Michael Kust

Michael Kust is Director of Marketing at ILLING Packaging, where he is building something the company never had in nearly 100 years of business: a formal marketing function spanning brand, website, data, and the technology to connect it all.

He came to ILLING from the other side of the table. Over a decade, Michael helped grow Discount Ramps from a sub-$10M business into MOTIS Brands, a $125M portfolio of brands, through a private-equity sale, leading marketing, eCommerce, and creative, and learning firsthand how the PE growth model really works. He’s seen what happens when growth has to compound every quarter, and what gets sacrificed to make it happen.

So when a family-owned packaging company that keeps turning down acquisition offers told him it wanted to grow responsibly and protect the service it has built its name on, it didn’t sound like a job. It sounded like home. Michael grew up across the street from his family’s small cheese factory in northern Wisconsin, running milk routes before he could drive. Earning his way up, from a teenage car-wash manager to here, is the only way he’s ever known how to work.

He lives in Brookfield with his wife and two kids, cooks from scratch, can’t stand a chain restaurant, and has never met a recipe, or a website, he didn’t try to make better.

Private equity grows at all costs. When growth and a customer’s interests collide, the customer loses, because to that model the customer was only ever a number.

A family-owned company can make a promise the private-equity model structurally cannot keep: grow only at the rate where service gets better, not worse, and turn away a prospect that is not the right fit rather than take the money and watch them churn. That difference is exactly what Michael came to ILLING to build on.