Joe Grover’s career path didn’t follow a specific plan.

He didn’t set out to become a chief growth officer or build a career as a CMO. He kept saying yes to opportunities he wasn’t quite qualified for and figuring out the rest along the way.

“I was probably more opportunistic than some,” Joe says of his early career. “I looked for opportunities where I could grow and learn from the smartest people.”

That instinct took him from an unlikely start in venture capital to CMO roles in Salt Lake City, Denver, and New York, and eventually to Ampleo.

Today, he serves as Ampleo’s Chief Growth Officer, helping lead a company that gives small and scaling businesses access to fractional executive expertise across finance, marketing, HR, and other functions. Since Joe joined, Ampleo has grown from four full-time employees to more than 200, with roughly 400 people across the organization

But if you ask him what actually built his career, he wouldn’t point to a specific title or business deal. 

He would point to the people who believed in him before he believed in himself.

Being in the Room

To see how Joe got to where he is now, we have to go back to where it all started.

Joe didn’t have a traditional business pedigree. He didn’t have a Harvard MBA or a finance background when he first got involved in venture capital. 

But what he did have was a willingness to work.

“I earned the right to be at Mercato because I worked for free for six months and helped raise capital for their first fund,” Joe recalls.

He continued to repeat that pattern throughout his career. 

He wasn’t a CMO before he became one. He simply took the opportunity, put in the work, and grew into the role.

Joe says, “I wish it was more intentional and a repeatable process… [But] if you’re willing to do whatever it takes to accelerate your learning, and you continue to provide value every single day, then new opportunities will arise.”

And Joe knows that these opportunities were not possible on his own.

He is quick to credit the people who opened those doors for him, including mentors like Greg Warnock and Alan Hall, who saw potential in him before he had much to show for it.

Building a Culture of Experts Without Egos

When Joe finally joined Ampleo, the company looked nothing like it does today. They had only four full-time employees. The rest were fractional CFOs working as contractors.

But when you fast-forward to today, Ampleo has grown to roughly 400 people in total, including more than 200 full-time employees. Along the way, the company has also completed eight acquisitions in two years, spanning finance, marketing, and HR services.

Now, scaling that fast could easily break a company’s culture. Joe says the thing that held them together is a simple value: experts without egos.

“There’s a lot of smart people, and if they’re smart and they think they have all the answers and they’re not collaborative and they’re resistant to change, that is not someone who’s going to thrive,” Joe says.

It’s a value Joe says Ampleo carefully protects as the company interviews new employees, integrates acquisitions, and builds its team.

Experience matters, but so does humility. “No one has a corner on all the best ideas and all the brightest recommendations,” he says.

Ampleo’s growth hasn’t been purely organic, either. The company has used acquisitions to add capabilities and expertise that would have taken much longer to build internally. But Joe is quick to point out that M&A isn’t an easy shortcut to growth.

“All the work happens after the announcement that you’ve acquired this company,” he says. Integrating businesses means aligning cultures, motivating people, communicating, compromising, and finding ways to bring the strengths of different organizations together.

The Mistake

Now, not every chapter of Joe’s career has been a highlight reel. He’s very open about that.

During his time as CMO at Homie, the company was raising a $60 million Series C and had built an extensive plan to expand into 15 new markets. The team invested heavily ahead of that capital, confident they would round out the close as expected.

But it didn’t. 

The investor backed away at the eleventh hour, and Homie closed the round at $30 million instead of $60 million, right as market conditions began to shift.

“We were hyper-optimistic,” Joe says. “We were investing way ahead of growth and ahead of the capital… I wish we would’ve been more prudent about the way we were investing.”

The experience also taught Joe another lesson: “Product market fit is not persistent. Markets change.” What worked for a company five years ago may not continue working as customer needs, capital markets, and economic conditions change.

That lesson is now one that he applies directly to his work at Ampleo. He makes sure to slow down long enough to prove the business model before scaling it.

Why Utah Works

Having built businesses in Salt Lake City, Denver, and New York, Joe has a clear perspective on what makes Utah’s ecosystem distinct. He defines it in just one word: access.

“We can reach out to anyone we want in Utah, and they will likely take our call,” he says. “There’s an accessibility and a humility that exists that I think is really amazing.”

He points to organizations like MountainWest Capital Network and Silicon Slopes as examples of how Utah’s business community invests real time and resources into helping the next generation of entrepreneurs, not just celebrating the ones who’ve already made it.

Joe also says that there is “something unique” about the people of Utah that he wishes he could bottle up and give to everyone. 

Combining the culture and the people makes Utah a great place for business and entrepreneurship.

Building With AI

Few technologies have Joe as excited about the future of entrepreneurship as artificial intelligence. He is highly optimistic about the ways AI can help entrepreneurs, founders, and teams work more efficiently while allowing leaders to focus on higher-value work.

Ampleo has actually spent the last several months building Ampleo Intelligence, a platform designed to let fractional executives focus on judgment and strategy while AI handles production-level work like financial reporting and cash flow forecasting.

“AI can do production-level work… but it doesn’t replace human judgment,” Joe says. “What it does is allow leaders to do what leaders can only do.”

For Joe, the opportunity isn’t to replace leaders with AI. It’s to use AI for production-level work so leaders can spend more time on judgment, strategy, communication, coaching, and the other work only they can do.

Destigmatizing Failure

When asked what advice he’d give the next generation of entrepreneurs, Joe comes back to one principle: failure should never define you.

Joe believes that failure shouldn’t be hidden away, and that philosophy also sits at the center of his podcast, The Real F Word. He invites entrepreneurs to share the businesses, ideas, failures, and mistakes that didn’t work out—and what they learned from them.

It’s not a negative show. Rather, it’s a space meant to normalize the reality that most founders fail at some point on the way to success.

Joe says, “There’s power when those entrepreneurs say, ‘I’m so-and-so, and I started this business, and that business failed, but that doesn’t mean I’m a failure.'” 

It’s the same principle he tries to model at Ampleo: separating your identity from an outcome, and treating setbacks as information rather than verdicts.

He boils it down to one philosophy that he tries to live by every day: “Failure does not define you and neither does success.”

For Joe, that’s an important distinction. Awards, financial outcomes, rapid growth, and other markers of success can be temporary too. What matters more is the experience, the people, the learning, and the growth that happens along the way.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

Joe’s story offers plenty of takeaways for founders navigating their own path. Here are a few to take with you:

  • Passion can follow opportunity, not just precede it. Joe didn’t plan his path from the beginning. He said yes to opportunities, did the work, and grew into it.
  • Prove the model before you scale it. Joe’s experience at Homie taught him the risks of investing too far ahead of growth and capital. Product-market fit, retention, service delivery, and a repeatable sales process all need a strong foundation before a company scales.
  • Culture has to be actively protected. Growing a business from four full-time employees to roughly 400 people in total doesn’t happen without intentionally reinforcing values like humility and collaboration.
  • Failure doesn’t define you, and neither does success. Both are temporary. What matters is the learning and growth in between.

Looking Ahead

Joe doesn’t pretend Ampleo has it all figured out. “We have not figured it out, and we’re a work in progress, just like all great businesses,” he says.

What’s next includes rolling out Ampleo Intelligence beyond its first ten customers and continuing to explore a new operating model that combines fractional executive expertise with AI.

Through it all, the mission remains the same: dramatically reducing the failure rate of small businesses across the United States.

Whatever comes next, Joe’s approach is likely to stay the same: embrace the learning, don’t let fear of failure drive the decisions, and remember that the people around you matter more than the outcome.

Want the full story behind Joe Grover’s journey?

Listen to the complete MountainWest Capital Network Podcast episode, where Joe shares his career experience, the lessons he’s learned from failure, and his perspective on Ampleo’s rapid growth.

[Listen to the full episode here →]

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/failure-doesnt-define-you-joe-grover-on-growth-risk/id1818372923?i=1000797598659 


Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1Q4MTUBGg7EOp5PBJoghgP?si=56OCAmWXS1WbZ-C0xyASqA 

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