Change Maker: Toss Grumley's rapid rise to trusted advisor

By his own admission, New Zealander Toss Grumley is a ‘tamed entrepreneur’.

He first made waves by becoming a non-executive director of several of his home country’s fastest growing companies and leading a major business by the age of 25.

Before he took his MBA, he had a finger in many pies, from e-commerce to property services to digital marketing – as well as expanding his business consultancy.

Toss has since learned he’s more effective when he doesn’t take on too much. Today he channels his entrepreneurial drive by helping his clients - some 250 business owners - stay ahead of the game.   

“I’ve got better at focusing over the years and learned it’s not good to try to do a million things at once,” he says.

A keen reader but a restless student, he decided at the age of 16 that school was dull, apart from history and business which both fascinated him, and he quit to work instead.

“I’d already started doing holiday jobs and I was enjoying earning my own money,” says Toss. “I wanted to put myself out in the world.”

He went on to work his way up the rungs of a leading wholesale business, eventually becoming general manager.  

But nearly a decade out of education, he began to consider consolidating what he’d learned from years of experience. It was his English-born girlfriend - now wife - who urged him to look beyond New Zealand and Australia.

“She told me I needed to be more international – and look at going to a top tier university. That led me to look at Warwick with its reputation for being entrepreneurial, respected and business focused.” 

A winner of Warwick Business School’s 2024 Alumni Awards, he’s forever grateful that back in 2015, Warwick Business School staff took his MBA application on the strength of his written tests and essays and didn’t baulk at his curtailed schooling. Originally enrolled on to the Global Online MBA, he decided instead to attend most of the business degree in person.

“I found it rewarding just being around people, and more time efficient – particularly when you are working full-time back home.” 

He valued the hands-on experience of the School’s teaching staff, and their insights into entrepreneurial finance.

“There were some fantastic professors,” he says. “One had led a couple of companies and listed them on the stock exchange.”

Meanwhile, his mostly Asia-Pacific cohort made the most of their time together during course modules. “We had fun. I’m from a little country at the bottom of the world and although we punch pretty high, being around students from all over the globe, you get a different mindset – it’s not so insular.” 

Today he still gets energy and inspiration from his network, still has several non-executive directorships on the go, helps steer an arts gallery and he’s successfully exited three businesses. “The majority of my role models are friends or business partners who are on similar trajectories, and I admire what they are doing.” 

One of his most formative experiences at Warwick was a course on coaching, which led him to write a dissertation on coaching entrepreneurs – he’s now nine years into his business adviser role, and the skills he picked up in analysing, researching and crunching numbers he now uses daily.

“It made me think deeply about how I do things, the context, the framework, the terminology,” says Toss. “Instead of just having knowledge, I can actually explain why I think a certain way.” 

Today his clients at Grumley+Company span all industries, but they must be owner-operated and have a strong brand. It’s just him and his PA, and he has no intention of changing that.

“I decided early on I was going to be a one-person business because I like sitting with clients – that’s my passion, working with dynamic people to create a strategy. My pledge to clients is that it’s always just me.”  

How does he juggle such a hefty workload? He now has a young family and spends a week each month in Sydney where some of his clients are based. “I have good time management.” He can also afford to be picky. “I like to work with ambitious people - time races by when you work with a good bunch with great intentions.”

With experience, he’s learned how to coax the best from his clients and his processes aren’t prescriptive – sometimes owners just need a prompt or two to get their fundamentals in order. 

“I’ll sit down with people for a day or two and we’ll go over the entire business back to front – all the classic stuff such as goals, plans, customers, market position, pricing models, where we are selling the product, the brand, the story and so on.” 

Once the foundations are in place, he likens the process to architectural design. “Then we can get fancy with the walls, the finishes and layout. People tend to be experts at what they do. What they are often missing is best practice and how to think about things.” 

The importance of a focused approach

While he has extricated himself from former business interests, he’s an active investor. A certain single-mindedness, he believes, is key to success – both for himself and his clients.

He says: “It’s so easy to just start running around and bouncing off walls. My top performing clients are all incredibly focused. They don’t try to do multiple things at once or add random services. They are directional in their thinking and they just execute to perfection.”   

Unusually for an entrepreneur who started out young, Toss considers himself relatively risk averse – as are most of his clients. “Probably 20 per cent of them I’ll encourage to slow down and be more cautious, and the other 80 per cent I’ll try to nudge them along because I don’t want them to miss an opportunity or the growth they could achieve.” 

If he’s taken the odd wrong turn in the past, he doesn’t dwell. “If the path ahead is perfectly smooth, I don’t think you’re really trying to get somewhere. You can get very caught up in sunk costs, but wasting time ruminating on past mistakes is a terrible thing. You need to learn from it and get on as quickly as possible.” 

Toss may have been tamed but his restless energy means he as quick as ever.

Discover more about Warwick Business School’s Change Makers.