04 Aug August 4, 2023 – Radio Station Owner Dennis Klautzer and Growing Overseas Larry Harding
Dennis Klautzer – Co-Owner of Viper Communications
Running a radio station, we don’t have to buy anything to resell it
like a restaurant. Our only expenses are our electric bill and personnel.
And you want to invest heavily in personnel because they create your product.
Dennis Klautzer
Dennis Klautzer is the co-owner of 6 radio stations in the Lake Ozark region of Central Missouri. These stations offer a diverse range of formats, including talk, country, soft rock, and classic rock. Prior to station ownership, Dennis had an impressive career with CBS/KMOX, where he dedicated 21 years of service to corporate radio. Under Dennis’s leadership, his radio stations have achieved remarkable success in the local market. Specifically, the stations have secured the top two spots in the highly competitive 3-county area, encompassing Miller, Camden, and Pulaski counties. When the COVID-19 pandemic began impacting the industry, Dennis and his team demonstrated resilience and adaptability. Despite the challenges, they managed to keep their stations on the air with minimal disruption. This required implementing innovative solutions, such as enabling many of their contributors and guests on the talk station to broadcast from home. Throughout his career and as a station owner, Dennis Klautzer has proven himself to be a dedicated and forward-thinking individual, ensuring the continued success of his radio stations and maintaining their importance in the local community.
Larry Harding – Founder and CEO of HSP Group
Around the world, culture issues are less important. Even though cultural
differences are huge, there is such a westernization that exists even in
markets like India and China.
Larry Harding
Larry Harding, Founder & CEO of HSP Group, has been a pioneer in the global expansion software and services space for more than 20 years. Larry developed a keen sense of the challenges inherent in overseas expansion and saw the need of better solutions. In 2003 he founded High Street Partners, one of the first providers offering solutions for HQ based Finance, Accounting, Tax, HR, Payroll, and Compliance personnel, helping them manage a global footprint. A high-profile success, the business was sold in a PE-backed merger transaction to create what is now Vistra. Itching to return to his entrepreneurial roots, Larry and a group of his current and former colleagues launched HSP Group. For over 20 years, Larry Harding’s customer-oriented vision for the global expansion solutions market has helped drive the industry forward. This is because, unlike most of his peers at the legacy providers in the market today, he has himself been a customer desperately in need of the right kind and full breadth of technology and services needed to manage a global footprint. After graduating from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Larry began his career on the audit staff of EY’s Boston office, and later provided due diligence assistance to leading Venture Capital, Private Equity and Corporate investors who were clients of EY, as an M&A Consultant. This led to a series of CFO positions with VC-backed hardware technology companies in the Boston area. One of these was acquired by Ciena, a leading provider of optical networking equipment, whose customer list included most of the larger telecommunications carriers around the world. As Ciena’s VP of International Finance, Larry led the Finance, HR and Legal initiatives related to their expansion into 30 different countries outside the US. During this time, Larry gained significant expertise in the best ways to handle the global expansion requirements driven by the opening of these offices in overseas locations. Armed with this expertise and a customer-oriented vision for how to deliver these solutions more effectively, Larry founded High Street Partners in 2003. This venture became an entrepreneurial success, culminating in a successful sale of the business in 2014, transacted as part of a private equity backed merger with a competitor firm that is now a part of Vistra. Larry next joined Amsterdam-based TMF Group, the largest provider in the global expansion services market. Initially focused on launching their consulting and advisory business, he later served as Head of TMF’s North America region. Now, with the launch of HSP Group, Larry and the founding team are focused on building the next great provider of tech-enabled global expansion software and services.