Podcast: Disruptive Successor Show
The Disruptive Successor Show is a podcast for next-generation leaders in family businesses and entrepreneurs who want to disrupt the status quo to grow their business and take it to the next level.
We all know that what got us here isn’t going to get us there.
If you are taking control over your family’s business or trying to get your business to the next level, you will need inspiration, advice and resources to help you create a massive impact.
Listeners of my show include not only the millennial or Gen Z but also the Baby Boomer and Gen Y. My listeners tend to be involved in these industries: business services, construction, design-build-maintain landscape contracting, food manufacturing, property management, real estate, and technology.
And are interested in issues like business coaching, branding, communication, difficult conversations, disruption, employee ownership, exit planning, financial management, leadership, innovation, intergenerational transfer, marketing, multi-generational family businesses, business operations, process documentation, security, selling, storytelling, succession, visioning, wealth management,
My guests are entrepreneurs, family business advisors, multi-generational and Gen 2 family business leaders, heads of university family business programs, consultants, coaches and firms that serve those who are growth businesses.
Clients of my show typically are running businesses with 10 to 200 employees and $1M to $20M in revenues.
Their concerns include: scaling up, exit planning, succession, leadership development, disruption, business planning, finances, growth planning, transferring generational wealth, transferring control, ownership issues, and more.
The benefits listeners receive are introductions to experts and advisors around the issues of growing and exiting a business, whether it’s a family business or entrepreneurial venture. They get a feel for the challenges other business owners and leaders face and how they overcame them. They will hear stories from people and how they came to do their work and why.
My shows feature handpicked guests who engage with me in casual conversations lasting between 30 to 40 minutes. You can expect to be entertained, engaged and may even get takeaways like business tools or ideas for implementation in your business.
I’ve led entrepreneurial adventures in art, clothing, a holistic health lifestyle magazine and trade show, shoe manufacturing. I’ve also led several non-profit organizations. I earned an MBA from the University of Southern California in Entrepreneurship.
I’ve been advising, coaching and consulting family-owned, family-run and entrepreneur-led businesses since 1989. My love for entrepreneurship follows the closure of my family’s sizeable multi-generational clothing manufacturing company after eight decades of operation because there were no successors.
After uncovering the code to scale up a family-run business – a playbook and a disruptive successor – I wrote a book called Disruptive Successor: A Guide To Driving Growth in Your Family Business.
My podcast is my effort to bring interested people into the conversation to benefit disruptive successors.
Grant and Erin Stahla are the inspiring husband-and-wife co-founders of Stahla Services, a premium restroom and shower trailer rental company. Starting with a single trailer after college, they have disrupted a traditional industry by providing hospitality-level service and a product often described as a “hotel bathroom on wheels.” Guided by their values and a passion for entrepreneurship, they’ve grown their family-run business across multiple states. The Stahlas are also the creators of Stahla Leads, an innovative online marketplace designed to help other vendors in the sanitation space grow their businesses by connecting them with qualified customers.
SHOW SUMMARY
In this episode, host Jonathan Goldhill chats with Grant and Erin Stahla about their incredible journey of transforming the portable sanitation industry. Grant shares the origin story of starting the business right out of college and how he and Erin joined forces to scale it with a commitment to quality and service. We explore how they innovated a commodity product into a premium experience, the systems they’ve used to scale effectively, and the genesis of their second company, Stahla Leads. Grant and Erin also offer an open and honest look at the dynamics of running a business as a married couple and how their faith serves as the foundational core for their leadership, culture, and life balance.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Innovating a Commodity: The Stahlas elevated the standard porta-potty into a premium experience with amenities like flushing toilets, running hot water, A/C, heating, and Bluetooth sound systems, effectively creating a new market category.
- Values-Driven Leadership: Their faith is the “core of everything.” They strive to run their business “like Jesus would,” which informs everything from their company culture and customer service to maintaining perspective and life balance.
- The Dynamics of a Couple in Business: Erin shares that success as a married couple in business requires acknowledging the ups and downs, communicating openly, and finding a flexible balance that works for them, rather than enforcing rigid rules.
- From Internal Problem to New Venture: After spending over a million dollars on Google Ads and finding most leads were outside their service area, they created Stahla Leads—a marketplace to sell those leads to other vendors, turning a marketing challenge into a new revenue stream.
- Building to Sell, But Inspired to Hold: While they use the “build to sell” framework to ensure the business is systemized and valuable, their true inspiration comes from legacy companies like Chick-fil-A, focusing on long-term growth and value creation over decades.
- Scaling with Intention: The Stahla have intentionally scaled using systems like the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), software like HubSpot and Smartsheets, and a commitment to embedding their core values across all locations to maintain quality and culture.
QUOTES
- “We really want to be that rising tide that lifts all ships within our industry.”
- “We want to do this business like Jesus would. So we want to own it like Jesus would and just manage like Jesus would.”
- “Anything that you do, there’s going to be some low moments and some hard things that you’re gonna have to talk through, whether that’s like purely a coworker or a coworker who happens to be your spouse.”
- “If we’re gonna have a business, we wanna do it right and we wanna keep building it.”
- “Such a basic thing. But also it, it’s so different than the standard plastic porta-potty.”
Connect and learn more about Grant & Erin Stahla:
Grant Stahla’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grant-stahla/
Erin Stahla’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinstahla/
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe, review, and share with a friend who would benefit from the message. If you’re interested in picking up a copy of Jonathan Goldhill’s book, Disruptive Successor, go to the website at www.DisruptiveSuccessor.com
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