Grow with Grunder: What’s your growth story?

October 18, 2022 - By Marty Grunder

(Photo illustration: iStock.com/Henrik5000)

Something we talk about frequently at The Grow Group is that companies need to be planning and preparing for growth, and the opportunity is growing at a pace and level that you and your team can sustain.

If you grow by 20 percent each year, you double the size of your company in 5 years. Doubling the size of your company over a 5-year period allows you time to hire the additional people you need, create systems and acquire the equipment you need to support the growth. Let’s say you have doubled the size of your business in two years. The growth is exciting but maybe you and your team are feeling the growing pains. Maybe you weren’t ready for it?

I like to ask business owners this. You have two companies in front of you:

Company A does $1M in annual revenue with a 10 percent profit margin. Company B does $2M in annual revenue with a 5 percent profit margin. Which would you rather own?

While both companies have the same profit of $100,000 at the end of the year, the $1M company is doing less work for the same amount of money and maybe has fewer complications. But perhaps their owner is more involved in all decision-making. Perhaps they have one key sales or operations person in, place and if they leave, it spells trouble. What matters more is your story. The story about why you want to go grow and how you plan to do it.

At GROW! 2023 in San Antonio on Feb. 28-March 2, we’ll have countless sessions to help your company grow revenue without sacrificing profitability. We like to attack this issue from all sides: your sales team needs to be effective at selling and accurately quoting work, your production team needs to be efficiently operating and optimizing their time onsite working, and you need the labor and the right people on your team to make it all happen. We’ll have sessions dedicated to all of these topics and more. We’ll also be touring a company, Summit Landscape & Design, that is growing at the right pace while maintaining profitability while we’re all together.

Our friends at Summit Landscape & Design outside of San Antonio have been on a steady growth path for years now. In 2021, they did $4.2M in revenue, in 2022 they’re budgeting to hit $5.2M. In 2023, they’re planning to hit $6M. They’re a very relatable company, still working out the kinks as they hit every new milestone, but they have the hard parts figured out. We talked about their company culture and all the ways they build and nurture it in The Grow Group’s weekly Great Idea earlier this month. It’s easy to see from the photos of their work that they know how to landscape.

This month for your own company, I challenge you to look around and evaluate your own story, and what you could spend time working on as we enter the fall months and start looking ahead to spring of 2023. If I were you, I would ask:

Do I have the hard part right? Are our clients generally happy with the work we do? If not, what training can we do in the next few months to solve this?
Are we communicating well with our team and with our clients? Many issues come down to communication or lack of it.
Are we happy with our financial performance? Can we do more to improve efficiency, reward our teams, and save our clients money?
Do we have plans for 2023? What skills does our team need to be able to reach them?

If you’re looking for help with your business, GROW! 2023 is a well-rounded event with breakout sessions designed for every member of your team to get what they need out of the event. Early-bird pricing ends on November 1, register now to save $200 per person.