A family-owned business. An industry in flux. A founder who discovered a new direction.
Name: Hargrove Construction Group
Founder: Marcus Hargrove
Location: Indianapolis, Indiana and Chicagoland Area
Founded: 2011 (15 years in business)
Team size: 18
Revenue: Grew steadily to ~$3.2M/year by 2022; now sitting around $2.8M and uneven quarter to quarter
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book a callThis case study presents Loxstill's Curated Behavioral Strategy process. As always, all names and entities have been changed to maintain absolute client confidentiality out of respect for the founder and business. Any similar mention of real businesses, individuals, or situations is strictly coincidental.
Marcus started as a framer, went out on his own in 2011, and built Hargrove Construction almost entirely on word of mouth. Hargrove Construction started with residential design-builds and mid-size home renovation, with a smaller light-commercial remodel arm added around 2018. Clients who trusted him sent his next three referrals. For a decade, that trust was the core of his growth. No major marketing spend, no lead-gen platforms. Just a reputation built on consistent, high-quality work.
Starting in early 2023, two things converged.
First, the local housing market went stagnant, resulting in fewer new builds, more homeowners staying put and renovating instead, which should have meant more work for a renovation-focused firm like Hargrove's. But at the same time, the regional construction economy got pulled hard toward a wave of AI data center construction projects in the area. These projects have enormous budgets that paid skilled tradespeople, especially electricians, well above what a residential general contractor could offer.
Hargrove started losing subcontractors mid-project or couldn't rebook them for the next one. Material costs were rising anyway; now labor was scarce and expensive on top of it. Marcus raised his prices to cover it and for the first time, longtime referral clients started asking for other bids.
Some didn't come back.
Marcus doesn't fully register this as a market shift. It reads, internally, as something going wrong with him. He mentioned during the intake interview that he felt the trust he spent fourteen years building had quietly started to erode, and he couldn't identify why. He's begun second-guessing pricing conversations he used to have on instinct.
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Read an excrept from Hargrove Construction's Five Market Forces Analysis and see Marcus's market clarity emerge.
A family business meets five market forces.
For Hargrove Construction Group, a 14-year, family-owned design-build firm outside Indianapolis, this analysis meant seeing five forces that, read individually, looked like the ordinary friction of a tough market. Read together, they told a different story: one force moving quietly through all the others, and a founder second-guessing decisions he used to make on instinct.
A Market Assessment and Analysis has two parts. Benchmarked questions that compare a business's performance against its industry and an analysis of the five market forces that shape that industry.
To maintain the anonymity of this client, the first part of the report has been excluded.
Read individually, the presented Five Forces of Market Position would suggest Hargrove Construction is simply in a tough market. Read together, they reveal something more specific: the labor pull toward data center construction is removing the leverage from Hargrove Constructions market position.
This new demand is quietly driving almost everything else Hargrove is experiencing. That's the kind of finding a founder can't see from inside the day-to-day operations. It's also exactly the kind of finding that informs founders on how to beat the competition.
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How intensely existing players in a market compete for the same customers through price, differentiation, or both.
Local renovation and design-build firms are competing over a flat-to-shrinking pool of projects. As new-home construction stays depressed and everyone chases the same renovation demand, the competition increases. Firms that once operated in adjacent niches like kitchen specialists, whole-home renovators, and light commercial remodelers, are now all bidding the same mid-size renovation jobs. The market has begun to shirnk and there's nowhere else to go.
Rivalry intensifies sharply wherever Supplier Power (see below) is weakest. Firms that lost their labor pipeline can't bid competitively even when demand is there.
Positioning against rivals on price alone is a losing game in a market this saturated. Price competition drives profits to the floor, resulting in a race to the bottom. The real leverage is elsewhere.
How much leverage customers have to demand lower prices, better terms, or simply walk.
Homeowners increasingly solicit multiple bids through apps and online platforms before ever calling a contractor directly. This also includes contractors they've worked with in the past. Referral clients who never used to ask for competing quotes are now comparing prices. This behavior has become the local default.
Buyer Power increases as Rivalry becomes more prominent in the market. More competing bids in front of the same client means more leverage for that client to seek out the lowest price.
The erosion isn't personal. It's a market-wide behavioral shift, and it's happening to every firm at once.
Alternatives that satisfy the same need without being a direct competitor — including doing nothing at all.
DIY content, national handyman-franchise chains, and app-based platforms all pull smaller jobs away from full-service general contractors. Rising renovation costs also make "wait and see" a real substitute. Smaller repair and cosmetic jobs that used to be easy add-on revenue for Hargrove now go to franchise handyman services with lower overhead or don't happen at all, as homeowners defer.
As pricing climbs (driven by Supplier Power below), the "do nothing" substitute becomes more attractive, shrinking the addressable market itself. Homeowners decide to wait for the prices to lower even more than the competition can offer.
Not every loset bid goes to a competitor. Some bids are lost to inaction, which requires a different response entirely.
How much leverage the people and materials a business depends on have over its costs and capacity.
Since 2023, material costs have stayed volatile, but the sharper shift has been labor: skilled tradespeople, especially electricians, have been pulled toward large-scale AI data center construction projects offering pay residential GCs can't match.
Marcus has had subcontractors leave mid-project or become unavailable for rebooking, not because of dissatisfaction, but because a data center project simply outbid him for the same crew.
This is the Force driving nearly every other one. Decreasing access to labor raises Hargrove's costs, which raises Buyer Power, which increases the pull of Substitutes, which intensifies Rivalry among whoever's left standing with a crew.
This is very likely Hargrove's identified weak point in the market. This force requires the most attention because its effects ripple through all of the other four market forces.
How easily new competitors can enter a market and erode existing players' position.
App-based, lower-license-barrier general contracting platforms are entering local markets with lower overhead than traditional full-service firms. New platform-based entrants haven't yet targeted Hargrove's mid-size renovation niche directly, but are visibly expanding from the smaller-job end of the market upward.
Currently the least active Force in Hargrove's specific situation but worth monitoring. This identified force may become a future blindspot if Hargrove does not pay attention to future trend behavior.
Knowing where a threat is still emerging is as valuable as knowing where it's already landed. This knowledge becomes leverage against Hargrove's competition as New Entrants increase, influencing the market in the future.
Marcus sat down with Gabriel and reviewed the last five major decisions that moved his company forward.
As they worked through the conversations, Marcus began to identify some of the major pain-points he had faced and how they impacted the way he saw himself, his business, and how they influenced his perspective as a founder.
A founder reviews what went wrong.
For Marcus, growth had introduced a new kind of uncertainty. Decisions he once made quickly had become slower, more heavily examined, and increasingly difficult to separate from the responsibility he felt toward the business, his family, and the people who depended on the company.
"What specific event or shift in your business's stability led you to find support and guidance today?"
"I don't know, it's...guess it started with a bid I lost. Client I'd worked with twice before. And it wasn't even that I lost it, bids get lost, that's normal. It was that they didn't even call me first this time. They just... went to the platform [quote app], got three quotes, mine happened to be one of them. And I kept thinking, did I do something. Did I mess something up on the last job? I still don't actually know if that's true or if it's just...everybody's doing it now, I guess. I don't know which one it is."
What looked operational on the surface was also behavioral: the founder’s own decision-making process had become part of the system the business was trying to scale.
That mattered because a company does not respond to market conditions independently of the people leading it. Perceived risk, confidence, past outcomes, anxiety, and expectations of gain or loss all influence which opportunities are pursued, which threats receive attention, and which decisions are delayed.
Loxstill’s Behavioral Interviews examine seven cognitive dimensions behind those decisions, including self-efficacy, motivation, perceived weaknesses, fears and anxieties, gain and loss, perspective, and the founder’s desired state.
For Marcus, those dimensions revealed a pattern beneath several seemingly unrelated decisions, one that could then be compared against the market conditions identified in Hargrove Construction’s Market Assessment and Analysis.
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The Integration Map places behavioral findings alongside the market forces affecting the business, revealing the points where founder cognition and external pressure influence one another.
A founder's instinct meets market reality.
Hargrove’s Market Assessment and Analysis had already identified the external pressures shaping the business. The Behavioral Interviews revealed the patterns influencing Marcus’s decisions inside it. The Integration Map brought those findings together.
For Marcus, the value was not simply seeing that market conditions and founder behavior were connected. It was seeing where they were connected. Decisions that had felt isolated began to form a pattern: particular anxieties intensified under specific competitive pressures, certain strengths became more useful in some conditions than others, and some of the company’s apparent strategic problems were being reinforced by the way those conditions were interpreted.
For Hargrove, that meant moving from a list of separate challenges to a clearer picture of the system producing them and identifying the intersections where strategic change could have the greatest effect.
The Behavioral Interview surfaced a Self-Efficacy pattern. Marcus consistently frames lost bids and pricing pushback as evidence of something he did wrong. As a founder, he associated his drop in business with a decline in his own skill, trust, or relationship management, rather than as a market condition acting on his business from the outside.
What looked operational on the surface was also behavioral: the founder’s own decision-making process had become part of the system the business was trying to scale.
The market data says this is structural. The founder's felt experience says this is personal. That gap, between what's actually happening and what it feels like is happening, is the single most consequential finding in Hargrove's entire diagnostic.
Every pricing conversation Marcus has had since 2023 has been shaped by a belief that isn't true. Correcting the belief doesn't fix the market. But it changes every decision made in response to it.
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Loxstill’s Curated Behavioral Strategy develops recommendations from the intersections identified in the Integration Map.
Each recommendation is shaped by the company’s market position, the founder’s behavioral patterns, and the conditions most likely to influence future decisions.
For Hargrove, the result was a strategy built not around an idealized version of the founder, but around the founder who was actually responsible for carrying the business forward.
A founder turns insight into a way forward.
By this point, Marcus had a clearer picture of both the market pressures surrounding Hargrove and the behavioral patterns shaping his response to them. The next step was not to hand him a generic growth plan. It was to build a strategy that accounted for both.
For Marcus, that meant translating the findings into a set of decisions, policies, and strategic priorities designed around the realities of the business and the way he led it. The objective was not to remove instinct from the process, but to give that instinct a stronger framework, one capable of holding up under greater complexity, pressure, and scale.
"Risk and rejection are currently being processed as personal verdicts rather than market signals, resulting in a pattern of self-doubt that compounds with each lost bid regardless of its actual cause. Future pricing conversations, particularly with longtime clients who now seek competing quotes, are best approached by first separating what is knowable (market-wide labor conditions, verifiable through the Market Assessment) from what is felt (a sense of personal failure), before deciding how to respond."
Marcus Hargrove's Integration Map revealed Self-Efficacy as a major source of externalized pressure that influences his decision making. Part of his Curated Behavioral Strategy is a Reflections Framework that provides clarity and self-reflection prior to finalizing Pricing decisions:
What happened → What the market data says about why (if known) → What I'm feeling is true about myself right now → Which of those two is actually driving my next decision.
This Reflections Framework disrupts Hargrove's habitual negative self-efficacy pattern and requires him to reframe his perspective on the relationship between Price and his self worth.
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