Ryan DeCaire - What Rapid Growth in Small Business Looks Like - Ep.93

<p><span>My guest in this episode is Ryan DeCaire. Ryan joined a private equity firm called Ashbridge Partners in Toronto Canada and became president of one of their portfolio companies, Geroline, in February 2019. Geroline is an industrial safety products company that sells ice cleats to companies in the energy, aerospace, mining, transportation, and construction industries among others. Geroline has a pretty incredible growth story from the time of acquisition in February 2019, when it had low double digits revenue, Ryan and his team doubled the size of Geroline and sold for 10x gross return to investors only 16 months later.</span></p><p><span>The story of how they did it with sweat and tears will have a familiar theme to anyone in a growing small company. Ryan and I discussed building systems and a growing business, hiring for culture, creating an incentive structure for their team, going to 55 trade shows per year, and all the work needed to handle those leads and the challenges of being a business with only one or a small handful of products. </span></p><p><span>Think Like an Owner has teamed up with the podcast app </span><a href="https://clever.fm/" rel="nofollow">Clever FM</a><span> to provide show-specific features like searchability, sorting episodes by tags, episode transcripts, and the ability to highlight and annotate episodes. Do us a favor and download </span><a href="https://clever.fm/" rel="nofollow">Clever FM</a><span> on Apple or Android and tell us what you think and what other features you would like to see.</span></p><p><span>Listen weekly and subscribe on </span><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/think-like-an-owner/id1445929750" rel="nofollow">iTunes</a><span>, </span><a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/3Fbv9d4HpDwuO4MOPvgdvO" rel="nofollow">Spotify</a><span>, </span><a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly90aGlua2xpa2Vvd25lcnMubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M=" rel="nofollow">Google Podcasts</a><span>, </span><a href="https://www.stitcher.com/show/think-like-an-owner" rel="