By Jennifer Goddard

When people ask me where SOARgrowth came from, I usually smile because it didn’t start with a grand vision or a perfectly mapped-out business plan. It started, as many good things do, with a problem—and a spark.

In our decades of working with middle market businesses looking to grow and improve performance and profitability, my partners, Larry Goddard (my husband of almost 19 years), Laurence Franklin (long-time friend, best man at our wedding and business partner of Larry), and I kept encountering the same pattern. Businesses were led by smart, passionate people with big ambitions—but despite their efforts, they sometimes got stuck. Stuck in a growth rut. Stuck in complexity. Stuck making uphill pushes without the time, clarity, or tools to grow efficiently. And worse, they were underserved. They didn’t have access to the resources larger companies take for granted. No one was delivering real world growth ideas and tools at the pace, price, and practicality that middle market leaders needed.

That frustration became our fuel.

Larry and Laurence go back to childhood—as in, “neighbors in Johannesburg, South Africa at age five” kind of childhood. Over the years, they’ve built businesses together, taken separate paths, led global brands across multiple industries and taken companies public. Larry, the scalability strategist. Laurence, the brand whisperer. When I met them, I brought my own lens—a focus on growth strategies, sales execution, and customer-facing strategy. The three of us quickly discovered that our skills were not just complementary—they were catalytic.

60% of middle market business leaders believe their companies are underperforming relative to their potential—but don’t have a clear, actionable plan to close the gap, according to the National Center for the Middle Market.

We didn’t just want to offer advice. We wanted to build a system that could help business leaders make sense of complexity, prioritize what mattered, and take confident action. We wanted to make elite-level business guidance accessible to the very people who needed it most—owners, executives, and leadership teams of growing businesses who didn’t have McKinsey budgets or time to waste.

That’s when SOARgrowth started to take shape—not as a consultancy, but as a platform. Something scalable. Something digital. Something real.

The early days of SOARgrowth weren’t glamorous. Picture endless conversations, whiteboards filled with post-its, and long nights converting war stories into frameworks. We asked ourselves tough questions: What actually drives sustainable growth? How do you get employees to buy-in and focus on what matters? What stops companies from implementing great ideas?

The original product, SOAR to Strategic Excellence was where the SOAR framework was born:

(S) Sales & Margins,

(O) Organization & Culture,

(A) Accounting, Finance and Technology,

(R) Responsiveness & Execution.

It wasn’t just a clever acronym. It was a blueprint. A way to walk into any business, diagnose the bottlenecks, and surface the high-leverage opportunities that could move the needle.

We used it with clients, honed it, and eventually built the SOARgrowth digital platform—a SaaS tool that replicates the hands-on consulting experience but delivers it through guided assessments, ROI-prioritized roadmaps, tools and resources, peer learning, and expert support when needed—all online, at a fraction of traditional time and cost.

What we kept coming back to was this: middle market businesses are the backbone of the economy, yet they’re rarely given the support they deserve. We had worked with well over 500 organizations between us, and no matter the industry, the same themes kept showing up:

• Leaders weren’t short on ambition. They were short on clarity.
• Teams weren’t lacking effort. They were lacking alignment.
• Businesses weren’t getting new ideas and a fresh perspective. They were too busy working in the business instead of on the business.

SOARgrowth was our answer to that. A way to democratize access to world-class strategy and execution tools and help leaders stop spinning wheels and start building momentum.

I have to pause and say that none of this would exist without Larry and Laurence. Larry and I have worked together building our consulting business and testing SOAR concepts for many years. Larry brought both the discipline of diagnostic thinking–seeing through the clutter of a business and distilling what matters most and his vast experience with running and advising middle market companies in at times remarkably difficult circumstances. We, and several other talented professionals at our firm The Parkland Group, Inc., developed the SOAR acronym and the original system and received a patent back in 2014. Our tools, frameworks, and strategic lenses were the original scaffolding of the SOARgrowth methodology. While this was going on, Laurence has been walking side by side with us in developing the mindset and methodology throughout the years while we all applied the concepts to whatever endeavor we were pursuing at the time.  Laurence has infused everything with real-world leadership perspective—his time as CEO of Tumi and President at Coach gave him an unshakable instinct for brand positioning, performance execution, and what it really takes to scale. Both Larry and Laurence are brilliant, but what I love most is that they’re grounded. They believe in the people behind the businesses. And they brought that spirit into SOARgrowth from day one.

We knew from the beginning: theory isn’t enough. Business leaders need to implement actions that work. That’s why everything we do at SOARgrowth—from the modules that help teams identify, prioritize and buy-in to the best path for growth to the specific implementation tools for developing a value proposition or evaluating the real cost-to-serve of a customer, to our leadership and culture modules and performance KPIs—is built for action. Not complexity, not consulting jargon. Real, practical action.

We took our decades of management and consulting experience and packaged it into a system that could scale: over 700 specific growth and improvement levers, diagnostics that identify what’s hurting you and what’s holding you back, and execution tools that help teams get aligned, get moving, and get results.

That’s why we say SOARgrowth was built for business leaders who want to grow with clarity, speed, and impact. Because we were those leaders.

Today, SOARgrowth is more than a platform. It’s a movement. We’re not just helping companies grow—we’re helping teams believe again. Believe that growth is possible. That complexity can be untangled. That performance can be purposeful.

And I’m honored to help lead the charge.

Join our SOARgrowth Community and get started on your growth journey or read our Best Selling book, SOAR to Business Success.