G. Kenneth Baum has always seen the importance of recognizing opportunities and taking the needed risk to capitalize on those opportunities.
Throughout high school and college, Baum worked summers at George K. Baum & Company. Upon graduation from college, he joined the company full time. Enthusiastically devoting his energy to managing the company that his father had founded, Baum quickly learned the business and became an expert in municipal bonds. During the early 1960s, he saw an opportunity to reshape the firm and added underwriting and trading of corporate equity securities to the firm’s capabilities.
As the firm grew in the 1960s and ‘70s, it developed a private client group and a corporate finance business and expanded the firm’s bond and equity trading activities. It also added several new offices around the region and the country: Topeka, Wichita, St. Louis, Phoenix, Little Rock, Denver and New York, among others.
The firm was instrumental in helping many Midwest companies raise capital, complete initial public offerings, and negotiate mergers and acquisitions, including H&R Block, Unitog, Sealright, Interstate Brands and American City Business Journals, among others. In 1970, the firm became a member of the New York Stock Exchange, as it continued to expand its corporate finance and stock trading businesses.