2026 Dynamic Dozen No. 4: Valiant Management Group LLC

SBJ: What has been key to your recent growth?
Josh Manning: There’s been a lot of opportunity, a lot of deals come our way. And then the other thing, too, is just we’ve really focused a lot on growing our team and hiring the right people and having the right people in the right seats. Since we were in Dynamic Dozen last year ... we now have full architectural design in-house. That’s really allowed us to grow and to scale. It just ... makes us more vertically integrated for what we’re doing.

SBJ: What developments have you most excited right now?
Manning: We have this one coming up called Third Harvest. It’s a south side project. It’s an old trailer park that we bought. It’s going to be 110 units, one multifamily building that’s 78 units, a mix of one bedroom, two bedrooms, and then two-story lofts. There are eight four-plex townhomes, so there’s 32 units of two-story townhomes with garages. But then the really cool part is that the middle part of the development ... is like a full production farm. We’ve got an event center that has a produce production area, and then we have an area where we’ve partnered with a local chef who’s going to do farm-to-table dinners. We’re going to do cooking classes, and we’re going to sell the produce, and we have a farm stand. We call it an agrihood. Other communities have done this, but I think this will be one of the first ones that’s ever been done here.

SBJ: What does the next phase of growth look like for you, and what needs to change to make that happen?
Manning: We are going to start exploring maybe developing in some other markets. We have some pretty hefty goals, and I think to achieve those goals, we’re going to have to take our model and maybe replicate it. For that to happen, really we’ve got to grow our team a little bit. We’ve got to create relationships and identify the markets that we want to go. We do have some opportunities right now. We are looking in areas three hours or less.

SBJ: What are your top issues when it comes to managing growth?
Manning:  I think the one thing that we’ve done very well is we’ve hired a lot of really good people, and we have a very good culture. Growing and keeping that culture intact is difficult. I want to always feel like we’re a small company – that it’s really easy for people to get to me or to leadership, and to not feel like we’re this giant conglomerate. I hate to use a term like mom and pop, but we want to feel like that.

SBJ: Where are you finding employees?
Manning: Originally, we’d just post ads online. We now use a recruitment company. They’re based out of Hawaii, but they only do contractors. Basically what they do ... it’s like an intellect test, a behavioral test. It’s 300 questions. It’s a lot. They do a video interview of predetermined questions that we have that we want to see. And then if we like the way that ... all of their scores come out and how their video interview is, then we would invite them in for an interview here. If somebody’s willing to go through that process and do the tests and do the interview and do all the prescreen stuff, then that means they’re usually a pretty serious candidate.