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 benefi...