What I learned after decades of building and scaling companies.
For a long time, I thought scale was the goal. More revenue, more customers, more people – all of it pointing in one direction:
Bigger is better.
When I was a member in EO, there was always this quiet expectation in the background: grow or sell.
Nobody said it outright, but it was there. If you weren’t pushing for more, you were somehow playing a smaller game.
I bought into that for years. And I got good at it.
But somewhere along the way, I started noticing something that didn’t quite add up.
The Reality Check
What really started to change my thinking was observing other companies. A friend of mine runs a company doing around $10 million in revenue.
On paper, it looks great. From the outside, most people think he’s crushing it.
Solid top line, large team, growing business, plenty of activity.
But when you look a little closer, it tells a different story.
He barely breaks even.
There’s constant pressure. Payroll, overhead, coordination, all the moving parts that come with a business of that size. A lot of effort goes into keeping the machine running, but very little of it actually turns into meaningful profit. And he’s one mistake, one lost customer, or one unexpected expense away from running at a loss.
And you start to ask yourself a simple question:
What exactly are we scaling here?
Revenue? Yes.
Complexity? Definitely.
Stress? Without a doubt.
But profit? Not really.
That’s when I realized: scale without profitability is meaningless.
The Default Answer
What struck me over time is how quickly “scale” becomes the answer to almost every problem.
If growth slows, the instinct is to push harder. If margins are thin, the assumption is that more volume will fix it. If the business feels stuck, the solution is usually framed as “we need to get bigger.”
It’s rarely questioned.
I remember sitting in EO forums where the conversation would inevitably drift in that direction. Not explicitly, not as a rule, but as a shared understanding: you either grow, or you position yourself to sell. Standing still – or worse, choosing not to scale – felt like a lack of ambition.
That never quite sat right with me.
Because it assumes that scale is the only logical destination. That bigger is always better. That the goal is to maximize the size of the business, regardless of what that does to everything else.
But once you’ve seen what scale actually brings with it – the complexity, the pressure, the fragility – you start to wonder whether that assumption is true.
Or whether we’ve just repeated it long enough that nobody challenges it anymore.
The Missing Middle
What took me a while to realize is that there’s a middle ground most people don’t even consider. It’s not about refusing to grow. And it’s not about building something just to sell it.
It’s about building something that is right-sized.
I came across the idea in a book called The Big Enough Company, and it immediately resonated. It articulated something I had been feeling for a long time without putting words to it.
The goal doesn’t have to be maximum scale.
The goal can be a business that actually works for you.
A business that is large enough to be meaningful, but small enough to remain understandable. A business that generates real profit instead of just revenue. A business where you’re still building something, not just managing an increasingly complex system.
Once you see that option, it’s hard to unsee it because it reframes the entire question.
It’s no longer “How big can this get?”
It becomes “How big should this be?”
What I Care About Now
These days, I’m thinking differently about how I want to live and work.
I’m still interested in building. That part hasn’t changed. I still enjoy solving problems, designing systems, and putting something useful into the world.
But I pay a lot more attention to what the business actually gives back in return.
I care about whether it produces real profit, not just revenue that looks good on paper. I care about how complex it becomes as it grows, and whether that complexity adds value or just creates more moving parts to manage. I care about how much control I have over my time, my decisions, and the direction of the business.
And I care about whether the whole thing makes sense.
There’s something very appealing about a business that is simple, profitable, and understandable. One where you know exactly how it works, where the margins are clear, and where growth doesn’t automatically introduce chaos.
That doesn’t mean I’m against scale.
It just means I don’t chase it blindly anymore.
Final Thought
I’m not against scale.
I’ve spent decades building and scaling businesses, and I understand exactly why it’s attractive. Growth feels like progress. Bigger numbers feel like validation. It’s an easy story to tell yourself – and to others.
But I’ve also seen what sits underneath it.
Scale brings complexity. It introduces pressure. And if you’re not careful, it creates a business that looks impressive from the outside but doesn’t actually deliver what you thought it would.
That’s why I don’t chase it by default anymore.
These days, I’m far more interested in building something that works. Something that produces real profit, stays understandable as it grows, and doesn’t turn into a machine that needs constant feeding just to keep running.
If that business scales along the way, great.
But it’s no longer the goal.
It’s just one possible outcome.
