Is Your Business Quietly Hitting a Growth Ceiling with Ron Gerrans

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10x ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne. Today, I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Ron Gerens. Ron has spent more than 2 decades at the intersection of strategy, technology, and operations, helping companies turn complex challenges into scalable growth. As the managing partner of Alpine Growth Partners, he advises performance-minded owners and CEOs on how to align people, process, and systems to drive sustainable execution and enterprise value. He's a former CEO of 2 different startups and an information services firm he acquired from McGraw-Hill and then successfully exited. Ron has led growth and turnaround initiatives across industries including software, utilities, real estate, and construction. His experience spans startups to billion-dollar public companies with a track record of revitalizing operations, improving P&L performance, and guiding technology-forward transformation. Ron earned his MBA in strategy and operations from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor's in architectural engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder. He's known as a practical visionary. He brings a rare balance of strategic mindset, execution discipline, and technical curiosity, mentoring teams while driving measurable business results. When he's not helping companies grow, you'll find him outdoors skiing, biking, or hiking with his family. Ron, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Mark. Glad to be here.

Yeah, I've been looking forward to this conversation. We've had a chance to connect a couple of times before this. So, before we jump into some of these interesting topics we've got planned, why don't you give our audience a little bit of a background of sort of like what your career path has looked like and how it led you to where you are today?

Sure. I think you kind of laid out a lot of it there. Kind of went through that serial CEO, starting with that buyout from McGraw-Hill, which was a lot of fun, kind of doing that turnaround, working with the team that had been there. getting to an exit point, but unfortunately we didn't complete that exit. So I ended up deciding to move on and try some other career paths. So took the startup gig, you know, took a run at doing the startups. That went, you know, not as well as I would have liked. You know, I learned a lot of lessons but found out that that was not my sweet spot. So 2017, took a step back, kind of thought through where I wanted to spend the next part of my career, and really was talking to a lot of friends and seeing companies really in that kind of I'd say kind of $3 to $30 million revenue range where founders that built a great company, a great product, a great service, had a good client base, but were stuck because they just didn't have that operational foundation to scale and grow, especially if they were thinking about exiting at some point in the future. So kind of took about a 9-month step back, kind of schooled myself in a lot of the different operational systems out there, scale-up, OKRs, EOS, and really thought, frame that with my 12 years of being the CEO and said, hey, how could I have been better? What could I have done differently from an operational perspective and made our companies more effective? And that gave me kind of the foundational toolset that I started Alpine with in 2017. Partnered back up with somebody I'd worked with back in the late '90s. So probably about 4 years ago, we formalized a lot of the framework, really created our peak performance operating model and really laid the foundation for kind of where we are today.

I love that. I love that. So We actually talk— we use some of those same analogies around, you know, ascending to the peak and some of the same things in our business. So, it really sort of resonates there. So, as you're working with companies, you've talked about that, you know, oftentimes you can help them see some of the gaps, you know, that they can't. As you're working with a company or helping them to identify some of those gaps, what are some of the processes that you use To help uncover those opportunities, those gaps that might exist?

Sure. A lot of times when we're brought in, it's because a company's feeling pain from their operations. Yeah, it's kind of hard for successful CEO founders to get them to understand those gaps until they are feeling that pain. So that's usually where we start. Take, for example, one of my clients was going through a really rapid growth expansion, starting to hire a bunch of new people. He was so central to the business that he was working around the clock. couldn't get things done, was starting to see the struggles in the business. The people he had promoted were pretty new into management roles. So he's really struggling there. So really brought me in to kind of help him first get his hands around kind of his hiring process and kind of scaling up just to meet the current demand to get back on track. They were starting to miss deliverables. And then once we kind of got that fire out, then it was really a step back with him, right? And Then what we really can do is we have coming up that operational framework that I talked about earlier, where we really come in and we really look at 5 areas of the business. We look at the customer journey, you know, really from your world of marketing through sales, account onboarding, account management, you know, customer success and support. We also then look at kind of what I'd say the product service delivery journey. That's really everything from innovation through revenue and how you're getting the product out to the clients, how you're working with them on it. And then we look at kind of the people operations, right? How are you bringing in your people? The stuff that I was helping that client with. How are you developing them? How are you offboarding them, right? How are you making that decision? It's time to help somebody find a new career path and helping them achieve that, right? Then we also look at finance, not like a CFO that strict, but we really are looking at kind of the FP&A operations of the business. What's the budget cycles? What's the reporting cycles? What are— what information are you looking at? And really that kind of quote-to-cash process, right? How are you getting from putting that out there, getting it closed, and actually getting the money back in the door? And then finally, we look at how the business is ran, right? How are you managing the business? What's the cadence of your leadership team? How are you doing your strategic plan? How are you aligning the rest of the team around it? So when we come in, we really take them through that assessment, kind of focusing on what you were saying earlier. It's the people, the processes, and the performance or systems, which are really kind of the KPI side of the business. And that gives us the ability to really scale it. We have kind of a 5-level maturity model. It goes from chaos to optimized, right? Right? And by staying there and going through and talking to people and looking at their systems and looking at their documents, we kind of see where the company is and where those gaps are. And that helps us then to prioritize with the CEO how we're going to then help them implement over the next, say, 6 to 18 months to build that operational capability, get somebody running it. And like I said, our job is to build capabilities, not dependencies. So get ourselves back out of that company at the end.

That's a really comprehensive approach. Those 5 different areas, you know, spanning everything from the customer path to the employee path and the leadership path, like all of those different things, very comprehensive. I oftentimes will, you know, sort of have this conversation with founders and entrepreneurs that, you know, there's 10 smart things you could do in the next year. You probably only have the bandwidth to do about 3 of them. As you're taking such a comprehensive approach with your clients, how are you helping them identify what are the right 3 of all the things that they could be doing? Because I'm sure in each of those 5 areas, you're identifying some gaps. And, you know, we could all get better at a lot of things all the time. How do you help them sort of create focus and prioritize?

Yeah, really, where we were there, we were both kind of 10,000-foot level and down at the weeds level, right? So, part of that is, if you take that last one, right, the management structure, how does a team manage? How do they plan? I use a version of an OKR type model that a lot of people are familiar with, objectives and key results, adding an aspect to that of actually putting together the operating plan, how you're gonna achieve it. And what I usually am doing is helping that senior team actually learn to act as a leadership team and work on the business versus in the business. And that's really getting them into that cadence of stepping back and saying, what are those priorities, right? The reality is, is most people will, you know, I tell them no more than 3 to 5, you know, No more than 3 to 5, target the 3. And most people go for the 5, 6, 7.

Yeah.

Through a couple of those quarterly cadences where they realize that overcommitment, they can't get everything done right and really start to teach them how to balance that working in and working on the business. That's at the high level. And then usually in my engagements, because I am in that COO role within the company as either an interim or fractional, I tend to work with each of the leaders and really helping them start to understand how do they operationalize that into the business, right? What are the problems that they're dealing with? So while it may be 3 at the corporate level, There are a lot of things happening within the different business units where we're helping them kind of start figuring out how to understand scalability and operations of their business unit. So for example, that same one I talked about, his leadership team, you know, when they got together, because when I did the initial kind of question survey, oh yeah, we meet, you know, every day to talk about leadership, right? Well, or talk as a team, get them together. It's like, oh, these are client planning conversations. This is not actually working on the business, right? So start teaching them how to do that cadence and then started working because he had some high potential but inexperienced leaders. He had one, she was running kind of their delivery systems, but she didn't know how to do bandwidth and throughput analysis, understand where choke points were and start looking at scalability. So a lot of it was helping her start wrapping her head around that and coaching her through that process. So not coming in and doing it for her, but helping coach her and teach her how to do those skills. So back to building the capability.

Yeah. So within those 3 areas that You know, the leadership sort of capability or the processes capability or the kind of technology and infrastructure. Where do you oftentimes see companies having the biggest gaps? Or maybe not the largest, but maybe the most impactful, the things that's creating their challenges?

Well, usually the problem is, as a company matures, especially a founder-led company, It's really the kind of heroic performance where it's individuals, right? And I'm sure you've seen it with, you know, the groups that you've worked with. You get the individuals that are the ones that know how to do their job. Nobody else does, right? And even when they're doing their job, sometimes they're not thinking about how do I do this on a repeatable basis, right?

That's right.

I find that right there and then back to the working in versus working on the business because all they're doing every day is showing up just to get stuff done, right? And once you start teaching them to step outside of that, Teach them to scale, teach them to get other people involved, you know, teach them to operate as a team. That's where you really start unlocking the business because that's when they start understanding that, oh, to get the next level, we can't continue to do what we've done. Then once you've done that, now you can start unlocking and saying, okay, how do we get these processes into repeatable and scalable, right? Where everybody understands how the business is run, building out those playbooks. And to me, I use a crawl, walk around metaphor, which I know a lot of people do. To me, crawl is kind of figuring it out the first time. That's where most these companies are and kind of chaotic to, you know, just starting to figure it out and turn into repeatable. Walk is that repeatable stage where you can do, you can do the same thing, get the same with the same inputs and get the same outputs. And then run is when you start getting scalable and that's where the systems come in, right? There's no reason to put in a CRM system until you actually understand what your sales process is. So really taking people through that evolution before we start using the systems to really scale them up.

Yeah, we so oftentimes see People will hear about, oh, there's new technology, you gotta get it. And so then they'll go out and maybe even evaluate multiple different things or even hire a consultant to implement that technology for them, but they haven't mapped the process that the technology is intended to enhance. And so they're running around with a hammer looking for nails.

Yeah.

Instead of trying to figure out what is it we're really trying to do here? And we all the time talk about moving from hero-led to systems-led. And we use the analogy sometimes that, you know, we don't want an action movie. Like, we don't want your business to be an action movie full of this conflict and big explosions and then a hero swinging in at the last moment to save things. We want it to be really boring and predictable.

Yep.

And, you know, no need for heroes to come swooping in because The system just sort of runs on its own. Do you ever find as you're working with founders or even just sort of key people within companies that they thrive on that action and that fast pace of solving problems? And how do you help them? I see you nod a little bit. How do you help them sort of evolve past that?

Well, I mean, that's an entrepreneur, right? That's the definition of an entrepreneur. Sure. They see a problem and they want to go solve it. And then they see another problem, they want to go solve it. And it's really starting to teach them to really figure out what they're good at and what they want to do, right? And there's a very big difference between, you know, I'll steal from the US model, the visionary, the integrator, right? They use that terminology, right? And I think it's, that's one of the things I really like how they think about because that person that wants to keep going and solving problems is that visionary and that's what they're really good at. But it's like, you know, called chasing the shiny squirrel down the fence line, right? They, every time they see them, they want to run after it.

Yeah.

They need that balance within the organization, either as an individual, but ideally within the rest of their team that is like, great, you go explore that stuff, but it's got to stay over there, right? And that goes back to what you were talking about earlier, right? The 3 priorities. And when you put those priorities in place, that's the hardest part, right? It's getting the CEO from changing those priorities and they have to start learning. It's like, oh, you think you want to do this? What are you giving up? And you start forcing them into that conversation of where they have to make that decision. Oh, if I want to do that, it's not an and. It's an or, right? So if I'm going to do that, then something else is going to give. And if these are your priorities that you stated, why is this more important? And so you have to kind of start crowding them into it. But like I said, but you want them to continue to explore. And that really comes to that box of where they want to be when they grow up. And that's a conversation I have when I come in with a CEO, a founder-led CEO, every time is, hey, what do you want? Where do you want this company to go? Is this a grow and exit? Is this a lifestyle? And where do you want to be, right? What do you really want to be doing in 5 to 7 years, right? Do you want to be around the company? You want to go do product? You want to go play in the technology box? And starting to have those conversations early so that they can understand where— what really is going to be the path that's going to fulfill them. Then you can start filling around them with the rest of the team and kind of provide that stability to the business while still allowing them to go have that creative mindset that got them to where they are today. And that's a hard balance, but that's the balance you're trying to build.

Yeah. And I love that framing of you can't just keep saying and, you have to start to say or. And the phrase that I've used oftentimes is strategy is what you choose not to do. Because if you just sort of keep adding things on, there's no strategy there. It's just, you know, yes and yes and. And you talked about something interesting, which I'm curious about. So, in our practice, we work with companies both scaling from, you know, $1 to $100 million, as well as companies that are preparing for an exit or recapitalization, some sort of transition within the next 5 years. And one of the things that we've noticed is that we actually approach the marketing and sales systems that we build and deploy very differently based on those 2 different contexts that they're operating in. And there's a lot of different reasons for that, but I'm curious from an operations side, What are some of those different contexts that you see companies, you know, going towards based on, you know, the long-term versus short-term horizon and what it is they're trying to do? What are some things that maybe people don't think about because they've been trained? And one of the things I found in marketing and sales is all the training, all of the common wisdom is about, I mean, if you're going to run this company forever, if you're trying to, you know, grow it from $1 to $100 million or a billion, like no one ever talks about But what if you're in this kind of unique context? Are there some, you know, common wisdom that's probably true if you're just starting out or if you're trying to grow from, you know, 0 to 100 from an operations and strategy side that isn't true if you're in some sort of different context?

Yeah. And the way I'd really look at it, like you said, if you're trying to grow, it goes back to that early part of that conversation. You want a company that you're going to grow and run for 10, 15 years. That is a very different Timeline and path forward versus, hey, I want to sell this company in 3 to 5 years. You know, that may be a full exit, it may be a partial exit, don't know, right? That means in that short period of time, you've got to make it so the company can run without the people, right? Without the key people. You still want the key people, but they can't— the company can't be dependent on, right? Going back to the heroics or even tribal knowledge, right? If everybody— if the company only runs because the people that are in it, and you can't tell somebody from the outside how the company runs, that exit gets really difficult. And it's also then you're showing where the scalability is, not necessarily delivering the scalability. And that comes with prioritization, right? If you're thinking you're gonna sell in a year and you've built a really nice direct-to-consumer brand with a nice supply chain, but you're running the ERP as a spreadsheet, right? If you're gonna sell in the next year, there's no reason to a strategic, there's no reason to put it in the ERP system, right?

Right.

Example, if you're gonna run it for 5, 10 years, then you better start investing in that ERP system and decide where that investment makes sense once you've taken care of the other pieces. And that's the way I really look at it is how do we build scalability, non-people dependency to get it ready for a transaction if they're gonna go with that approach. Even if they're not gonna go that approach, we still wanna start doing that. But now we can start looking at the systems and the scalability to get past that longer-term window. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and it comes back to that sort of strategic planning of really having a picture of where you want to go. There's— what's the phrase? If you don't know where you're going, you'll never know when you get there. And oftentimes we see companies that, you know, are sort of managing themselves that way because they never take the time to really hammer down and then to make those strategic choices of If I'm going to do this, I can't also do this. I have to do one or the other. I'm curious, you know, what you've seen is the impact that culture has on empowering companies to either lean in and embrace, you know, some of these operational or strategic choices. And what are some ways that you've seen, you know, culture really have negative impacts or positive impacts and how it impacts the organization?

I think we've all heard the term, right? Culture eats strategy for lunch. Right. Yeah.

Or breakfast. Depends on who you ask.

Yeah. You're right. To me, you know what that really means? If nobody's really dug into that and spent the time there, it is— I mean, culture will define whether or not you can move forward and how you move forward. And the companies that don't define the culture are defined by the culture. And that's where you get dysfunction, and that's where you get challenges, and you get the politics, and you get people working at odds, right? And that's one of the core things I focus on is that alignment within the organization. And that's why we use a version of the OKR cascade model, right? You set your strategic, and you, by the time you get done, everybody in their job description should know what they're kind of, what, how they're contributing to that, both the working on the business and how you're moving it forward, but even working in the business, right? What are your KPIs and FPIs you're working to? To, you know, what are the core things that you're supposed to be doing in this role? And you really need to align people and then define how those people work together, your culture. But, you know, I went through a cultural transformation when I was running, um, the eSource company I bought from McGraw-Hill because I went from 32 employees to 98 employees over a very short period of time.

Wow.

And if you ever read— if you ever look at this, every time you double is where things start breaking. And I had a culture of a company that was pretty much an us versus them when they're part of McGraw-Hill because of the uniqueness of the company. I made the false assumption that the culture would hold. I didn't realize at the time, as early in my career, that you have to nurture that culture. We'd about— we doubled, had a few, you know, had helped some people leave. That's one part I do understand is you don't have a culture until you fire somebody for those reasons. But we— culture started breaking down. And really what— when I went back in to really start to understand how to build culture, the frameworks I did just, you know, that I learned about, what I really liked about it's not about putting a bunch of words on a whiteboard. It's about behaviors, and culture is really the summation of the defined behaviors— what are acceptable, what are not acceptable. And that's when I work with companies on culture, I really help them try and understand that you need to find the behavioral patterns of what defines the culture that you want. It's not just about putting the words on the board, but what are the behavioral patterns that support those, and what are the behavior patterns that are detrimental to those. And back to that point, I always tell people, your culture isn't truly there until you fire somebody purely for a cultural misfit reason. It's a kind of a mean way to be, but, you know, it's true because that person's miserable, right? And that's the other thing. You go back to that operate, you know, how we help people leave a company. It's not just saying, hey, you're a loser, you need to leave. It's saying, hey, this is not the right company for— it's helping them see this is not the right company for you. This is not a place you're happy, you're going to grow, you're going to be fulfilled, right? Helping them make that realization makes it a lot easier on both parties because then they're— they can select and go. Wow, you're right. I think this isn't a good fit. So let me look and go with, and, you know, and support them in getting out of the organization. But until you're willing to do that, you're not really building a culture. But once that culture is there and people are aligned around it, then your strategy gets executed very well.

So I've never heard that definition of, you know, you have a culture when you've been willing to fire someone because they weren't a good fit. But that makes tons of sense. And You know, so much of, you know, my undergrad was in organizational psychology, and so a lot of time was spent on culture. And you see a lot of people hand wave about culture and how it interacts with strategy. And so I've heard it said, and this definition really resonated with me, and I heard it a lot in what you were just saying is, you know, you were talking about it's the behaviors and the values and like, but what I've heard is that, you know, It's not just values up on a whiteboard that seem nice, but it's also the habits that reinforce how those values get manifest, those behaviors. As you talked about, that intersection is really where culture exists. And that makes so much more sense of how it really impacts the organization and drives that change.

Yeah. And to your point too, I mean, that is the point where that happens, where you don't have to tell people. how to make their decisions, right? Once people understand that, then you can trust your team to make the right decisions to move the company forward. And that's when you know you're executing well with, with a good culture.

So I'm curious, as someone that, you know, has so much expertise in this space, do you find that it's possible for a company to aspirationally define this is the culture we want to build and so do that, or Do they have to authentically uncover and reveal this is the culture that we have? Like when we are our best selves, this is what we're really doing. Or can it be a balance? What have you seen?

It depends on where the company is. When you're starting the company out, it's the what do we want to be, right? And that's the greenfield. And that culture though is anchored on the people that are there and really the CEO. And that is a lot of hard work. And companies that don't do that upfront, right, to your point, the values and the culture and define those, they do get defined by then who they end up hiring. And it's a little easier when you're first hiring because everybody hires friends of friends that they know that they want to work with.

Right.

So you're kind of building a culture there already. But when you get to a point of, okay, where are we? Then you do need to go through what you just described. And that's what I did, you know, at eSource. I went through that evaluation. I talked to the team. I, I did a lot of group meetings, a lot of one-on-one meetings and said, hey, define for me what our culture is. Define for me what are the behaviors that we're doing? What are the things we like to do? And what are the things we don't want to see done, right? What are the things that are starting to happen that we don't think is who we want to be as an organization and having those broad conversations. Because when you get that big, it can't be just the CEO sitting there going, hey, here's our new culture, right?

Right.

It's got to be based on reality. And you've got to understand the team and who they want to be. And sometimes there may be a misalignment there. And then maybe it's the CEO's job to leave. You know, who knows? But you can't just force it down their throats at that point. You got to understand reality where you're at, understand where the changes that everybody is open to making, and then actively manage that change process going forward.

Yeah, well, and that's fundamentally the thing. Like, I've heard it said, you know, what's a tree? Like, is the seed the tree? Is the sapling the tree? Is the giant tree the tree? Is the lumber that gets made from it the tree? Like, what's a tree? And organizations are oftentimes the same way. Like, they grow and they change over time. Like, change is the only constant within business. And so, it's managing that change that's really the heart of that strategy and that management, that leadership. So, for folks that are listening and really getting a lot like I am out of what you're saying and what you're sharing, tell us a little bit about your practice. Like, who does Alpine work with? What are the types of things that you help companies solve?

Sure. We really work with what I'd say is kind of the lower mid-market companies in the $3 to $30 million revenue range.

Uh-huh.

Usually founder-led, though we do help sometimes VC-backed and PE-backed companies, but it's usually that founder-led company. And it is that company that is struggling to grow, right? And, or starting to understand that they don't have that scalability. And that may be scalability to your point earlier for that 10, 20-year growth pattern, or it may be, hey, I'm thinking about transacting, right? And how do we make sure we are operationally prepared for a transaction? Buyers have gotten much more operationally sophisticated over the last 20 years. It went from financial engineering in PE firms to actually having to understand the operation of the business. And so we're there to really help those companies through either one of those phases to kind of help them get ready.

That's fantastic. And so for folks that are listening and sort of find themselves in that space, what's the best way for them to engage with you and get in touch?

Yeah, best way is to reach out to our website, alpinegrowthpartners.com. They can reach out to us by Solutions App to get emailed to us, or we even have a short little 10-question survey that if they want to kind of get a quick snapshot read of where their operational maturity is. And that's, you know, it's obviously self-reported by one person, but But it lays a foundation, at least kind of starts seed with it. So, they're happy to fill that out and we're happy to have a conversation with them around that.

Well, and then that also gives them a framework to start to think about, even if they don't engage with you, how they can start to make those changes on their own. So, that's a very, very powerful tool there. Well, Ron, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I certainly got a lot out of it. I'm sure our audience did as well.

Likewise, Mark. Thanks for having me.

All right. Talk to you soon.

Yes.

Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform, and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services tech or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story, send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.