For 34 years, Grant Burcham was known as a prominent community banker in the Kansas City area, but after exiting that world about three years ago, he has re-emerged an investor and mentor.
Burcham was CEO of Missouri Bank & Trust, which his family sold to BOK Financial Corp. for $102.5 million in November 2016. Burcham stayed with the bank — which changed its local brand to MoBank and later to BOK Financial — as Kansas City-area chairman until 2018, when he retired from banking. He stayed relatively quiet on the business scene for a few years until May, when he teamed up with former Cerner Corp. executive Ryan Tillman to acquire CyTek Corp., a Kansas City-based computer IT support and managed services firm. Burcham is the company’s chairman and CEO.
In early July, Burcham announced an investment in Crux KC, a Kansas City-based marketing firm. Burcham is not actively engaged in management at Crux, describing his role as investor and mentor.
“I’m more actively engaged in CyTek, but it’s really relative,” Burcham said. “They’ve got an exceptional team there that I trust, and they’re doing a great job. I don’t really get in their way.”
Burcham said the common thread in the investments he has made is they each have smart people who work well together, differentiated products in really fragmented markets and huge upside growth potential. An added bonus is that they sell into the small to midsize business market, where Burcham spent his banking career.
“At the bank, we bet on people, and we trusted their business plans,” Burcham said. “At the end of the day, all you got back was your interest and principle if everything went perfectly. So this is kind of fun for me to actually be able to mentor these folks and to play a role that includes me having more investment potential than just getting a loan paid back. I love mentoring business owners, and with these investments I get to do that, yet also have a stake in the company at the same time, which is nice.”
Burcham said that at the moment, he doesn’t have plans to make more investments in local companies. His investments are still fairly new, and he wants to make sure they’ve got their feet firmly on the ground and their strategy clearly defined before he starts looking at anything else.
“These are great teams, and I think these will be great investments,” Burcham said. “It’s really fun for me to be back in business and talking strategy with my partners.”
