Slow Growth Isn't Sexy but It Works
With Guest Ryan Crownholm
Why focusing on value instead of revenue might actually make you more money
The How to Sell More Podcast
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October 30, 2024
In this refreshingly honest episode of "How To Sell More," host Mark Drager talks with serial entrepreneur Ryan Crownholm about the unsexy truth of building lasting businesses. Ryan breaks down how he's built and sold six successful companies by taking the slow road to growth.
Forget the flashy start-up hype – Ryan shares why treating customers right, charging fair prices, and focusing on steady improvement beats rapid scaling every time. Whether you're feeling the pressure to grow faster or just starting out, this conversation offers a compelling case for why slow and steady might be your best path to success.
”While I'm not leveraged to the point where my businesses are going to grow into monsters, they're very durable, and strong. They provide me with a great living, and I can give steady employment to all my people.” -- Ryan Crownholm
Top 3 Reasons to Listen
Learn about sustainable business growth: Ryan's success through multiple economic cycles offers a compelling alternative to the typical "grow fast or die" start-up mentality.
Understand effective pricing strategies: His concrete example of achieving a 90% close rate through transparent, fair pricing provides an immediately actionable approach to sales.
Master business durability: His practical insights on building recession-resistant businesses through lean operations and careful growth offer valuable lessons for any business owner.
Follow Ryan Crownholm on Social
Businesses: Mysiteplan.com & Dirtmatch.com
More About Today's Guest, Ryan Crownholm
Bridging Construction & Tech: 14 Years Heavy Construction, 10 in Tech Innovation | 'The Hustle Trap' Author | Army Vet
Ryan Crownholm is a dynamic serial entrepreneur, mentor, investor, and U.S. Army veteran with a diverse and impressive career spanning multiple industries. As the president and founder of Crown Capital Adventures Inc., he has demonstrated an exceptional ability to develop business models that deliver immediate and sustainable returns.
Crownholm's entrepreneurial journey began in the construction industry, where he was formerly a Class A General Engineering Contractor. He has since launched over five successful businesses, selling more than half of them. His notable ventures include co-founding Dirtmatch.com, a marketplace connecting contractors, homeowners, and companies to exchange fill dirt, and Mysiteplan.com, a website offering informal property maps to simplify the permitting process for simple projects.
With a passion for mentorship, Crownholm dedicates his time to guiding a diverse range of individuals, including entrepreneurs, CEOs, veterans, and both currently and formerly incarcerated individuals. He volunteers for Defy Ventures and serves on the board of Equip Our Kids, a non-profit campaign supporting emotional intelligence life skills.
An early adopter of blockchain technology, Crownholm has served as an advisor to several crypto and NFT projects. His expertise extends to various professional organizations, including Genius Network, Summit, METal, and the Boulder Investment Group.
Crownholm is also an author, having written "The Hustle Trap: A How-To Guide for Doing Less + Making More with Your Business," which shares principles for building a sustainable business and creating a passive seven-figure income.
Currently, Crownholm is engaged in a legal battle with the state of California, partnering with the Institute for Justice to challenge licensing requirements that he believes hamper innovation and hurt consumers.
With his mission to practice "insubordinate entrepreneurship" and change the landscape for small to medium-sized business owners, Ryan Crownholm continues to make significant contributions to various industries while focusing on mentorship and community impact.
Key Takeaways
- Value of slow, sustainable growth - Success comes from patient, organic growth focused on profitability rather than rapid scaling. This approach builds durability, maintains quality, and creates lasting customer relationships while avoiding the pitfalls of aggressive expansion.
- Customer-centric business philosophy - Building successful businesses requires focusing on exceptional customer service, fair pricing, and delivering consistent value rather than maximizing profits. This approach naturally leads to referrals, loyalty, and sustainable growth.
- Importance of operational simplicity - Creating self-sufficient businesses through systematic improvements, clear data points, and removing oneself from day-to-day operations allows for sustainable growth while maintaining work-life balance.
A Transcription of The Talk
Mark Drager: So, Ryan, as the listeners heard in the introduction. You have been a part of a ton of different companies as an entrepreneur, and as someone who's brought in as a consultant to help other businesses. How many businesses have you been actually a part of to date?
Ryan Crownholm: Well, the businesses that I've started—I think I've had six businesses, somewhere around there. Years ago, when I got out of the military, I started a junk removal business. That was sort of my first one, and I started that when I was in college. By the time I graduated from college, I was running 10 trucks and had about 20 guys working for me. Over time, I grew that into a pretty good-sized demolition general engineering company.
Along the way, there were some other companies I started. I had electronics recycling centers across the Bay Area, a property preservation company when the housing market crashed in 2007—fixing up properties for banks. Later on, I sold some companies along the way, like my general engineering company, and then started a drafting company, where we did construction drafting. I also have an online dirt exchange, where I help contractors, excavators, and truckers connect cuts and fills of soil. I've done quite a bit of angel investing, advising, and consulting work, so I sort of spread the gamut pretty widely, but I think broadly, I like to stick to construction, technology, or businesses.
Mark Drager: And why is that? Because your background isn’t specifically in general contracting or construction until you started your companies and grew them. But you're very good at the startup, the scale-up, and then, at a certain point, I guess, you sell, you exit, you move on. What is it about that size of company, and what is it about your unique skill set that you bring to the table to be able to grow these companies?
Ryan Crownholm: Yeah, I never built a company with the intention of selling it—it sort of just happens. Like, with the electronics recycling, it just made sense to divest because the payments from the state got cut in half overnight. They were paying 50 cents for CRTs and TVs, and suddenly they wanted to pay 25 cents. It turned into a high-volume business, which I don’t like—high-volume, low-margin businesses.
My other one, the general engineering company, was a big sale for me. I just wanted to do something different. I had been working in construction for a lot of years because I loved manual labor. I loved operating equipment and driving trucks, but my body was starting to wear down. I thought, "If I keep this up, I’ll be the fat guy in the pickup truck who can hardly walk." I just needed to try something else. So, I sold that company and moved more into the technology side, which has been quite a learning curve, but I’m starting to figure it out.
Mark Drager: And this is "How to Sell More," so obviously, we want to focus on growth, revenue, and sales. What were some of the real "aha" moments or breakthroughs that you've had along the way? Have you been able to apply the same lessons as you moved through your six businesses?
Ryan Crownholm: Yeah. I mean, it feels like nowadays, people just go into business for the money, and they forget about the customer and their staff. It’s been really easy for me—I just treat customers exceptionally well, the way I would want to be treated. I do everything to the best of my ability. I try to return as much value to my customers as possible, meaning I keep my prices competitive and reasonable.
For example, when I used to remove swimming pools, we used to take out 300 swimming pools a year. When I would do bids for them, it was a no-nonsense process. Here’s my bid—it’s non-negotiable. Here are the last 100 pools we’ve taken out. Call any of them. I encourage you to call as many as you like and have conversations. Here’s all my insurance, bonding, and everything else—testimonials, whatever. Make your own decision. I won’t be the cheapest, I won’t be the most expensive, but I’ll be the best. Then, I’d leave it. I wouldn’t follow up, and I’d land 90% of the jobs.
Anybody who didn’t hire me was probably more price-sensitive or looking for something else that wasn’t me—and that was probably my competitors’ customer, not mine. For me, when you service your customers and treat them exceptionally well, they just refer you, they take care of you, and they don’t cause a lot of hassle. That’s really what my businesses have always been built around.
Mark Drager: And does that lead to naturally organic growth, organic sales? Some up, some down. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not good in terms of revenue. Because when I hear you say that, I think of what keeps business owners, what keeps leaders from investing in great customer service, in great systems, in great teams, in great deliverables. And frankly, even for myself, it almost feels like there’s never quite enough money to go around to hit the level that you may want to hit on everything. So, I’m curious how you were able to grow and scale businesses, how you were able to finance it, and how you were able to deliver on that when there’s only so much budget to go around.
Ryan Crownholm: Yeah, the answer to that is: slowly. That’s how I build.
Mark Drager: That’s not the answer anyone wants.
Ryan Crownholm: I know, I know it’s not. It’s a great superpower when everybody else is busy trying to blitzscale, grow their business as fast as possible, and hit top-line growth of, like, 3x, 4x, 5x. I just want to grow the bottom line. I want to grow profitability. I want to grow it very steadily. I want to grow my repeat customer base slowly over time, and that way, you know, if you grow three, five, ten years down the road, you are such a durable business. Whereas somebody else might come in and just dump tons of money into marketing, flood themselves with business, overwhelm themselves, and not service the customers to the level they should. A lot of people get soured. They’ll never come back. You get a bad reputation online, and now you have a business that’s very, very hard to continue growing, and very expensive, meaning you have to pay a lot more for your customers now. For me, it was like, "Well, I’m just going to avoid all that." I don’t care about having a super-fast-growing company; I just want a really durable company. And so, that’s my focus.
Mark Drager: That is rare. You know, that is a rare approach. On YouTube, I get served a lot of Warren Buffett clips. I mean, I think most entrepreneurs do, and so there's an uncomfortable thought, but there’s the thought that just some things take time to grow. You can’t plant a 40-year-old tree, right? Like, it just takes time to grow. But as you’ve mentioned, if you’re willing to be patient and if you’re willing to put in the time and compound growth and make improvements... Almost every business owner I speak to who has been wildly successful past year 10, 15, or 20, they’ve all just accepted that growth kind of happens at its own pace. Is that what you're suggesting, or are you still whipping it a little bit?
Ryan Crownholm: Yeah, I don’t set any goals. I just do my best, and my people do their best, and we just grow at whatever the organic rate is. It’s funny, you know, with one of my companies right now, Dirt Match, I took on a couple of partners in that business to handle more of the technology side. They’ve run traditional tech companies where they raise a lot of money and scale up very quickly. We’re not raising money—we’re bootstrapping it. But I think they’re getting a little anxious on the growth side because we’ve been at it for three years now.
And I’m saying, "Well, you know, we’re providing a lot of value. We’ve got a lot of users, and a lot of dirt is exchanging. It’s a very popular platform." Yeah, we could probably throw some fuel on the fire and 10x the business, but I’d rather just incrementally improve the business, make it better and better, and have more loyal customers on the site. I’m patient. So, there’s a little bit of friction there, but in another two to three years, that business will be a monster, and I’m just not in a hurry to get there.
Mark Drager: That is very refreshing to hear, only because I have—and maybe you’ve experienced this too—but I do have the one little angel on my shoulder that says, "These things take time." In my experience, the first three years, at least with any new product, service, or venture, you’re really testing market fit. You’re really figuring things out, especially if you have a long sales cycle if you’re dealing with low-volume, high-margin, fairly complex, somewhat customized work. It might just take you a few years to work everything out. By year five, you’re usually pretty stable. By year seven, you’re usually fairly profitable. That’s been my experience.
And yet, just like the other devil on my other shoulder is like, "What is taking so long? You only have so many years, and we have to go! Let’s go!" How do we make this happen? How do we make it bigger? And I love hearing the "just keep your head down, slow and steady" path to growth.
Ryan Crownholm: You’ve been in business for a while—18 years, yeah?
Mark Drager: Yeah.
Ryan Crownholm: Yeah, I’ve been through a lot of downturns. I started my first company in
2000, so I went through the collapse in 2001—that was when I started my first business. I learned to be lean and mean. And then, I went through 2007-2008. I’ve been through all these ups and downs, and all the people I was always really jealous of—their business when I was watching them blitz scale and grow like crazy—every time one of those big downturns happened, they went away. They’re gone.
So, while I’m not leveraged to the point where my businesses are going to grow into monsters, they’re very durable, and strong. They provide me with a great living, and I can give steady employment to all my people. You know, when you scale very quickly, people are always a problem. You can’t bring on 30 great people in a month. It’s not possible. So, when you grow slowly, you nurture people, and you end up with a better staff over a longer period of time as well.
Mark Drager: Do you have a favorite entrepreneur that you tend to look up to?
Ryan Crownholm: I mean, I like the Richard Branson type. You know, he kind of just is. And I’ve flown with him, I’ve taken vacations—I mean, not with him, but with his companies—and I feel that, overall, he sets a standard in his company, and that people are decent and they’re fair, and he provides value and has a lifestyle. So yeah, I appreciate him.
Mark Drager: I always liked Richard Branson. He used to be one of my favorites. I’ve got a few of his books, and I was quite into him. I really loved Gordon Ramsay—old Gordon Ramsay, old, old, old—when he first started on television, Kitchen Nightmares out of the UK. Not the American stuff, where he’s swearing and yelling all the time, but he always ran the same playbook. He’d come in, assess the restaurant, assess the staff and their capabilities, create a very small menu that was somewhat unique, but mostly just valuable and delicious, that the team could actually deliver time and time again. Then he’d focus on creating a buzz and simplifying the menu, making sure it could work with the systems and the team so they could deliver consistently. And then creating a bit of buzz. It was like, he just ran that playbook over and over again, and I loved it.
I think most of us want to do the opposite. I think we want to overcomplicate everything, stretch our systems and our teams way too far, and then never create any buzz—just hope that people will find us along the way.
Ryan Crownholm: It’s so funny. I was just in La Jolla for a weekend with my family, and we went to this grouping of restaurants. There was a burger shop, an empanada shop, a pizza shop, and a taco shop. There were one or two people in each of the shops, but the taco shop had about 40 people in line. And if you looked at it, it was obvious that they had a good premium product, and they were charging a fair price.
Meaning, that a lot of people now start businesses and do a premium product, and they want to charge the top premium price. These people were keeping their prices down so they could sell reasonably. And because they had this big line, it was obvious why. It’s amazing to me that more people don’t figure that out. This is all about value. If you give good food, fair portions, and you’re friendly, and you sell it at a price where you can make a reasonable markup, you end up with fresher food because you’re turning it over faster. It’s just a better business model.
And then the other places were like, "Well, I’m going to sell a burger, it’s okay, and it’s $13." Sure, some people will come in and stop by occasionally, but you’ll never have really hardcore loyal customers, you’ll never have a line of 40 people down the street. So, I don’t know—that was just a reminder to me that, you know, that’s what people want. People just want a really good quality product at a fair price. Like, Costco figured it out. Walmart figured it out.
Mark Drager: I’m curious to pick your brain on social proof, because I know your businesses are mainly online technologies with Dirt Match, My Site Plan, your drafting company, and others. But social proof and reviews and systematizing it seem to be a really big part of your business. I don’t think most companies focus enough on the social proof—the testimonials, the case studies, the reviews—showing rather than telling, and what have you. But you’ve always been really strong in that. Is that just the nature of e-commerce, where if you want to play, you’ve got
to get good at it? Or did you learn something along the way?
Ryan Crownholm: Well, like I said before, it’s really about servicing customers. I’m a very diligent person, so if I’m getting work done on my house, I don’t just call the first person with the cheapest price and have them start working. I’m going to call some references, I’m going to research them online, I’m going to figure out who I’m dealing with and who’s going to be coming into my house every day.
I model my businesses the same way. I want to make sure that my customers can go in, do their own due diligence, figure out who I am, figure out what kind of work I do, figure out my Better Business Bureau rating, and my Google reviews, and then they can make their own educated decision. I think a lot of people try not to go online or have reviews because they’re afraid of getting bad reviews. If I get a bad review, that’s a data point to improve my company. Like, okay, here we screwed up—what could we have done better to avoid this? If you do that enough times, your company gets better and better.
Mark Drager: I want secrets here, and what you’re saying is all such common sense. I love it.
Ryan Crownholm: Secrets? There are no secrets. The secret is that everybody just has their eye on the dollar. Most business owners are so concerned with the dollar that they forget about the fact that it’s the customers who are going to grow their business for them. So, if you're solely focused on making the next dollar, you're going to miss out on where the business really has the
most potential for growth.
Mark Drager: And I will say for listeners when Ryan says that he does his due diligence—we’ve had the chance to work together. When we first met, I came into everything super trusting, and super open. You were very polite and to the point, but there was a moment where you were like, "Listen, man, you’re just some guy off LinkedIn. And even though we know each other from this group, I don’t know anything about you." I was like, "Ooh, I like this challenge," you presented in terms of me having to prove myself a little bit to you. So, I really appreciated that about you.
Ryan Crownholm: Yes, and that’s the truth. I think about myself the same way. I’m a stranger on the internet—you don’t know me, I don’t know you. So, I figured I might as well put it out there upfront. Like, hey, to me, you’re a stranger. You’re charging a price that’s significant for me. And, you know, a lot of people do that—they offer you a lot upfront and then don’t perform. I’ve been through that many, many times, so I figured I’d just be honest with you. But you did—you were actually the opposite. You overperformed, which is very rare.
Mark Drager: Well, team, pull that clip. Oh, you found out—the whole reason I brought you on was just to say nice things about me.
Ryan Crownholm: I would tell you if it was otherwise, Mark.
Mark Drager: Actually, that’s also another thing I appreciate about you. Here’s something we were able to do—halfway through a project, I reached out to you with what felt very uncomfortable to me. I said, "Hey, we’re halfway through this project. If there are things we’re doing or not doing—things you don’t appreciate, things we’re not doing that you’d like to see done, if there are changes to be made—it’s not too late for us to adjust our approach." I do that with each client, but every single time it makes me incredibly uncomfortable because I’m just waiting for you, or for any other person we work with, to come back and go, "Well, now that you ask, here are 42 things you guys can do better." That doesn’t happen, but it’s my fear almost every single time, honestly.
Ryan Crownholm: Right! And that’s the same with a lot of companies afraid to ask for reviews. It’s like, well, reviews are gold. You want to know where you stand. Being afraid—that’s sort of like being in a relationship. If you’re afraid to ask your partner a question, then that’s the question you need to ask.
Mark Drager: So, you have your hands in a whole bunch of different things. You’re a professional speaker, you’re an author, you advise a bunch of companies, you have your own companies. How do you tend to split your focus among all the different businesses and areas you need to focus on without dropping the ball or letting something slide?
Ryan Crownholm: Yeah. Well, I mean, if you want to learn more about that, pick up a copy of The Hustle Trap. I’ve kind of outlined how I run my businesses. It’s really just about removing myself from the business, seeing what breaks, and constantly fixing it. I’ve learned a lot of lessons over the years, but my businesses are quite self-sufficient. I try to boil everything down to data points so I can look at my data every morning and see the health of my business. If there’s something I need to dive in and work on, then I dive in and work on it.
If not, I don’t have a job, per se, like a day-to-day job. My job is only growth. So, I spend a lot of time reading, a lot of time walking, a lot of time listening to podcasts and doing experiments or split tests—things that will incrementally improve my business. And if I do that every single day for five or 10 years, I end up with a pretty solid business and a pretty solid life.
Mark Drager: And what are the data points or measurements that you use to determine if you feel you are making personal progress in your life? You’re not getting the dopamine hit from working with clients and putting out fires. You’re not... You know, I don’t remember who says it, but it’s the idea that if you keep putting out fires, you’re the arsonist. So, you're not spending the day getting dopamine hits by putting out fires. Your businesses are self-sufficient, and you're growing steadily and organically. So, what are you using to measure, for yourself, the feeling of progress?
Ryan Crownholm: Well, I’m an entrepreneur. Busyness—I'm just busy. New ideas are always coming up. I get excited about watching people succeed. I do a lot of volunteer work with entrepreneurs. I love it. It’s like how a lot of people like football or something—I just like watching people grow businesses. It fires me up.
At the same time, I don’t like being busy. That’s part of the reason why my businesses are not sexy. I don’t own a fishing charter where I can go fishing for a living because I would enjoy that too much, and I’d work all the time. Instead, I have businesses that are basically just service businesses. I serve my customers, and I make sure they’re really happy, but it’s not something where I’d ever say, "I want to go spend 12 hours doing that." It’s just not what I do.
So, I have a really good balance. I walk my son to school every morning, I walk during lunch, and I come to the office for about four or five hours a day to work on testing, go on a podcast, or whatever. I live my life the way I like. I have very low monthly expenses, so I don’t stress about what my revenue is—it’s just growth and gravy. Life is not stressful.
Mark Drager: That is the title of the episode right there: "Growth and Gravy." So, Ryan, one final question for you. I end each conversation the same way, and I’m curious to know—if you had to give the listeners and myself one strategy or one tip to sell more, what would that be?
Ryan Crownholm Create value. Customers buy value. What problem are you solving for them? Do it better than anybody else. And then stand strong by your pricing. Set a fair price that you don’t negotiate on. It’s kind of like what you did—you gave me a really fair price and stood by it. Now, I’ll refer you. It’s pretty simple. Here’s a really good piece of wisdom: don’t screw people. It sounds crazy, but you’d be amazed when you start not screwing people—the amazing business you can grow.
