20%
30 Years
80
OUTGROWERS ACTIVATED
The numbers had been steady for a reason. So had the ceiling.
For 30 years, Jim Hobbs knew exactly what each month at DGI Supply would look like. March strong. October strong. November the weakest month on the calendar — every single year. The seasonal rhythm was so reliable he could forecast around it.
That predictability was a sign of how much DGI had figured out. A clear strategy: play a meaningful role in the customer’s success. Weekly call quotas tracked at the seller level — 16 visits a week, four of them joint calls with a preferred vendor. Close rates measured. Vendor partnerships analyzed. The data said the structure worked.
The growth said it almost did.
Underneath the metrics, the team had a pattern. Leadership would roll out a new initiative and the room would say, “Yes, this is a great idea. I wish we had thought of this sooner.” Six to eight weeks later, nothing had changed. No follow-through. No accountability. A culture of agreement on the surface and silent inaction underneath.
DGI had built every part of a sales system except the one that mattered most: what to say once the seller was in the room.
“What was missing from our strategy was: what do I do when I get there? Outgrow filled that gaping hole. We had assumed everybody knew. That was a really bad assumption.”
— Jim Hobbs, President & CEO, DGI Supply
The strategy was right. The assumption underneath it was wrong.
Jim Hobbs listened to the Outgrow audiobook on a drive back from Canada. He read it again before sitting down with Alex Goldfayn and Outgrow Advisor Luke Mutter. By the time the meeting was over, he knew what had been missing.
The strategy had been right. The metrics had been right. What had been missing was the substance of the conversation itself. DGI had assumed everyone knew what to ask when they got in front of the customer. Nobody did. And the silence in that gap was where the inaction had grown.
Outgrow filled the gap. Specific questions. Specific framing. Specific things to say. Sellers stopped winging it and started showing up to every call with intention.
Eighty people. One system. One conversation.
01
Every role that touched a customer carried a piece of growth
Eighty people across DGI’s North American operation began making proactive outreach every week. Sellers. Inside sales. Customer service. The frontline managers who coached them. The middle managers who challenged the work. Not all 80 carried a quota. All 80 carried a piece of the customer relationship.
02
Customer service was invited to sell — for the first time in over a decade
For more than ten years at DGI, customer service had been the team that picked up the phone when something was wrong. Process the order. Solve the problem. Move on. They were reactive by design. And they had a deeper relationship with the people making the buying decisions than anyone else in the company. They knew, better than anyone, the gap between what the customer was buying from DGI and what they were quietly buying from a competitor. They had just never been asked to ask. Now they were.
“Our people know what those products are. They had just never been asked to ask.”
— Jim Hobbs, President & CEO, DGI Supply
03
Natural leaders went first. The rest followed.
Every company has leaders without the title. The ones whose answers the rest of the room’s eyes find first. At DGI, those were the people who picked up the Outgrow language earliest and put it to work the fastest. Their wins got recognized in the weekly huddles. By the time the launch workshop was finished, the natural leaders were already running. The rest of the team had a path to follow.
The pattern broke in November. The growth kept going.
In late October 2025, DGI ran the Outgrow Launch Workshop. Nothing else changed in the business.
That November, daily sales were at least 25 percent higher than the year before. High enough, on a per-day basis, to outpace October. The 30-year pattern broke.
Bookings outpaced sales for months after that. Operations could not catch up until late January. Coming out of January, the team was seeing growth at a pace it had not seen in three years.
Six months in, revenue is up roughly 20 percent. The pipeline is still compounding.
“For 30 years, March and October have been our strongest months and November our weakest. The only thing we did different was run the Outgrow Launch Workshop in October. November outpaced October. That has never happened before.”
— Jim Hobbs, President & CEO, DGI Supply
The team stopped being pushed. It started pulling for more.
Before Outgrow, marketing would push an idea to sales and sales would nod politely. Now marketing pushes an idea, middle managers challenge it, frontline managers refine it, and sellers come back asking for more. For the first time, the two sides are in lockstep.
The same shift showed up everywhere else. Accountability stopped being something leadership enforced. It became something the team carried — pulled forward by the natural leaders who had moved first, reinforced by the data the system surfaced every week.
The team didn’t need more discipline. They needed a system.
DGI is a sophisticated organization. They had the data discipline, the metrics, and the leadership most companies wish they had. None of it had been enough on its own.
What changed was the cadence. The accountability built into the rhythm. The pace held when leadership wanted to push faster. The room created where natural leaders could lead, and the wins celebrated without overdoing the spotlight.
Training is forgotten in three days. Culture is permanent. The difference at DGI is the Outgrow system, the accountability it builds, and a Certified Outgrow Advisor who has done this before and stayed with them through it.
“I have never been more energized about a process change inside our organization than I am right now with Outgrow.”
— Jim Hobbs, President & CEO, DGI Supply