How Turngrow Came To Be

How It Started

Turngrow’s founder, Vegard Vevstad, wasn’t initially interested in business turnaround and growth. His early fascination was with how things could be built once and used many times, and how things in disrepair could be brought back to life.

As the son of a civil engineer, he grew up around discussions of design, planning, systems, and long term thinking. His father had demonstrated how changing the way work was organized could dramatically change its economics. Over time, Vevstad’s interest expanded from physical structures to organizational structures and the systems and relationships that support businesses.

Searching For Better Answers

That curiosity led him to study both law and business. He was particularly interested in long term business relationships and the decisions that shape them. His law school dissertation examined the use of long term contractual payments as collateral for financing. While earning his MBA at the University of Chicago, he found himself asking what seemed like a simple question: How should business decisions actually be made?

Finance, marketing, operations, law, and strategy each provided part of the answer, but real business decisions rarely fit neatly within a single discipline. The more important question became how all the relevant circumstances could be understood together well enough to decide what to do.

From Local Businesses to International Strategy

In 1981, Vevstad began helping local businesses in the Chicago area start and grow. His work soon expanded to market research for companies selling highly engineered products. In late 1988, after completing research on the office products industry for a franchise development firm, he joined the firm and eventually became its Vice President of Strategic Planning and President of its international division.

Over the following decade, he either personally structured or supervised the development of approximately 300 franchise programs, about half of them in the restaurant industry. At headquarters, he supervised as many as four senior consultants at a time, while his international responsibilities eventually included directing ten consulting firms on three continents. As his work evolved, he was increasingly assigned to larger and more complex industrial and corporate restructuring engagements.

After leaving the firm in 1999, he spent six years as outsourced Corporate Development Advisor to a franchised manufacturing company with plants around the world. By then, franchising had become only one part of a much broader question: how should a business be structured to turn around, grow, and create lasting value? That broader question eventually became the principal focus of what is now Turngrow.

Experience On Both Sides Of The Table

Consulting was only part of the experience. Vevstad has been an entrepreneur since the early 1970s, with ventures ranging from real estate development in Norway and the United States to several restaurant businesses operated with his wife.

Being an owner changed the perspective. Advice that makes sense on paper still has to work with real customers, employees, limited resources, competing demands, and consequences when things go wrong. It also reinforced the importance of building businesses that can function without requiring the owner to personally manage everything.

Before moving to the United States in 1981, Vevstad apprenticed with a leading bankruptcy law firm in Oslo, gaining early exposure to business turnaround. He also worked for the Norwegian Foreign Service, supervising consular offices around the world in the administration of estates. Combined with later work across industries and countries, these experiences produced a perspective that is difficult to confine to any one profession or industry.

From Cencir To Turngrow

An early name for the broader work was Cencir, derived from center and circumference. The idea was that a business at the center and the channels through which it reaches its markets have to be understood together as parts of a whole. That remains an important part of how we think about growth today.

Cencir developed recognition of its own and remains a registered DBA of Turngrow, Inc., and is still used when appropriate in our work. But as the work increasingly included operational turnaround, restructuring, and growth extending beyond channels of distribution, a broader name was needed.

Turngrow eventually became that name. It reflects what much of the work had become: helping owners turn around and grow businesses, and restructure them when necessary.

One Thing We Take As Given

There is one premise underlying everything we do that is difficult to express fully in words: do good for the sake of doing good.

We regard it as an absolute law, not a business tactic. We do not do good because we expect to profit from it, nor do we measure what is good by its immediate consequences. We simply trust that when the motive is pure and our actions follow from it, the rest will ultimately fall into place as it should.

This does not make difficult business decisions easy. It gives us a place from which to make them.

We do not expect to spend much time debating that premise. If we cannot begin there together, we may simply not be the right people to work together.