or your number of customers or number of employees, there's a number of things that you need to change before that happens to keep that growth going. And then there's the whole part of, there's the difference between growth and scaling, right? Growth tends to be kind of linear and scaling is exponential.Share on X So if you have things in place to anticipate scaling, that is one thing. And usually what happens is you grow with your customers. And again, that's a good thing. But you don't necessarily anticipate growth or anticipate scaling. And so when I'm looking at rekindling that growth, we look at these five different areas that you have to change to anticipate scaling or to rekindle that growth.
Okay, that's a great segue. So that's your framework about the five categories to change?
It is.
So first question is, why five categories? How did you pick five? And then what are those five, or maybe the other way around?
Yeah, it's interesting. These five buckets, I've learned for the last 25 years working with my clients that they have typically four areas of expertise and then there's a fifth one, which is them. And so, if I can talk to a serial entrepreneur or family business owner about their sales, marketing and business development, one, two, their finances, three, their operations, and four, their culture, which we typically then call becoming an employer of choice. They can usually talk about which areas are in their own strengths, right? Very common for the founder of the company to be the chief sales officer.
But then there's this fifth one, which typically goes ignored because you and I personally don't really like to change even though we know we have to. And when you're talking about even a serial founder or that founding family business owner or business owning couple, for example, what they typically don't look at is how is my entrepreneurial leadership development happening. And a lot of that is because most entrepreneurs kind of live on an island and they might have some good business advisors, but they're typically not talking to other entrepreneurs. Maybe they're not involved in an industry association so that they're a thought leader in their industry, but they're also stuck in that functional role, which is the one that they like the best. So again, using chief sales officer as the example, being the chief sales officer of their company is not gonna help their company grow or scale. Them becoming the visionary strategic CEO that their company and their employees need, that's gonna help them grow and scale.
Yeah, so obviously they are stuck in any one function. That means they are not focusing on the most important function for them, which is being the CEO and being strategic and think about how to innovate and how to build relationships and to help the people grow below them and they become well on it. So the five categories are, what the notes I made here were, leadership, customer creation, you saide an employer of choice, the culture, finance and operations. How do you approach these five categories and how do these help you help them?
Yeah, I typically start with one of two approaches. One is where their strength lies, and I start there. Or we start with where they believe the fire is, the most fires, for example. So one of those two ways. And typically what I get called into, I get called into when there are fires to put out that either they are not able to, don't understand why these fires keep happening, et cetera. But what we then look at is how each of these areas affects all the other ones. And part of that entrepreneurial leadership development into the strategic visionary CEO is seeing all these different areas working together and how fires in one of them affects all the other three.
And part of that really is based on their own personal growth into being the CEO of the company. And if they are kind of stuck in that functional role, they can't move into that role, hire somebody to be that chief sales officer, as an example, and then continue to grow their company that way. Plus, if you really think about succession of the company, that's the best way to provide value and have a valuable company that somebody else wants to buy. If you're the chief sales officer of your company, and that company depends on that, your business has much less value for that next generation, or however you exit your company, whether you sell to your employees or you sell to a new owner.
So what do you do in order to help these people get out of these functional roles?
Yeah, a lot of it has to do with setting up systems in each one of these areas. So as an example, if it's in operations, we look at how they have used operational functions, software, processes, and procedures that have not kind of kept up with the company, right? They're still using the ones that they developed 10 years ago, and they haven't adapted those to now their adult children in their family business.
