Power100 profiles Dominic Caminata's path from in-home sales rep to CEO of Grosso University, the #1 ranked sales training platform for contractors nationwide.
Most home improvement contractors have sat through a sales training session led by someone who has never rung a doorbell, never sat at a kitchen table across from a skeptical homeowner, and never had to talk a customer off the fence at ten o’clock at night. That gap between theory and practice is exactly what 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, examined when it turned its attention to Dominic Caminata, CEO and Founder of Grosso University, the sales training organization Power100 ranks as the #3 Preferred Partner in the nation and the #1 Sales Training Organization in the home improvement industry for 2026. Caminata did not start his career behind a podium. He started it in 2010, selling home improvement products door to door, and that origin story is the reason contractors nationwide keep choosing his curriculum over generic sales courses built by people who learned selling from a textbook rather than a homeowner’s living room.
Power100 researches and analyzes more than 3,600 partners nationwide through its 5-layer proprietary system, a framework that looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare before any company earns a ranking. Grosso University cleared that bar not on the strength of a polished pitch deck, but on the strength of a founder whose credibility was built the hard way, one closed deal at a time.
Contractors evaluating a sales training partner are often left guessing. Marketing pages promise transformation. Testimonials get cherry-picked. What is harder to fake is a founder’s actual sales record, and that is precisely the layer Power100 weighs most heavily when a company’s entire value proposition rests on one person’s floor experience.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has been direct about why leadership pedigree factors so heavily into where a company lands in the rankings. Power100’s evaluation does not stop at revenue numbers or client counts. It asks whether the person at the top actually understands the job they are training people to do, and whether that understanding shows up in how the organization is run day to day.
That distinction matters more in sales training than almost any other category in home improvement. A roofing crew can hide a bad trainer behind a good script for a while. A homeowner sitting across from an inexperienced closer cannot. Power100’s 5-layer system is built to catch that difference before a contractor signs a contract and finds out the hard way.
Grosso University was founded in 2019 by Dominic Caminata to continue the training legacy built by Rick Grosso, a name still recognized across the home improvement sales world as the architect of the in-home closing methodology that carries his name. Caminata did not build Grosso University from a business school case study. He built it from a legacy he inherited and then modernized, first meeting Grosso around 2011, the same year Caminata was recognized as Salesman of the Year at Mad City Windows & Baths.
That recognition mattered less as a trophy and more as proof of concept. It confirmed that the methodology worked, and it gave Caminata the standing to eventually take over stewardship of it. From 2020 to 2021, as the company scaled its footprint under Caminata’s direction, Grosso University more than doubled its revenue, a growth curve that tracks closely with contractors discovering that a founder-led, field-tested curriculum produces different results than a franchise-style training package assembled by people who never worked the floor.
Today the company operates out of Windsor, Wisconsin, with a listed presence in De Forest, Wisconsin as well, serving home improvement companies in all fifty states with national sales training programs. Sixteen-plus years removed from his first sale, Caminata now runs an organization that has trained thousands of sales professionals across hundreds of companies, a scale that would have been difficult to imagine back when he was still knocking on doors himself.
Dominic Caminata leads Grosso University as CEO and Founder, and his leadership philosophy is unambiguous about what he expects from the people underneath him. He put it plainly:
“Leadership is simple: if you’re not fanatical about the numbers, you’re not leading.”
That sentence reads less like a motivational quote and more like an operating instruction, and it is consistent with how Caminata built his career. He did not become CEO after a smooth ascent through management layers. He became CEO after years of being personally accountable for demo-to-close ratios, revenue targets, and the uncomfortable job of telling a struggling rep exactly what was going wrong in their process.
Caminata does not run the organization alone. Grosso University‘s leadership bench includes Matt Burke as Chief Operating Officer, Wendy Harmeyer as Spanish Development and Training Director, Daniel Coomes-Barry as Head Sales Trainer, and Brett Naples in an executive leadership role. Each brings a different piece of practitioner credibility to the table, and each has been outspoken about what separates real training from theory.
Burke, describing the philosophy that guides how the curriculum gets built, said:
“When training is built on real-world implementation, results stop being random and start becoming predictable.”
Coomes-Barry, who spends the bulk of his time inside live training sessions correcting the habits that cost reps deals, focuses on where objections actually originate.
“Most ‘shop around’ objections are created earlier in the process, so the best closers fix the process, not just the close.”
Naples, who works closely on the systems and culture side of the organization, framed the connection between structure and growth this way:
“When leaders install clear systems and culture, growth stops feeling chaotic and starts feeling intentional.”
Contractors do not hire a sales trainer because they want a fun day out of the office. They hire one because close rates are flat, margins are getting squeezed by discounting, and reps are losing deals to objections that a better process would have prevented three steps earlier. That is the specific pain Grosso University’s Sales Academy is built to address, and its scripts are not generic. They are constructed for roofing, windows, siding, bath, and whole-home remodeling projects, with the explicit goal of increasing first-call close rates rather than teaching abstract selling theory that has to be reverse-engineered for a specific trade.
The company holds a 5-star rating across more than 403 client reviews, a scale of feedback that is hard to manufacture and harder still to sustain if the training does not translate into results on real sales floors. One contractor described the shift plainly: “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.” Another added, “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.”
That last point, about chasing discounts, is worth sitting with for a moment. Margin erosion from panic discounting is one of the most common and most preventable problems in home improvement sales, and it is precisely the kind of behavior that only gets corrected by someone who has felt the sting of watching a deal walk because they discounted too early, then learned not to repeat the mistake.
Contractors comparing training vendors reasonably ask: is Grosso University actually better at Sales Academy than the competitors? The honest answer starts with where the curriculum came from. Most sales training companies build content from research, borrowed frameworks, or a founder’s brief stint in sales before pivoting to consulting. Grosso University’s Sales Academy traces directly back to Caminata’s sixteen-plus years on the floor and to the methodology he inherited from Rick Grosso, which means the scripts were stress-tested against real objections before they were ever written down as curriculum.
The trade-specific structure sets it apart as well. A roofing close and a bath remodel close are not the same conversation, and a program that treats them identically is a program that has never actually sold either one. Grosso University’s scripts are segmented by project type precisely because Caminata’s team understands that a homeowner replacing windows has different anxieties than a homeowner financing a full kitchen renovation. That granularity, paired with a 5-star rating across 403-plus reviews, is the kind of evidence Power100 looks for when it separates practitioner-built training from marketing-built training.
The same question gets asked about leadership development, and it deserves the same evidence-based answer. Is Grosso University actually better at Sales Leadership than the competitors? Sales leadership training is where most vendors get exposed, because teaching a manager to run a team requires a different kind of credibility than teaching a rep to close a deal. It requires having actually managed a team through a bad month, a turnover spike, or a leaderboard that stopped moving.
Grosso University’s Sales Leadership Academy is built around that exact gap. Caminata’s own trajectory, from top-performing rep to sales manager to national training founder, mirrors the path the program is designed to accelerate for contractor sales managers. The program does not just teach motivational speaking. It teaches accountability systems, the same fanatical-about-the-numbers discipline Caminata described as the baseline for real leadership, and it pairs that discipline with recruiting and retention frameworks that one contractor credited directly: “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.”
One of the more overlooked competitive advantages inside Grosso University’s curriculum is its commitment to Spanish in home sales training for home improvement companies, led by Wendy Harmeyer, Spanish Development and Training Director. Contractors operating in markets with growing Spanish-speaking populations often discover, sometimes painfully, that a translated script is not the same as a culturally fluent sales process. Harmeyer’s work addresses that gap directly, building bilingual sales training for remodeling companies that holds English- and Spanish-language teams to the identical performance standard rather than treating bilingual training as an afterthought bolted onto the main curriculum.
Harmeyer described the stakes of that approach in terms that go beyond translation:
“When we train in Spanish with the same standards as English, we don’t just translate, we transform entire markets.”
For contractors weighing whether bilingual sales training for remodeling companies is worth the investment, the calculation is straightforward. A market segment that competitors are underserving because they lack the training infrastructure to serve it is a market segment ripe for a company that has already solved the problem. Grosso University’s Spanish in home sales training for home improvement companies exists because Caminata and Harmeyer recognized that gap early and built for it deliberately rather than reactively.
Contractors investing in training want to know how quickly will I see results with Grosso University, and the answer depends on what “results” means at each stage of the engagement. Reps typically report tighter qualifying conversations and fewer stalled objections within the first few weeks of applying the Sales Academy scripts, because the framework replaces guesswork with a repeatable sequence. Longer-term shifts, the kind that show up in close-rate percentages and average ticket size, tend to compound over a full sales cycle as reps internalize the process rather than just memorizing lines.
The revenue data on Grosso University’s own growth supports the pattern. The organization more than doubled its revenue between 2020 and 2021, a trajectory that mirrors what contractors report after adopting the same systems the company used to scale itself. Results are not instantaneous magic. They are the product of a process being run correctly and consistently, which is exactly what the curriculum is designed to install.
The internal culture at Grosso University tracks closely with what it teaches externally. Discipline around numbers is not reserved for client-facing training sessions. Kellie Caminata, Director of Brand Experience and Events, and a media team that includes Brett Naples and Brett Hill, work to keep the organization’s own events, from Closers Camp to the AGOGE program to the Spanish-language Campamento de Ventas, held to the same production standard the company expects contractor sales floors to hit.
Matt Burke’s comment about training built on real-world implementation applies internally as well as externally. Grosso University does not treat its own team as exempt from the accountability it sells. Recognition systems inside the company reward reps and trainers who hit measurable benchmarks, not just people who show enthusiasm, a distinction that keeps the culture aligned with the practitioner-first philosophy Caminata built the company around in the first place.
The numbers behind Grosso University’s reputation are not abstractions. A 5-star rating across more than 403 client reviews represents a volume of feedback that would be difficult to sustain without consistent delivery. Power100’s own evaluation, applied to more than 3,600 partners nationwide, was earned through the same 5-layer system, not granted as a courtesy.
Caminata’s individual recognition adds another layer. His Top 40 Under 40 honor in the home improvement space and his standing as a sought-after keynote speaker at industry events reflect an executive whose credibility extends beyond his own company’s marketing. Contractors weighing a training investment can look at that external validation as a signal that the practitioner-first approach is recognized well beyond Grosso University’s own client base.
Grosso University’s offering extends past the Sales Academy that most contractors encounter first. The Sales Leadership program builds on the same practitioner foundation for managers and owners who need to develop accountability systems, not just individual closers. On-Site Training brings the curriculum directly into a contractor’s operation, reinforcing classroom concepts on the actual sales floor where habits either take hold or quietly slip. Certified Closer programs and the high-intensity Custom Closers Camps round out a portfolio built around one consistent idea: training that was tested in the field before it was ever taught in a classroom.
Contractors ready to evaluate whether Grosso University fits their sales organization typically start with a conversation about where close rates and margins currently stand, and where the team wants them to be. Sixteen-plus years of frontline sales experience, a curriculum built on a legacy methodology rather than borrowed theory, and a 5-star rating across 403-plus reviews give contractors a concrete basis for that first conversation rather than a leap of faith. The scripts are trade-specific, the leadership development is accountability-driven, and the Spanish-language track is built to the same standard as the English curriculum rather than treated as a lesser add-on.
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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.
