It was the day before the first day Ryan Russell and his wife, Abigail Russell, opened local coffee shop Grounds for Celebration as the new owners — and Ryan had a major question.

“How are we going to get milk?” said Russell. “Like, where does the milk come from? We need that.”

His question was answered quickly, when he arrived at the coffee shop and found that Anderson Erickson had already delivered the milk earlier that morning. He credited the previous owners for setting “us up really well.”

Ownership of the coffee shop, with locations in Beaverdale and Windsor Heights, transitioned this year to the Russells, who also share ownership with Julianna Biedenfeld. George and Jan Davis opened the shop in 1994 and ran it for 30 years.

Russell is one of the many small business owners in Central Iowa on a learning curve as he takes over a leadership role. He also doesn’t quite know what an Autumn Fog coffee drink is, and is getting up to speed on the point of sale system, along with intricate accounting practices.

Most small business leadership transitions happen under the radar with little attention – but deserve to be spotlighted, as small businesses are economic drivers, employing about half of the workforce in Iowa and nationally, said Rowena Crosbie, president and CEO of Tero International.

“The transitions in large businesses are pretty heavily documented,” Crosbie said. “There’s a lot of data around them, but that sure is not true for small businesses.”

There are several differences between leadership transitions depending on the size of the company, Crosbie said. In small businesses, the top leader is more than just the person in charge.

“Senior leaders in any business shape culture, but in a small business, that person is the culture,” she said.

Smaller businesses also don’t tend to have the same type of succession planning as large businesses do, she said.

“There may not have been a real plan for [a] training program and preparing the next leaders, or the next generation of leaders, as we often see in big businesses because in small businesses … the change isn’t usually being appointed by a board of directors,” she said.

It’s also important to note it’s hard to prepare for a new CEO role.

“It is the one job inside a company that doesn’t have a peer group and I don’t think people realize that,” she said.

Crosbie said she encourages CEOs, no matter how big the organization they’re leading, to find peers.

“That means maybe CEOs from other non-competitive companies, where you can get together and have someone to talk to when you’re grappling with some of the big opportunities and challenges in the business,” she said.

For new small business leaders, it’s important to come in subtly rather than making major changes, said Ryan Lincoln, district director of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Iowa District Office, who started in his new role Nov. 13.

“You have to feel your way,” he said. “If you’re going to make any changes, they have to be subtle. You can’t go in with ‘All right, I’m gonna totally flip this on its ends by day 30.’ That doesn’t work.”

Ideally, a new business owner is taking over a business that was successful to begin with, and maybe the previous owner is retiring, he said.

“Go with what has worked historically,” he said. “Get feedback from your team. Get buy-in. Because if you get feedback, you’re going to get buy-in, because they’ll know that you’re listening to them.”

Ali Hatfield started preparing to transition ownership of the Body Wisdom Massage Therapy School in Urbandale in 2015.

Along the way, she met Kirk Lautensleger, who is now owner and director of the school, and sold it to him on July 1, 2025. Hatfield stays involved as an independent consultant.

“It’s a foundation that she has, and my job now is to scaffold and layer upon that foundation through a growth process,” Lautensleger said.

He said he and Halfield sat “side-by-side, elbow-to-elbow” for months.

“She’s just downloading all of her institutional knowledge to me,” he said.

Hatfield said the institute didn’t lose any staff members in the transition, with a faculty of about 25 people and about eight to 10 in administration.

“And not a single person did quit the job through this transition, which was very, very important for both of us in the entire alignment,” she said.

Lautensleger said he assured the team during their first meeting together in June, which was pre-acquisition, that, “Hey, nothing’s going to change. I don’t even know what to change.”

He wants to make changes, but said he moved slowly on change, which helped with some of the “stickiness of the transition.”

Joe Keller took over full management duties in 2023 of RCS Millwork LC in Ankeny, which does custom architectural millwork, when his father retired.

He said when his dad bought the company, which was previously called Ray’s Cabinet Shop, he was still in high school.

“I did a lot of floor sweeping, a lot of dust collector cleaning, the jobs that nobody else was willing to take on,” he said.

He didn’t initially want to be in the family business, so he majored in construction management at University of Northern Iowa and then worked for a general contractor for a few years.

“I learned a ton until the point where my dad was like, ‘Hey, I need to bring some partners on. I need to figure out what my succession plan is.’ Luckily, he was thinking that far ahead.”

Keller said he made the transition to come and work on the office side in 2009 and did a “little bit of everything.”

At that point, Keller’s dad was ready to take some time off, camping and spending winters in Florida.

“There was one day when he was wintering in Florida, that I sent him a picture of his office,” he said. “Except it had all of my stuff in it. I said, ‘Hey … when you come back, we’re gonna have to find a new space for you.’ … That was our more official transition.”

He said he continues to learn in his position by finding a best practice group of other second-generation business owners.

“We get together three or four times a year,” he said. “We visit each other’s shops. We talk shop. We’re very open and honest. We don’t compete with each other, because we’re from all over the country, so we can hold each other accountable. We can ask questions. There’s emails, there’s constant conversation happening with that group of people who are like peers. I can have some of those peer conversations and steal some of the successful things that they’ve done.”

Crosbie said small businesses can start preparing for a leadership transition by preparing internal staff members with lots of communication.

“We do an annual retreat every year, and I started talking to the team a couple of years ago and let them know that I’m starting to look at what my own retirement might look like, and by summer of 2026, my goal is to be working half-time,” she said. “I’m really proud of how we’re handling it, because together, we’re starting to just reassign some duties so that it shouldn’t have an impact on the business.”

John Mickelson, managing partner of Midwest Growth Partners, a private equity fund that invests in food and agriculture businesses seeking a succession plan or growth capital, echoed Crosbie in emphasizing the importance of communication during small business leadership transitions.

He said employees will want to know about the transition, why it happens, some goals for the business going forward, why the department leader selected the new leadership that they did.

“Doing that in person is super important,” Mickelson said.

“We’re not big fans of emails because it’s just so impersonal,” he said. “But we also have … an FAQ ahead of time, so maybe a data room with some information, so once the employees hear about the change, they can have one place to go to answer 70% or 80% of their questions.”

People naturally don’t like change, he said, and the initial response is typically panic or fear.

“But if you provide them with a lot of information, once they’re able to digest that, usually they kind of settle down,” he said.

Leaders at every level need to be “future focused,” Crosbie said, “and developing people for the business as it’s going to look in the future, and not as it looks today.”

If their heads are down too much, “Amazon is going to disrupt them,” Crosbie said.

“If they want to survive long term, they’ve got to at least lift their head up from their desk a little bit and try to take a look at the world happening around them and what consequences might be to their business,” she said.

As for Russell at Grounds for Celebration, the future is now.

On the first day of his ownership, almost every table was occupied at lunchtime with patrons with his wife working behind the counter.

“It’s like a Hallmark movie,” he said. “Look around, this is so special. I want to tear up.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct the spelling on Julianna Biedenfeld’s name.