We live in a world obsessed with scale. Bigger, faster, wider reach. If it doesn’t grow, it’s not worth doing. If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter. Success is defined by metrics, margins, and how quickly you can multiply.
But lately, I’ve found myself drawn to something else entirely. To the businesses that stay small. The ones that choose depth over breadth. The ones that haven’t scaled and are somehow all the more beautiful because of it.
A few weeks ago, I discovered a small CSA just a few properties down from us, run by a woman farming a modest plot of her family’s land, providing vegetables to friends and family. No fancy website. No glossy branding. No grand expansion plan. Just fresh, local food grown with care and handed over with love. It felt special and rare.
My good friend, LeChing, makes fanny packs from upcycled materials. Together with her sister, she sources forgotten fabrics, and her mom sews them by hand. No two bags are the same. There is no inventory warehouse. Just something creative and joyful that she and her family have built with their own hands.
These businesses aren’t successful in the traditional sense. They haven’t scaled. But they’ve done something harder: they’ve kept their soul intact.
Scaling changes things. The CSA becomes a commercial farm. The fanny packs become another fast fashion product. The founder becomes a manager. The craft becomes a spreadsheet. The business becomes less fun, less human and less like the thing you fell in love with.
There is an old story about the businessman and the fisherman. The businessman tells a fisherman who is fishing on the beach that he could grow his fishing operation, buy more boats, and build an empire. The fisherman asks, “Then what?” The businessman says, “Then you can retire, sit on a beach, and relax.” The fisherman smiles. “But I’m already doing that.”
When I chat with these business owners, my instinct is always the same as the businessman in this story: I start thinking about how they could scale. It’s reflexive. Something that’s been hardwired into me after years of building in the startup world. I catch myself imagining the e-commerce site, the partnerships, the content strategy. The growth plan writes itself in my head.
But then I pause.
Because if they scaled without intention, they’d almost certainly lose the magic, the intimacy and the soul. They’d risk losing the very thing that makes their business so compelling in the first place.
Scaling for the sake of scale isn’t the answer. Growth without care is just expansion at the cost of meaning. And maybe, for some businesses, that’s a price not worth paying.
Maybe the bravest thing a business can do isn’t to scale, but to resist the pressure to scale at all costs. To protect what makes it special and choose meaning over metrics. Success isn’t always measured in growth charts and exit strategies. Sometimes it’s in the joy of making something with your own hands. In knowing the names of the people you serve. In the craft. In waking up excited to do the work, not just manage it.
Maybe the real ambition is not to grow faster, but to grow wiser. To grow in a way that lets you stay close to the soul of it. And maybe, in a world obsessed with more, that kind of business is the most radical, rare and special of all.
Way to make me tear up on public transit. Appreciate our little chats Abigail 💗