Stewart Kohl on the Bright Future of Cleveland

Stewart Kohl is the co-CEO of The Riverside Company, a global investment firm focused on being one of the leading private capital options for investors, business owners and employees at the smaller end of the middle market by seeking to fuel transformative growth and creating lasting value.

Stewart Kohl has been actively involved in a variety of community and philanthropic organizations, serving as an Honorary Trustee of Oberlin College and Co-Chair of the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. He is also on the Board of Trustees of Cleveland Clinic and Co-Chairs its $2 billion Power of Every One Capital Centennial Campaign.

One of Stewart’s proudest accomplishments is helping to serve as a founder of VeloSano, a cycling-related charity that has raised more than $20 million to fund cancer research at the Cleveland Clinic since its start in 2014.

According to the Greater Cleveland Partnership, 2,407 new jobs were created and 8,515 jobs were retained in 2018, and more than $1 billion annually in infrastructure and development financing has been allocated since 2013.

Stewart Kohl is a passionate cheerleader for Cleveland and recently spoke about the city’s incredible potential as a magnet for talent, and as one of the best places to live and work in the United States. We highlight some recent remarks from Stewart Kohl on the bright future of Cleveland.

Why Cleveland?

“Cleveland has a terrific opportunity. I think our educational institutions... I'm a little bit biased. I put Oberlin in that list, although I recognize that a few may not feel as closely aligned with Cleveland as I think it could or should be, but it attracts folks from all over the world, like me at 17 in New Jersey, and provides to them an extraordinary education. Too many of them then go everywhere else. Hopefully, we'll, over time, keep more of them in Cleveland. Certainly, institutions like Case [Western], like the Cleveland State University and like Tri-C are very attached and doing a lot in these areas. Then we are kind of surrounded by these very interesting private colleges and universities like Baldwin Wallace and John Carroll and others. Ohio is a hotbed for education every way.

Boston has been enormously benefited by producing so much young talent and then keeping it in Boston. If we can do the same, we're going to be hugely advantaged. What we have going for us in terms of keeping young talent is Cleveland is so darn affordable. So, our young folks that we attract to Cleveland we're often attracting here either returning here, trailing spouses or folks coming home, or attracted here for the first time, they're coming from the coasts or Chicago, where the cost of living is, particularly housing is three or four or five X what it is here. Here are folks, even our youngest folks, really live like queens and kings compared to their colleagues in these other cities. I know that because our other US offices are in places like New York and San Francisco. I think affordability and particularly of housing is a huge advantage that we have.

Some folks would point to some negatives that we have. Our own brand, and I know we're working hard on improving that, our weather and climate change is unfortunately going to improve that. I don't personally think things like that should stand in the way of us being able to attract young talent. Last time I was in Minneapolis in September. There was a blizzard, and Minneapolis seems to be doing just fine. I don't think we should look at degree days as being the big impediment. It's jobs. It's the ability to offer young people great jobs.

When we have a job to fill at Riverside, I'm very impressed with the quality of talent that we can attract. If anything, we need to be increasing the labor pool here of talented folks. A lot of great jobs are begging for more talent, so just creating more and more of these great jobs, more and more great career paths for people at the start of their career. Later in their career, we've also done very well attracting folks. The famous old saw from headhunters is, "The only thing harder than attracting somebody to come to Cleveland for a new job is getting them to leave Cleveland for their next job," because of the quality of life that they can afford while they're here.

Along the way, we have to give folks great opportunities, great career advancement opportunities. That means trying to keep the whole ecosystem going. Larger companies with their headquarters here provide the best career advancement opportunities. When we lose these large employers, these large headquarters, in mergers and acquisitions, it sometimes has a lot of terrible consequences, although my sense is that was true 10 or 20 years ago, famously, we were the home to more Fortune 500 companies outside of New York, except for the fact that they were all in the lower half of that, and they became targets.

Today it seems more and more we're almost the beneficiary of that, where our companies are making acquisitions, so I see growth. I'm fundamentally more optimistic now about the progress in Cleveland than I've been in my 30-plus years of living in the region. I think we have a lot going for us, and we just need great policies. I know that's the work of the GCP [Greater Cleveland Partnership]. We need great government decisions, and we need all of us as employers to be investing in our people and in our businesses here.”