The thinking a Fortune 500 buys, for a company your size.
More than eighty percent of the jobs in America are in small and mid sized businesses, and those companies deserve the best advice available. They cannot afford it at the prices the large consulting firms charge, so most of them never get it.
I have been through that mill. I have hired people from the largest firms, learned their processes, and turned down an offer from one of them after a friend inside told me what it did to people. I built Growth Right Solutions so that the owners I most respect, the ones who worked hard, put everything in, and sacrificed for years, could have that quality of thinking at a price a company their size can afford.
A full time Chief AI Officer commands a salary of well over $350,000 a year before benefits and bonuses. Your Chief AI Officer through Growth Right Solutions is $144,000 a year. The company is not cheap and does not try to be, but it is not out of reach either.
I ran my managed services company for twenty six years without knowing the four freedoms existed. When I read about them, it was a revelation, and it changed what I wanted from the rest of my working life. I want that for myself now, and I want it for every client, which is why I keep the number small. The four freedoms, as Dan Sullivan names them, are freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship, and freedom of purpose.
The company is a weave of excellence, affordability, and freedom, and every engagement is meant to hold all three at once.
The work is done with people, not at them.
My faith shapes how I see this work, and I approach it as stewardship, as teaching, and as leaving something better than I found it.
The technology is always the smaller half of the problem. The result comes from deciding what to fix first, writing down where things stood before the work began, and getting the people who use the system to use it.
Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. You listen first, you understand second, and only then do you prescribe.
What makes this work well.
01
You get a written governance policy in place before anything is built, covering what may be built, what data may enter a model, and who approves it, so your leadership team can say yes quickly for the rest of the year.
02
Your leadership team being in the room is what makes the plan theirs rather than ours, and that is what makes it get carried.
03
You get one Digital Employee at a time, and each runs for three months before the next begins, so it is tuned, measured, and proven before anything is layered on top of it.
04
You get someone who knows your company well enough to be useful in the room, because that kind of knowing takes time, and that time is what makes the work possible.
Owner led and family owned companies that decide in the room.
We work with owner led and family owned companies, including partnerships, and with no private equity, no venture investors, and no outside board. The leadership decides in the room. The work fits specialty contracting, large home services, roll ups and holding companies, and emerging franchisors.
Some work is out of scope, and we say so plainly. We do not take healthcare or anything under HIPAA, banking, insurance, defense, or complex systems such as logistics. We do not take federal government contracts, although we will work with companies that hold them, and we gladly serve Arkansas public school districts.
The greatest impact was never building the technology. It was getting the people who use it to embrace it.
A perfect system nobody adopts is worth nothing. That is the through-line of three careers, and it is the reason Growth Right Solutions exists the way it does.
Oklahoma City, in a t-shirt and tennis shoes.
I was called to the FAA Air Traffic Control Center in Oklahoma City. The airline lost my luggage, so I walked into the administrator's office in a t-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. He looked me over and asked who I was.
I said I was Ed Becker, that they had asked me to come help with a technology problem, and that they had lost my luggage. We have been friends ever since.
The point is simple. The work is done with people, not at them.
Ed Becker · Founder
A lecture I did not know I was giving.
I walked into NASA headquarters expecting a one on one meeting and found an amphitheater full of lead scientists waiting for a lecture I did not know I was giving. I excused myself, called my Greenbelt project manager, briefed them in under a minute, and returned with the project manager on speakerphone.
Together we delivered an hour long presentation on neural networks followed by thirty minutes of questions, entirely unrehearsed. Standing ovation. The neural network we had built for NASA Goddard became the model other NASA divisions asked to replicate.
Three careers, held to one standard.
More than twenty years in education, teaching from fourth grade through college and serving as a school principal, before a career leading technology.
Twenty-six years running a managed services company, from $0 to $2M ARR with a 17-year average client tenure against an industry norm of three to five years.
Seventeen years in government technology, reporting profit and loss quarterly to the White House on a program that grew from $1.4M to $14B in backlog. Systems delivered for the FAA, Department of Defense, NASA, and the US Customs Service.
I was virtual CIO to eighteen companies, in the boardroom, building five-year plans that were implemented and continually updated rather than filed.
Certified Customer Success Manager. Degrees and certificates from Harvard, Loyola, and the University of Maryland at College Park.