There are conversations that are interesting.
And then there are conversations that hit a nerve because they force us to stare directly at a truth we have tolerated for far too long.
That was my conversation with Rion Westfall. Rion is an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word. He has built businesses the hard way: in the field, under pressure, across borders, and without the luxury of theory detached from reality. Two months before his third child was born, he stepped into a 30-year-old company as Vice President of Global Business Development with four cold-call leads and one parting shot from someone who clearly thought he would fail: good luck, you’re not going to survive.
Less than two years later, he had tripled the company.
That alone would make for a compelling business story. But Rion’s journey goes further than that. As a former Department of Defense mechanical engineer with secret clearance, he has lived and worked in more than 15 countries, speaks English and Spanish, and has built nine companies ranging from solo ventures to private-equity-backed disruptors. Today, he is focused on helping small and medium-sized businesses do something far too few of them ever accomplish:
survive long enough to matter.
And that is where every business executive should start paying attention.
The 4% Problem Should Offend Every Leader
Rion shared a statistic during our conversation that should stop every one of us in our tracks: only 4% of small and medium-sized businesses make it past five years.
Read that again.
Only 4%.
That means if you know 100 SMBs, 96 of them will likely fail before they get the chance to become mature, stable, community-shaping enterprises.
Worse, this is not some sudden market anomaly. It is not a post-pandemic blip. It is not a one-year distortion. This has been a stubborn reality for decades.
And the most frustrating part?
We have accepted it.
We have normalized it.
We treat it like weather.
We talk about entrepreneurship as if failure at that scale is simply part of the romance.
It is not romantic. It is wasteful.
It is wasteful of talent.
It is wasteful of grit.
It is wasteful of jobs.
It is wasteful of local economic health.
And it is wasteful of the extraordinary emotional investment founders pour into the businesses they build.
This is why Rion’s work matters.
Because if only 4% survive, then helping even one more business stabilize, scale, and thrive creates real impact. And if we can do it repeatedly, we do not just help companies. We help communities. We help local economies. We help families. We help the actual operating engine of the American economy.
Let’s be honest: Fortune 500 companies may get the headlines, but SMBs drive the daily reality of economic life.
They hire locally.
They serve locally.
They sponsor local teams, fund local causes, and create local opportunities.
If we want a stronger future, we cannot afford to ignore them.
Businesses Are Not Just Assets. They Are Adopted Children.
One of the things I appreciated most about Rion was how personally he talks about business ownership.
He grew up around it. His grandfather was a logger. His father was a serial entrepreneur. He has spent his life in entrepreneurial environments, and he speaks about businesses the way many founders secretly feel but do not always say out loud: businesses are almost like adopted children.
That metaphor is more important than some executives may realize.
Because founders do not simply “operate” a business. They pour themselves into it. They sweat for it. They bleed for it. They worry about it in the middle of the night. They celebrate it when things are going well and grieve for it when things are not. They make sacrifices for it that outsiders rarely see. They love it, and sometimes they fear it, all at once.
Any leader who has built something from scratch understands this.
That emotional investment is exactly why simplistic advice to SMB owners is so often useless. They are not looking for abstract theory disconnected from their day-to-day reality. They need practical ways to stop the chaos, find the friction, recover lost revenue, and create a business that can sustain growth without collapsing under its own weight.
That is what Rion is trying to solve.
The Real Reason Many SMBs Get Stuck
Rion made a point that every executive should understand, especially those advising or investing in founder-led companies.
Most SMBs are started for one of two reasons.
First, someone is good at a specific skill and decides to build a business around it. The plumber opens a plumbing company. The contractor starts a firm. The consultant launches a practice. The founder knows the craft, the trade, or the service.
Second, they are driven by a clear entrepreneurial instinct but still end up learning vast parts of business ownership on the fly.
In both cases, the founder often starts without a complete operating system for growth.
They know how to do the work.
They may even know how to sell the work.
But they do not necessarily know how to structure, scale, financially optimize, or operationally align a growing company.
So the business grows in fits and starts. A few side jobs turn into real clients. One hire becomes three. Then ten. Then the owner is dealing with legal questions, tax questions, marketing questions, people questions, communication problems, procurement problems, cash flow issues, and operational friction all at once.
And because most founders are smart, capable, and hardworking, they push through.
For a while.
But pushing through is not the same thing as building well.
This is where many companies get trapped. They are not failing because demand does not exist. They are failing because complexity starts outrunning capability. Chaos multiplies. Small inefficiencies compound. Communication breaks. Revenue leaks. Leadership gets overwhelmed. And the founder, who once loved the business, starts feeling trapped inside it.
That is not a revenue problem alone.
That is an operating problem.
The Value of Seeing Patterns Across Borders and Industries
Rion’s background gives him an advantage many business advisors do not have: he has studied organizations from the inside, in multiple countries, in real operating environments.
He spent years going into industrial organizations and businesses to perform evaluations and audits. Sometimes he was there for three days. Sometimes a month. He observed day shifts, night shifts, maintenance functions, procurement workflows, staffing realities, and operational performance across organizations large and small.
And what did he see?
Patterns.
Not just one-off quirks. Not isolated dysfunctions. Patterns.
He saw that whether a company was in South America, Central America, Canada, Africa, Mongolia, or elsewhere, the language might change, but the friction points were remarkably similar.
That is important because business leaders often believe their chaos is unique.
It usually is not.
Your business may have its own flavor of dysfunction, but the underlying breakdowns tend to repeat:
- unclear communication
- weak process ownership
- poor visibility into operational bottlenecks
- underdeveloped leadership habits
- inventory and equipment misalignment
- strategy disconnected from execution
- money is being lost in ways the owner cannot clearly see
When someone has seen those patterns enough times, they stop reacting to symptoms and start diagnosing systems.
That is what Rion has built his work around.
Owning Revenue Means More Than Selling More
Rion’s framework is called Own Your Revenue, and I like that phrase because it challenges one of the laziest assumptions in business growth.
Too many leaders think that if they want to scale, they simply need more.
More people.
More marketing spend.
More leads.
More sales activity.
More hustle.
But more on top of broken systems does not create healthy growth.
It creates bigger chaos.
Rion’s framework examines seven areas of a business through what he calls PEPSLIM:
- People
- Equipment
- Process
- Strategy
- Leadership
- Inventory
- Money
That is a smart framework because it forces leaders to stop pretending revenue lives only in sales. Revenue is affected by every part of the operating system. If your people are misaligned, you lose money. If your equipment or tools are not fit for purpose, you lose money. If your processes are inconsistent, you lose money. If your strategy is fuzzy, your leadership is reactive, your inventory is poorly managed, or your money is misunderstood, you lose money.
This is the kind of reality business owners need to hear.
You do not “own” revenue simply because money comes in.
You own it when you understand the system that creates, protects, and expands it.
The Hidden Money Is Already in the Business
One of the most compelling examples Rion shared was a client doing roughly $40 million a year who wanted to grow to $100 million. On paper, that sounds like a sales problem. More pipeline. More accounts. Bigger market reach.
But that was not the first issue.
The first issue was that the business had been stuck at $40 million for six years.
That is not a lack of ambition. That is a sign of structural drag.
Using his process, Rion identified 34 different items that pointed to $19.2 million in annual opportunity already hiding inside the business.
That is staggering.
Not because it is magic.
Because it is not.
It is the result of disciplined pattern recognition and operational evaluation.
The money was already there in some form. It was being lost through friction, delay, miscommunication, underperformance, leakage, or underused opportunity. The business did not first need to invent an entirely new future. It needed to uncover and reclaim the value trapped inside its current reality.
That is one of the most powerful lessons executives can take from Rion’s journey.
Before you chase the next shiny growth initiative, make sure you are not hemorrhaging value through the back door.
Chaos Grows When You Scale It
This is one of the most important truths Rion articulated, and it should be tattooed somewhere in every founder-led business:
If you do not correct the chaos before you grow, the chaos grows too.
Exactly.
Many executives imagine scale as a volume exercise. Add people, add spend, add customers, add locations, add product lines. But if the internal systems are messy, growth acts like an amplifier. It magnifies every unresolved issue.
Poor communication becomes communication overload.
Weak accountability becomes organizational confusion.
Small delays become customer frustration.
Inventory errors become margin problems.
Leadership bottlenecks become business-wide drag.
This is why scaling too early or too blindly can damage a business more than stagnation.
Rion’s approach is not glamorous, which is one reason I trust it. It is about identifying the “chaos pools,” as he describes them, and dealing with them methodically. Some are problems. Some are missed opportunities. Either way, they create friction that prevents the business from moving cleanly.
And friction is expensive.
Sometimes the Fix Is Simpler Than the Damage It Prevents
One of the practical examples Rion shared involved a general manager drowning in constant communication across a remote, fast-moving organization. Ninety-five employees. Endless texts. Questions coming from every direction. Constant interruption. No triage.
That kind of leadership overload is common, especially in growing SMBs.
And sometimes the answer is not some expensive platform rollout or elaborate organizational redesign.
Sometimes it is a simple communication protocol.
Rion introduced a four-level urgency ranking:
- 1 = emergency, respond now
- 4 = informational, get back to me when you can
That is not revolutionary technology. It is disciplined clarity.
But clarity changes flow.
Flow changes prioritization.
Prioritization changes decision quality.
Decision quality changes business performance.
This is why executives need to stop dismissing simple fixes. The point is not whether a tactic sounds sophisticated. The point is whether it reduces friction and increases effectiveness.
Good operators understand this instinctively.
The Bold Shift: From Job Loss to Network Power
Rion also shared a turning point in his own entrepreneurial path that I think will resonate with many leaders.
He described being unexpectedly let go from a role. One moment, he had a job. Next, his login did not work, and the reality hit. For a young father supporting a family, that is not a motivational poster moment. That is a gut punch.
And yet what came next mattered.
After the tears, after the stress, after the long drive home, he made a critical decision: he was going to take his network seriously.
That shift changed his path.
This is especially important for anyone stepping out of corporate life into entrepreneurship. Your corporate network and your entrepreneurial network are not the same thing. Some people will come with you. Many will not. The advice, access, and support structures that work in big-company environments do not automatically translate into SMB growth.
You have to rebuild. Intentionally.
You have to nurture relationships.
Target people in the industries you serve.
Build trust before you need something.
Respect that most opportunities still come through people.
This is not old-school advice. It is timeless advice.
Technology may accelerate introductions, but business remains relationship-based. Clients, referrals, hires, partnerships, investors, advisors, vendors, growth opportunities: they all move through networks of trust.
That is just as true today as it was 20 years ago.
What Executives Should Learn from Rion Westfall’s Journey
Rion Westfall’s journey is a reminder that business growth is not about noise. It is about ownership.
Owning revenue means understanding what drives it, what drains it, and what protects it. It means evaluating the full system, not just staring at a sales number and hoping more effort will solve what poor design created. It means recognizing that SMBs do not fail only because they lack ambition. They often fail because no one helped them see the patterns holding them back.
For business executives, there are several clear lessons here.
First, stop normalizing the 4% survival rate for SMBs. It is not acceptable.
Second, recognize that small and medium-sized businesses are not peripheral to the economy. They are foundational to it.
Third, understand that growth without operational control is just amplified disorder.
Fourth, treat people, equipment, process, strategy, leadership, inventory, and money as an interconnected system, not isolated functions.
And finally, remember that some of the most meaningful business transformations come not from dramatic reinvention, but from disciplined discovery: finding what is already there, fixing what is creating friction, and reclaiming the value that has been leaking out all along.
That is what Rion is doing.
One business at a time.
One pattern at a time.
One chaos pool at a time.
And if enough leaders start doing the same, we may finally begin to change that 4% story into something far more worthy of the people building the future from the ground up.
Listen to the full episode on C-Suite Radio: Disrupt & Innovate | C-Suite Network
Watch the episode: DI 163 The 4% Survival Rate: A Call to Action
Check our website: LcubedConsulting.com
This article was drafted with the assistance of an AI writing assistant (Abacus.AI’s ChatLLM Teams) and edited by Lisa L. Levy for accuracy, tone, and final content.
