Keith Davenport recorded this episode from a park in Olathe, after a library patron sat behind him in frame and a cello lesson pushed him out of his home office. That small logistical scramble is a pretty accurate picture of his life. He runs three businesses, a coffee shop in Gardner called Ground House Coffee, Blazor Strategies, and an HR tech company called Mythic Higher, while navigating a closing on a new house and working out what a value based entrepreneur actually does in practice.
What You'll Hear
- Why Keith and his wife bought Ground House Coffee in Gardner, Kansas even though it doesn't make much money
- How wages in Gardner have stayed flat while starter home prices crossed 300,000, and what that means for local hiring
- Keith's adult ADHD diagnosis and how hiring a specialized executive coach reshaped his workload
- The day on I-35 when he listed everything stressing him out and decided to run for the Kansas House of Representatives
- A gradual shift out of pastoral ministry after a decade working as a pastor
- Running the Missouri Center for Employee Ownership and what ESOPs and worker cooperatives actually do for retiring owners
- Why the core value at Blazor Strategies is outcomes over outputs, and how that shows up in their client contracts
Buying the heart of Gardner on purpose
Keith and his wife took over Ground House Coffee and Bakery in Gardner, Kansas in July 2024. The shop was founded in 2011 and had two locations when they bought it. They've since narrowed it to one. Keith is direct that this was not a money decision. Most business people, he says, would think it's a little crazy.
Gardner has about 25,000 people and very few places for a daytime meeting, a coffee date, or a community gathering. Ground House fills that role, which is why Keith calls it the heart of Gardner. He says the venture is a lot of work for not much money, and he wouldn't let it go.
The reason shows up in the numbers he pays attention to. Starter homes in Gardner now run above 300,000 dollars. Keith and his wife sold their own house this summer for nearly twice what they paid for it ten years ago. Wages in town, especially the top end, have stayed essentially flat. He can count on his fingers the number of local jobs paying above 50 to 55,000 a year, which is not enough to buy a house in the community those jobs are supposed to support.
So his three businesses are also a hiring pipeline. A high schooler works at the coffee shop, moves into an internship at Blazor Strategies, maybe ends up in a better paying role at one of his other companies or carries the same values into whatever they do next. He talks openly with his team about his civic engagement. The bet is that a first work environment shapes what people will tolerate in every workplace after it.
An adult ADHD diagnosis and building the support structures
When Keith launched Blazor Strategies in September 2023, he was simultaneously heading toward the mid 2024 closing on the coffee shop and building a client and contractor base that was growing faster than he could manage. He kept running into the same wall. He loved the work. He could hyper focus on a new big initiative. He would also skip straight over things he didn't like or didn't rate as important, which, as he puts it, is a problem in business because at some point you have to keep writing checks to people you owe.
Two of his kids had already been diagnosed with ADHD. Learning alongside them was what finally made him willing to ask the question about himself. He got the formal diagnosis, hired an executive coach who specializes in ADHD, and eventually hired a virtual assistant who is now his director of finance and handles a lot of the detail work that wears him down.
What changed over the last year is the wall. The month of June, between a collapsed house contract, a second house that turned out to be a bad unpermitted flip, five days to find a third, closing one of the coffee shop locations, and moving negotiations on a potential acquisition and a new lease at the same time, he says he would have stayed in bed without the support structures he built. Instead he got through it.
He talks about Steve Jobs as a cautionary example. Whatever any of us chooses to do with our physical and mental health has consequences. He is not willing to trade the husband or dad version of himself for a more affluent founder version.
A decade in the pulpit and a slow shift
Keith knew he was going to be a pastor by the time he was nine. He set up his own youth pastor internships in high school, cold mailing dozens of Illinois churches and taking the one that said yes. He got a bachelor's in pastoral ministry at a Nazarene university south of Chicago, moved to Kansas City, got a Master of Divinity, and spent about a decade as a pastor. He wrote and published theology.
The shift was gradual. It started when his own study of the Bible kept landing in different places than the Christianity he was preaching, and it built from there. His views continued to evolve as he supervised a staff of international students at Johnson County Community College and processed how policy debates affected the kids he worked with every day. There was no single moment. The community and compassion values haven't changed. The reason for holding them has.
Campaigns, grants, and finding employee ownership
During the pandemic Keith was running communications for the Johnson County mental health department. Every morning an executive team he wasn't on would meet, send him notes, and expect polished public and internal communication by end of day. It was crisis communications every day for months. Racial unrest, a presidential election, disputes about basic science, and the mental health toll of isolation all landed on his desk at once. His ADHD hyper focus made him the guy who wouldn't go to lunch with coworkers because there was always more work to do. He looked, in his own words, like a jerk from the outside.
He tried to move to another department in county government and couldn't. At the end of 2021 he took an executive director job at a nonprofit, then found a job board listing for the Missouri Center for Employee Ownership and took it. He had to go research what employee ownership even was. He came out of that research convinced. ESOPs and worker cooperatives give retiring owners a real alternative to selling to private equity or closing the business. They keep jobs local. They close wealth gaps across demographics. They involve real tax policy and real business negotiation.
The role was grant funded by the Kauffman Foundation with a known end date. That constraint is part of why he launched Blazor Strategies in fall 2023, while simultaneously being executive director at the nonprofit and serving as general manager at one of the coffee shop locations during the ownership transition. Three full time jobs at once. He says he will never do that again.
He also filed to run for the Kansas House in 2022. He didn't win the seat. It did put him in rooms with the people who became his coffee shop sellers, his real estate agent, and the civic network he builds on now. He credits the sphere of control exercise he learned at the mental health center, listing what you can actually act on versus what you can't, for the decision to file in the first place.
Outcomes over outputs, every level
Blazor Strategies has a core value that shows up everywhere, including in its contracts. Outcomes over outputs. Keith's point is that most marketing and consulting agencies sell activity. Three social media posts a week. Two leadership conferences. The client gets a checklist, not a result. Keith would rather tie the engagement to whether the client's business actually grows, because his best business development channel is clients who succeed and come back. At the two year mark, he says one hundred percent of Blazor's clients have returned for additional work.
He applies the same filter to his own calendar. If the output feels busy but doesn't change anything, it's the wrong use of time. For a founder with ADHD, that is also a practical screen against getting pulled toward whatever is loudest.
He's also thoughtful about operating as someone whose views don't always line up with his town's. He doesn't screen clients or employees by belief. He works closely every day with people whose religious and economic views are different from his own, and most of the time it works. He argues that political rhetoric trains people to treat beliefs as a closed box, where pulling one flap collapses the whole thing. His counter is simple, and it lines up with how he runs his businesses. Get engaged in your actual community. Meet enough real people who disagree with you, and the polar opposites in the talking points stop ringing true.
The guiding principle he leaves the conversation on is the one he started with. Outcomes over outputs. In business, in civic life, in his own health. If it looks like action but it doesn't change anything, it doesn't count.
About Keith Davenport
Keith is a Gardner, Kansas based serial entrepreneur and the founder of Blazor Strategies, a consulting and marketing firm. He and his wife own Ground House Coffee and Bakery in Gardner, and he runs an HR tech company called Mythic Higher. Before entrepreneurship he spent about a decade in pastoral ministry, worked in student development and local government in Johnson County, and served as executive director of the Missouri Center for Employee Ownership. He ran for the Kansas House of Representatives in 2022.