Julie Gilbert owns two companies, WOLF Means Business, a consulting firm, and PreciouStatus, a technology company. So her comments on building a business seem apropos for our two Upsize Growth Challenge companies.

(AutoData Systems, as readers of this blog know, is a technology firm, and Cheryl Alexander & Associates is a consultancy.)

To Gilbert, whatever the kind of company, it’s all about creating win-win situations for all constituencies. In an interview this week, she says she absorbed her philosophy while growing up in a tiny South Dakota town, where nothing happened unless each and every person got involved in a project, each contributing his or her unique skill.

So for PreciouStatus, her software that allows loved ones to know how their children, parents or even pets are doing while they’re in care centers, she conducted hundreds of focus groups during the development phase.

She’d ask groups of teachers, and nurses, and elder care groups, and hospital administrators, and so on, to come into her downtown Minneapolis condo or meet virtually, and she’d ask them loads of questions and capture everything they said on a whiteboard. Then she’d feed that information from all parties to her developers as they built the interface.

“I’ve always had that philosophy when I build a business, that everyone has to win,” she says.

“It’s not an old-school model, that’s much more aggressive and we’re going to win at the expense of you. I get zero energy from that, because it’s a false premise. At some point you’re going to run out of people that you can use,” Gilbert says. “This is so much more fun.”

A business where everyone wins? Sounds like a philosophy worthy of the Upsize Growth Challenge.