About Dr. Gary Kunkle

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Welcome! I'm Gary, and I’ve spent the past 30 years immersed in the science and strategy of sustained company growth. My work blends deep, data-driven research with real-world experience advising hundreds of executive teams across a wide range of industries.

Over my career, I’ve logged more than 10,000 hours of big-data analysis, led expansion initiatives in 39 countries, and worked with both small businesses and billion-dollar enterprises. My mission has always been to answer three foundational questions:

• Why do so few companies achieve long-term, frequent growth?
• What internal decisions and behaviors set sustained growth companies apart?
• How does business growth impact regional economies and community prosperity?

While Senior Research Fellow at the Universities of Wisconsin, I helped create the YourEconomy.org dataset—the most comprehensive U.S. business databases available—which tracks over 42 million businesses across three decades. I’ve collected and analyzed thousands of CEO decision-making surveys, built predictive models to estimate the survival and growth odds of every US company, and authored sustained growth studies for states including: Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Michigan, Texas, and Louisiana.

These studies examined how sustained growers actually grow, their impacts on job creation, wage growth, and regional economic health—providing the foundation for policy recommendations and training programs across the country, as articulated in the White Paper available here for download.

Today, I specialize in executive training and advisory services that help leaders implement the 50 most important growth decisions—identified through rigorous statistical testing of over 500 decision variables. These form the Core Curriculum of my Sustained Growth Training programs.  Training has been delivered to CEOs and executive teams from every industry sector, many of these through the Tugboat Institute.

I also bring deep global experience from past roles as:

• Economist, Inc. Magazine
• Senior Research Fellow, Universities of Wisconsin
• Senior Manager, KPMG International Trade & Investment Services
• Managing Director, State of Maryland Business Center Europe (Netherlands)