Growth Navigator Solutions, LLC

09/10/2026

My wife made me promise not to grow tomato plants in the window this year.

Fair. Last year, before the first frost, I clipped a couple of tomato plants, rooted the cuttings in water, potted them in soil, and raised them inside all winter until it was time to replant. They grew so big on the window they got me in trouble.

Here's the thing though. Last year I put up five or six cans of my own tomato sauce, and I'll say it: the best tomato sauce I've ever tasted outside of Italy. So fresh. My pasta-loving family went through those cans fast.

I'll admit the part nobody envies. As I get older I don't love pulling weeds. But grabbing the vegetables and fruit right off the vine? That part never gets old.

Funny how that works. Everybody wants the harvest. The harvest comes from the unglamorous months nobody watches.

What's the thing you grow, make, or cook that beats anything you can buy? Type it.

09/09/2026

I built the fence. Then I said, okay, let's go find a dog.

Some backstory. I'd wanted a dog since 2011. During a one-year Army school in Alabama, I thought my wife and I had a deal: when we moved back to Tennessee, we'd get a puppy, as long as I put up a backyard fence first so she could let the dog out with two little kids in the house. So while I was on leave, before taking command, I built the fence.

Fence finished, I made my case. My wife politely replied, "I don't think it's the best time right now, with two young kids."

That was 2012.

In 2021 I finally got my puppy. C**t, a goldendoodle, our COVID dog. He sits with me at the office all day, gets mad when I leave to go work with clients, and sleeps next to my desk. I suspect he's still hoping to make it into a session room one day.

Nine years is a long time to wait for something. Worth it.

What did you wait years for that turned out to be worth it? Type it.

09/08/2026

There were missions in flight training I flat out failed to navigate.

The number one skill you had to demonstrate in Green Platoon was navigating the aircraft without the systems. It's a perishable skill. And I was learning it while also learning a brand new aircraft, new emergency procedures, new everything. There were moments I genuinely wasn't sure I'd get there in the time I had.

I got there because of my instructors. They tested me and encouraged me at the same time. They held a standard they would not lower, and they pushed me to believe I could meet it. If they had given up on me, I might have given up on myself.

I think about that every time an owner tells me about a struggling team member. A new estimator who's behind. A crew leader who isn't there yet. The question usually gets framed as "do I hold the standard or do I support them?"

Wrong question. The people who change our lives do both at once.

Who held you to a standard and believed in you at the same time? Type their role.

09/08/2026

You can be wildly successful at work AND at home. This is why I do what I do.

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?