We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ryan Goral a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Ryan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you tell us a story about a time you failed?

G-Spire Group is not the first company I have started. I have started others, some which have not survived. I launched a fundless sponsor/private equity busienss back in 2010 in search for one or more businesses to purchase. I was unsuccessful in my efforts to put a deal together and had to shut down the company. This experience, however, provided me an incredible learning experience that has accellerated my accomplishments in business since. There is so much growth and opportunity that comes from failure as long as you can pick yourself back up, learn and keep moving forward.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have served small and lower middle market businesses for most of my career. This service was mostly focused on being a trusted advisor to leadership/ownership teams as their financial debt capital provider (banker). Over the years, I built a specialty lending into M&A transactions and recognized a gap in the market for leadership and advisory services to support companies who were active in growing through mergers and acquisitions. This created the idea of G-Spire Group where we provide fractional corporate development executive services to leadership teams of small and lower middle market companies. We bring leadership capacity and M&A expertise to owners/executives who are already operating at near or over capacity so they can take advantage of the benefits of growing through mergers and/or acquisitions.

Among many reasons, we typically aim to accomplish two main objectives when serving our clients; building stable, stainable and durable companies which enhances the company’s valuation and supporting the organizational design changes for the owner that free’s him/her up from the day-to-day operations so they can focus on more strategic initiatives as well as spending more time doing other things they love (spending time with family, golfing, fishing etc).

I am most proud of our role in enhancing the value of our client’s businesses while, at the same time, improving their quality of life. Additionally, we are proud of being a part of a process that provides employment and leadership development opportunities to our client’s employees as the company grows to the next level.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

I think my reputation in the market has came from both the results and value I bring to my clients as well as how I deliver them. In my business, transactions can be fairly emotional which produces real challenges in achieving the end goal. I believe that leading from a place of both confidence but also with empathy coupled with clear and concise communication allows for perspective shaping in times when it can be hard to ‘zoom out’. Transactions by their very nature are, transactional, but there are people on both sides working to accomplish their agendas and at the end of the day, working with them during emotionally tense situations to facilitate a win-win outcome can need a clear minded, objective advisor to play an important role.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

First, resilience to me is the ability to keep going when things get hard. I have played sports for most of my life and believe my resilience came from the lessons throughout my sports career. As a business owner building a professional services company, and this is probably true for most business owners and executives, every day can produce multiple challenges that feel like it takes an inordinant amount of time and energy to overcome. If you aren’t laser focused and passionate about your mission, these daily challenges will win and people quit. However, when you look at almost every successful person’s journey, you will likely see that they were resilient because they were able to fight through every single daily or weekly battle they engaged in to acheive their vision and deliver their mission.

My story consists of the daily battles that are included in building a company from scratch. Take the time when, out of the blue, Zoom didn’t work for a very important sales call. Or, take the time that you were days away from signing a new client to have a weather related event impact one of their key employees and put the project on hold. Or, take the time when you do an outreach campaign that fails to return a single conversation. Or…. These are the daily challenges that require a ton of resilience to remain on the journey. I think most people can be resilient through one or a couple adverse things (for the most part) but it is the daily battles over the long term that defines real resilience.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.gspiregroup.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-goral/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/RyanGoral