Greg Tillar of NuGrowth Solutions
Meet Greg Tillar, co-founder of NuGrowth Solutions, a Columbus company that helps to grow businesses through outsourced marketing and sales services.
What is NuGrowth Solutions?
We're like a fully operational regional sales office. We recruit, hire, train and manage sales executives to execute lead generation and marketing for companies. We do web development, content creation and digital marketing. It's a fully staffed marketing management team.
How did you start your business?
NuGrowth Solutions was founded in 2007 as an offshoot of NuGrowth Partners, which provided executive leadership in strategy, operations, management, team building, account management and new business acquisition. As we increased the number of our engagements we were managing small inside sales teams, making it difficult to bring best practices to each. In 2007, we had eight NuGrowth Partner engagements. We decided to start Solutions, moving everyone into one location and building all the necessary infrastructure and leadership.
Who are your company's customers?
Our primary market is large enterprise organizations as well as small- and medium-sized businesses. We are currently working with about 20 different companies.
How have your services evolved with changes in the business world?
The biggest change that impacted our business is the use of technology. You need to know how to use digital marketing tools effectively to create leads and speed up sales. It's difficult for a small firm to be able to afford those resources. Our service is a much faster and secure return on an investment than a company trying to do it alone. We can have a fully staffed sales and marketing team trained in a six- to eight-week period.
What makes your company unique?
There are very few organizations that look and act like us. There are lots of lead-generation companies, but we act as a fully integrated, dedicated team with our clients. It's an unusual model as sales and marketing have changed from the traditional environment. You need a broader set of skills than you've ever needed before.
What have you learned along the way?
I learned how valuable it is to hire, train and develop the proper talent. The ability to assess the skills of a potential partner and how that partner relates to your needs is critical to any emerging company's success. The price for being wrong can be catastrophic.
What's the biggest challenge you've encountered?
Being an early pioneer in a space is always painful. In the beginning people would ask, "Why would I outsource my sales function?" Now it's a way we can effectively work together.
What inspires you as an entrepreneur?
The ability to hire young people and develop them into successful sales executives and leaders is rewarding. We often describe ourselves as a teaching institution disguised as a business. I've been blessed in my career in developing some large-scale implementations. Building world-class, industry-leading teams is fun.
Where do you see your business going over the next five years?
Our plan has always been to add two or three new partners a quarter in all the solutions we represent. I don't see an end to that.
Interview by Douglas J. Guth