Business Leader Rich Kruse Talks Outsmarting the Recession

About this sponsorship: In honor of the 60th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary’s historic ascent of Mount Everest, Patch and Grape-Nuts are teaming up to highlight those who inspire people around them to climb their own mountains.

Rich Kruse is the founder and president of the nonprofit organization ExecuLeaders, a business association dedicated to further educating the business community and fostering networking. His strategies have helped the organization thrive despite the recession. 

Here, Kruse shares the difficulty of helping Long Island businesses thrive despite the recession’s impact. 

Q. What’s the biggest challenge you’ve taken on? 
A. I would say my executive leaders were in our 10th year, and the biggest challenge I’ve had along with my board of directors is to keep our membership and sponsors retained, as well as getting new membership and sponsors. That’s been my biggest challenge over the last few years.  We’re in the ninth year of the recession in my mind.We’ve had our leaders who has been going out of business, who have been bankrupt, who are still in business and keeping head above water, who is still in business but can’t pay bills, who has had to layoff all their staff. It’s been tough.

Q. What inspired you to take on this challenge?  
A.  The reason I started ExecuLeaders almost 10 years ago is I’m one of the biggest business advocates out there. My passion is helping the business community, I’ve been in the business community for many, many years. I have the need to help our fellow business people and all our peers out there carry forward even with this horrendous economy. Executive leaders is a great way to do that.

Q. Did you succeed? 
A. We are succeeding, we’re very successful, we’re fairly big association on Long Island. We’re one of the five big business associations. We run as grassroots association despite being fairly big. We don’t have a board of directors with 50 directors on the board. That wasn’t the intention or the goal.

We started from zero almost 10 years ago and before this winter, we had close to 800 members from more than 200 companies and so many people from each company as members. We took a hiatus over this winter as it got to the point that members were having a hard time renewing or paying their membership fees, new members wanted to come in but it was tough.

People were asking, “Well do you think that’s the right thing to do not having events after all these years?” Interesting enough, as winter went by and we’re  starting spring new series called “Leaders on Stage” and we are preparing for that right now. A lot of the associations are telling me, “We should have done what ExecuLeaders did because it was torturous for a lost of associations, private and nonprofit.

We are starting again successful all these years and adapting to past and current business situation. Now I feel we are picking up momentum again, I’m getting more email, texts and seeing more people at all these events. We want to jump back in ExecuLeaders and want to support the business community.

About this column: We’re dedicating the month of April and May to telling the stories of people locally and statewide who have overcome the impossible, affecting positive change in their own lives, or in communities. Sponsored by Grape-Nuts.