The Business Growers

Laura Johns is the founder and CEO of The Business Growers, a Mississippi-based agency focused almost exclusively on managed service providers (MSPs), IT firms, cybersecurity companies, and telecom operators. The public founder story on the site is relatively brief, but Johns is described as having more than 20 years of experience in tech marketing and was named the 2024 Gold Stevie Award winner for Best Female Entrepreneur in the Small Business category. She leads a team that collectively claims more than 60 years of tech marketing experience, with chief operating officer Lydia Walker, a 20-year veteran of the technology and telecommunications industries, handling operations and scaling. The firm's thesis is that MSPs and IT service businesses rarely have the time or internal marketing bench to execute consistently. Owners are absorbed in ticket queues and client escalations, and generic marketing vendors don't understand the channel, the partner programs, or the buyer. The Business Growers answers that with a packaged framework called KNOW, GROW, SCALE, which moves clients from brand and messaging foundations to lead generation infrastructure to paid media and fractional CMO oversight. The agency is an approved marketing provider in the AT&T Partner Exchange ecosystem, which lets AT&T Solution Provider clients run engagements against Market Development Funds, a specific wrinkle that most generalist agencies can't offer. The firm also produces its own MSP Marketing Podcast and webinar library, reinforcing Johns's positioning as a voice inside the MSP channel rather than a generalist looking in.