Gus Ramirez and the Ramirez Family Foundation made big news in 2023, buying the former campus of Cardinal Stritch University in Glendale and Fox Point for $24 million not long after the school shut down at the end of the spring semester. The chairman of Waukesha-based manufacturer Husco International, Ramirez and his family were behind the launch of St. Augustine Preparatory Academy on Milwaukee’s south side and now plan to open another Christian education K-12 school on the Cardinal Stritch campus by 2025. In September, Ramirez joined BizTimes Media managing editor Arthur Thomas and Marquette University president Michael Lovell for a recording of Leadership Lens, a podcast in which area business leaders discuss their leadership styles and making important decisions. Listen to the full conversation in the podcast player above. The following are excerpts from that conversation, edited for length and clarity:
Launching Aug Prep
“We decided that even though we didn’t have a lot of public empathy and support for this effort … that we would go through with it and do it anyway and we would build a grade school and students would come. And along the way, we did encounter a fair amount of objections, legal objections from the city, et cetera, but we always got the right people in front of me as partners to be able to deal with those issues. And as my son has said, if he couldn’t go over it or around it, he went through it and those brick walls that were put in front of us were shattered in time, and we built the school on time on budget.
“We started with about 560 students, which was more than any choice or charter school had ever started with in Wisconsin. Four years after, we started the school when we had all our classes full … so it was a very challenging initiative. God put it in our hearts for us to do it, and when we had objections and I met with the family to discuss it – because all of us were sort of in the limelight during this process – I told them, ‘Hey, if God wants a school built, it’ll be built. If he doesn’t, it won’t.’ And we went forward with our initiatives and again, we had it built on time to the specifications.”
Leading a successful project through change and opposition
“The number one thing I would advocate and recommend to people is if you’re going to take on a project of this size, it’s now a $100 million-plus project, but you’ve got to have the very best people. So, my philosophy at Husco, anytime I needed to hire a direct report, I would hire somebody who was smarter than me and that knew more than me. And my job was to integrate all the brilliant minds to make sure that our outcomes of our business were superior. And I used the same philosophy at Aug Prep.”
Making the decision to buy the Cardinal Stritch campus
“The key to our success at Husco was the ability to always move faster than the competition and execute better. … When I walked that campus for the first time – actually for the All-In Milwaukee graduation – I was impressed, and I came back and knew it was for sale and the real estate agent gave me a tour through the entire facility. As I finished that tour, I told her that we were going to make an offer, we would make an offer at their asking price, but it would include everything that was contained at the university.”
Why he is involved in education
“I believe southeastern Wisconsin faces a huge deficit in the talent pipeline. What we’re doing is a human resource initiative: We hope within 10 years to be graduating 450 new grads every year into the Milwaukee community. … If you look at the impact of having 450 young men and women graduate who have academic skills way beyond average, have a sense of values, have a faith and are walking in their faith and understand the value and meaning of family and what it means to a community, we will have impactful young people that will make Milwaukee better. The reality is Milwaukee needs four or five Aug Preps because this talent pipeline is so severe.”
Business community involvement in education
“We have a business community that is philanthropic, but very few people in the business community are able or willing to make long-term seven-, eight-figure donations, which is what’s required to build a school that costs $100 million. What the business community is good at is they come alongside. … Can the business community do Cardinal Stritch by themselves, those that have the financial capacity to do so? The answer is no. They can’t make decisions as rapidly as they need to make them. And most of these businesses are public entities and they feel that shareholders should be doing the investment, not the corporation. So, they do make limited investments through foundations, but writing an eight-figure check would be a very big task for them.”
On the role of faith in his giving
“Whether it be (supporting schools in) Central America or what we’ve done in the United States, in all cases, God made it clear that this is the door he wanted us to walk through. And if we deviated, he would knock us back on path. When we had challenges, financial challenges, he called on us to have faith to go ahead and keep the commitments we made and he would reward us for that. And that’s what we did. That’s what we did in 2008, 2009, when our business was losing $30,000 a day for a year and a half, which we had never had any losses, but we kept up our mission commitment even though we had to sell our stocks that we owned and put a mortgage on a house that we had had for 10 years. And we committed that God wanted us to do this and we would do it in light of the difficult economic situations and Husco losses, and God was true to his word and he rewarded us tremendously. Fifteen months later, we were having record months and the future of our business was brighter than it has ever been before and led to a threefold increase in business in a matter of six or seven years.”
On making decisions
“My approach is speed is my friend. If you go faster than everybody else, nobody will catch up. So, our decision-making and my decision-making goes at warp speed. … When we’re facing big investments, what I ensure is that we understand the opportunity precisely. We might not have every T crossed or i dotted, but if we understand something as an opportunity of consequence, we assess it as such and then we execute extremely fast to make that opportunity happen. That’s been how we’ve done our business-making decisions, and that’s how we’ve done our philanthropy as well. We rely on our instincts and the fact that God has just given me a business mind that allows me to look at strategic situations and understand them in a way that I can identify opportunities for the organization that others may not be able to see.”
