Growth Navigator Solutions, LLC

09/04/2026

A client found me through my website. No referral, no warm intro. The thing every owner hopes will happen actually happened first.

That first session was rough. Not because it went badly. Because I was in my head the whole time. They knew they were my first client, and they were forgiving about it. Forgiving, and challenging. The perfect combination, looking back.

What that season taught me is something the Army had already tried to teach me over and over: you really cannot over-prepare. Preparation is what people are paying for, whether you run a consulting firm, a landscaping crew, or a machine shop. So now every session I lead is built to pick up right where the last conversation left off, whether I was in the room for what happened in between or not.

Here's the part I didn't expect: we both grew. A lot.

What do you remember about a customer? Type one detail.

09/03/2026

The best construction teams I've seen have one thing in common: when something goes sideways, nobody's first move is to find out whose fault it was.

A recent industry study on what great owners do broke down what actually separates high-performing project teams from the rest. Four things stood out:

They spend more energy solving problems than assigning blame.
They take collective ownership of outcomes, not just their individual piece.
They share in the benefits when the project wins.
They recognize how much they actually need each other.

That last one matters more than people think. Real collaboration isn't built on everybody liking each other. It's built on trust and need. If the team doesn't need each other to succeed, they won't collaborate. If they don't trust each other, they can't.

Owners set the tone here. The teams that default to "how do we fix this" instead of "who caused this" don't get that way by accident. Somebody built that culture on purpose.

What does your team do when things go wrong? Fix first, or find fault first?

09/02/2026

In the unit I flew with, nobody skipped the pre-flight checklist. Not the newest pilot, not the one with thousands of hours who knew it cold.

It wasn't about knowledge. It was about the cost of assuming you remember when the margin for error is zero.

The most experienced pilots were the most disciplined about the checklist, because they'd seen what happens when confidence gets to fly the aircraft.

So when an owner tells me "I don't need a process, I know my business," I hear the same trap. The more that lives only in your head, the more everything depends on your memory being perfect, every job, every day.

What's the one process in your business that lives only in your head right now?

09/01/2026

Most recent article posted.

Choosing leadership the right way determines whether your standard survives as you grow. Here's the one test that tells you who's ready.

09/01/2026

After the Army, I worked for a couple of big corporations. Good roles, steady paycheck. And I couldn't see the results of my work.

The customers I served weren't in my community. The impact was too distant, too far off. It was clock in, clock out. After twenty years of seeing the results of my leadership up close, in peacetime and in combat, work with no visible results was setting me up to be unfulfilled.

My dad was a small business owner who never built a team around him. After the military, I had seen the other side: the power of building teams, delegating, training, and developing people.

So I made a decision. I wanted my customers in my backyard. I wanted to see them, know them, have them know me, and help them lead better in their businesses.

The scariest part before committing? Giving up a steady paycheck, and being willing to tap the emergency fund if it came to that. What made the leap worth it was believing in what I was building and the impact it was going to have.

Work you can't see the results of will hollow you out, no matter what it pays.

What result of your work did you actually see this week? Type the moment.

08/31/2026

The eval didn't match anything I'd actually done that year.

A couple years into my corporate career after the Army, a review landed with issues nobody had ever raised. When I pressed for specifics, my manager couldn't back them up.

My first move wasn't anger. It was accountability. I called the people who actually saw my work every day and asked for honest feedback, because if the failure was mine, I wanted to find it.

Nobody could make sense of the verdict either. The people closest to my work respected it. My manager had never talked to a single one of them.

Lesson that stuck: when the verdict doesn't match the evidence, stop trying to make the verdict make sense. Look for your own failure first. Then trust what you find.

When's the last time you asked for honest feedback from the people who actually see your work?

08/28/2026

If your best customer described what it's like to work with you, unprompted, to a friend, what would they actually say?

Not the website version. The real one. How fast the phone gets answered. What happens when something goes wrong. Whether the crew leaves the site the way they found it.

That description is your actual brand. Everything else is aspiration.

Most owners have never asked. Not in a survey, in a real conversation: "What made you stay with us? What almost made you leave?"

Which customer could you call next week and ask? And what do you want them saying about you a year from now?

08/27/2026

Every mission I gave in the Army had two parts. The task, what to do. And the intent, why we were doing it and what winning looked like.

Because the plan never survives contact. Not on a mission, not on a jobsite when a change order lands at 6am and the crew's already there.

If your people only know the task, they freeze or they guess. If they know the intent, they can make the call without you.

New video up today on this one, worth two minutes.

08/26/2026

Been rereading Simple Numbers by Greg Crabtree, and one line keeps poking at me: 10 percent pretax profit is the new breakeven.

His point: if your business is only clearing 5 percent, you're not really profitable. You're surviving with extra steps. One slow season, one big warranty claim, one key customer paying late, and you're underwater.

I watched an owner absorb that idea in real time this year. It changed how he priced and which jobs he said yes to.

Worth asking: is your profit target an actual target, or just whatever's left over?

08/25/2026

Colt's out here strutting around in his boots today and getting all kinds of looks.
Not because anyone thinks it's a bad idea, they've just never seen it before.

Nobody expects a dog to have shoes on, so it looks funny to people. A few laughs, a few double takes, that's about it.

Kind of reminded me of business sometimes. You do something a little different, a smarter way, and people notice because it's not what they're used to seeing.

Doesn't mean it's wrong. Just means it's not common.

I'll take the funny looks. Colt's paws say it was worth it.