Power100 spotlights Dominic Caminata's sales leadership coaching at Grosso University, teaching home improvement owners to recruit, train, and retain elite reps.
Home improvement business owners tend to get promoted into sales leadership the same way: they were the best closer in the room, so someone handed them a team. Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer system, has spent time examining what happens after that promotion, and why so many strong salespeople struggle the moment their job becomes about other people’s numbers instead of their own. That examination points squarely at Dominic Caminata, CEO and Founder of Grosso University, whose sales leadership coaching has become one of the more closely watched frameworks in home improvement sales training nationally. The service category here is sales leadership development, not one-off motivational coaching, and the distinction matters more than most owners realize until they are three months into managing a team that will not hit quota.
Power100 ranks Grosso University as the #3 Preferred Partner in the nation and the #1 Sales Training Organization in the home improvement industry for 2026. That ranking rests on a proprietary 5-layer system built by researching and analyzing more than 3,600 partners nationwide, looking at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare across every category Power100 covers. Sales leadership coaching sits inside that framework as its own distinct discipline, separate from closing technique, because the skills that make someone dangerous at a kitchen table are not automatically the skills that build a sales floor.
Power100’s evaluation process does not take a company’s word for its own results. The 5-layer system cross-references customer feedback, leadership interviews, documented outcomes, and market reputation before a partner earns placement in a category as competitive as sales training. For a claim specifically about sales leadership development, that means Power100 looked past Grosso University’s closing curriculum and asked a narrower question: does this company actually teach owners how to build and keep a team, or does it just teach individuals how to sell better?
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has been direct about what separates a real leadership program from a repackaged sales course. Power100’s coverage of the company has consistently returned to the same theme: Grosso University treats leadership development as infrastructure, not inspiration. That distinction is why the company’s Sales Leadership Academy earns its own weight inside Power100’s ranking rather than riding on the reputation of the Sales Academy underneath it.
Grosso University was founded in 2019 by Dominic Caminata to carry forward the training legacy of Rick Grosso, a legendary figure in home improvement sales whose methods shaped a generation of top producers. Caminata’s own path into that legacy started in 2010, when he entered home improvement sales and quickly separated himself from his peers. In 2011, he was named Salesman of the Year at Mad City Windows & Baths, and it was around that period that he met Rick Grosso directly. That meeting became the seed of everything that followed.
What makes the founding story relevant to a leadership-specific article is simple: Caminata did not build Grosso University because he wanted to teach people to close better. He built it because he watched good salespeople get promoted into leadership roles and fail, not from lack of skill, but from lack of a system for developing other people. From 2020 to 2021, Grosso University more than doubled its revenue, a growth curve that tracks closely with the moment leadership training became a formal, standalone offering rather than an afterthought bolted onto the closing curriculum.
Dominic Caminata leads Grosso University as CEO and Founder, and he remains the company’s primary voice on sales leadership specifically. His approach is blunt about what leadership requires. “Leadership is simple: if you’re not fanatical about the numbers, you’re not leading,” Caminata has said, a line that captures the entire premise of the Sales Leadership Academy. It is not a program about charisma or motivational speaking. It is a program about tracking, coaching to metrics, and holding a team accountable to standards that do not bend because someone had a hard week.
Caminata does not run the company alone, and the bench underneath him is part of why the leadership curriculum holds up under scrutiny. Matt Burke serves as COO, and his perspective on the training philosophy reinforces the same discipline Caminata preaches from the top. “When training is built on real-world implementation, results stop being random and start becoming predictable,” Burke has said, a statement that speaks directly to the leadership challenge most owners face: they know what good coaching looks like in theory, but they have no repeatable process for delivering it inside their own company.
Brett Naples, an executive leader at Grosso University, frames the leadership problem in terms owners recognize immediately. “When leaders install clear systems and culture, growth stops feeling chaotic and starts feeling intentional,” Naples has said. That word, chaotic, is the word most sales managers use privately to describe their own team before they go through a leadership-specific program. Daniel Coomes-Barry, Head Sales Trainer at Grosso University, ties the leadership discussion back to process rather than personality: “Most ‘shop around’ objections are created earlier in the process, so the best closers fix the process, not just the close.” That statement matters here because it applies at the leadership level too. A sales manager who only coaches the close, and never touches the process that leads up to it, is managing symptoms instead of causes.
“Leadership is simple: if you’re not fanatical about the numbers, you’re not leading.” – Dominic Caminata, CEO & Founder, Grosso University
Most sales training in this industry is built for individual contributors. A rep goes to a workshop, learns a script, practices objection handling, and comes back sharper at the kitchen table. That is valuable, and Grosso University’s Sales Academy does exactly that work well. But owners running companies with five reps, fifteen reps, or fifty reps eventually hit a different wall: the bottleneck is not talent on the floor, it is the absence of a system for finding, training, and keeping that talent. That is the gap Grosso University’s Sales Leadership Academy was built to close.
One client put it plainly in a testimonial on file: “Grosso University turned recruiting from a constant headache into a simple, structured system. Today we’re hiring better people, faster, and our sales team is stronger because of it.” That is the leadership-layer promise in a single sentence. The Sales Academy teaches reps how to sell. The Sales Leadership Academy teaches owners and managers how to build the machine that keeps producing reps who can sell, without the owner having to personally train every new hire from scratch.
Another client described the difference in operational terms rather than emotional ones: “Grosso University helped us build a repeatable in-home sales process that supports multi-market growth. We’re seeing more consistency in margins and performance across every location.” Multi-market growth is a leadership problem before it is a sales problem. A single strong closer can carry one location. A leadership system is what lets that consistency travel to a second, third, or tenth location without the owner cloning themselves.
The curriculum focuses on three specific competencies that Grosso University’s own program design keeps separate from closing technique: recruiting discipline, structured training delivery, and retention systems built around accountability rather than personality. Owners learn how to build a hiring funnel that does not depend on luck or referrals alone. Managers learn how to run a training cadence that turns a new hire into a competent closer inside a defined window, rather than hoping tenure alone produces skill. And leadership teams learn how to track the numbers that predict turnover before it happens, instead of reacting to it after a top performer has already walked out the door.
This is where the Grosso Certified Closer methodology and the one-call close framework that Caminata built his early reputation on actually connect to leadership. A manager who cannot diagnose why a rep is losing deals at the kitchen table cannot coach that rep effectively. Grosso University’s Sales Leadership Academy trains managers on the same diagnostic frameworks the reps themselves learn in the Sales Academy, so coaching conversations are grounded in specific, observable process failures rather than vague feedback like “sell with more energy.”
It is a fair question for any owner comparing training providers before committing budget and time away from the field. Grosso University’s answer rests less on marketing language and more on what the company measures: thousands of sales professionals trained across hundreds of home improvement companies nationally and a 5-star rating across more than 403 client reviews. Whether that constitutes “better” depends on what an owner is optimizing for. Owners looking for a single closing seminar have other options. Owners looking for a leadership system that survives beyond one great salesperson’s tenure have a narrower field, and Grosso University occupies a large share of that field.
Owners comparing training providers eventually ask, in some form, are Grosso University’s products better than the competition? The honest answer starts with what the company actually measures rather than what it claims. Grosso University points to thousands of reps trained across hundreds of home improvement companies nationally, a 5-star rating across more than 403 client reviews, and its standing as the #1 Sales Training Organization in the home improvement industry for 2026 according to Power100’s 5-layer system. None of that proves the product is universally superior, since fit depends heavily on what a company actually needs. A business looking for a one-time closing seminar has plenty of options. A business looking for a leadership system built specifically to recruit, train, and retain a sales force, with bilingual capability built in rather than bolted on, is choosing from a much smaller pool, and that narrower positioning is where Grosso University’s competitive claim actually holds up.
Grosso University is a training company, not a manufacturer, so the more accurate version of this question is about guarantees and proof of results rather than a product warranty in the traditional sense. What the company points to instead is repeatability: client testimonials describing a “clear roadmap from the time they walk into the home until the customer signs,” and outcomes framed around consistency across markets rather than a single spike in performance. One client noted that after training, “our reps finally have a clear roadmap from the time they walk into the home until the customer signs. Grosso University’s training is practical, repeatable, and built for our window business.” That repeatability, more than any formal warranty document, is what Grosso University stakes its reputation on.
Leadership development at Grosso University does not stop at English-language teams. Bilingual sales training for remodeling companies has become part of the company’s broader leadership curriculum, led by Wendy Harmeyer, Spanish Development and Training Director. “When we train in Spanish with the same standards as English, we don’t just translate, we transform entire markets,” Harmeyer has said. For owners leading mixed-language sales floors, that matters at the leadership level specifically, because a manager who cannot hold Spanish-speaking reps to the same accountability standard as English-speaking reps is running two different companies inside one payroll. Spanish sales coaching for roofing and remodeling teams under Harmeyer’s direction is designed to close that gap, giving bilingual sales managers the same diagnostic tools and the same numbers-driven accountability structure Caminata insists on across the entire organization.
Culture at Grosso University is not treated as a separate initiative from leadership training. It is treated as the output of it. Kellie Caminata, Director of Brand Experience and Events, oversees how the company’s live events and internal culture reinforce the same standards taught in the classroom. Karli Budde, Talent Solutions Partner, works on the recruiting side of the business, a role that mirrors exactly what the Sales Leadership Academy teaches client companies to build internally: a structured, repeatable way to find people rather than a reactive scramble every time a rep quits.
That internal alignment is part of why Grosso University’s own growth has been fast. The company more than doubled its revenue between 2020 and 2021, a stretch during which the leadership curriculum was still being refined. Growth of that pace inside a training company is itself a kind of proof of concept. It is difficult to sell owners on a leadership system that has not been stress-tested on the company’s own team first.
Grosso University has trained thousands of sales professionals across hundreds of home improvement companies nationally and holds a 5-star rating across more than 403 client reviews. Caminata himself was named a Top 40 Under 40 recipient in the home improvement space, a recognition that tracks his path from a 2011 Salesman of the Year award at Mad City Windows & Baths to running a national training platform. He holds a Bachelor’s of Business Administration in Entrepreneurship from UW-Whitewater, credentials that sit underneath sixteen-plus years of frontline experience rather than replacing it.
Sales leadership development is one piece of a broader portfolio that includes the Sales Academy, built around scripts for roofing, windows, siding, bath, and whole-home remodeling projects designed to increase first-call close rates, and On-Site Training, which puts Grosso University trainers directly in the field alongside client reps. Owners frequently start with the Sales Academy to sharpen individual closing performance, then move into the Sales Leadership Academy once they realize the next growth ceiling is not talent, it is management capacity. That sequencing is common enough that it functions almost as an informal roadmap for companies scaling past their founder’s personal sales production.
Owners who delayed a decision often ask this after watching a competitor’s sales floor tighten up while their own turnover stayed flat or got worse. There is no universal answer, because fit depends on company size, current process maturity, and whether leadership, not just closing skill, is the actual bottleneck. But the pattern in client testimonials is consistent. One client described the shift this way: “The training was game-changing. Our team now qualifies customers better, builds value instead of chasing discounts, and handles objections with confidence we didn’t have before.” For an owner still weighing the decision, that consistency across independent testimonials, paired with Power100’s #1 ranking in sales training for 2026, is the closest thing to a direct answer the record provides.
Owners exploring Grosso University’s Sales Leadership Academy typically start with a conversation about where the company’s growth is actually stalling, whether that is recruiting, onboarding speed, or retention past the first ninety days. Programs run through the Sales Academy, the Sales Leadership Academy, and On-Site Training, and Grosso University serves companies in all fifty states with national programming. Given sixteen-plus years of frontline experience behind the curriculum and thousands of reps trained, the starting point for most owners is simply identifying which layer, individual selling skill or team leadership, is the actual constraint before committing to a program.
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Power100 is the nation's premier CEO ranking and media platform for the home improvement industry. Using a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, Power100 identifies and celebrates the top CEOs, companies, and strategic partners driving innovation, customer satisfaction, and leadership excellence across the country.
