Why I don’t want to grow my business

I’m always looking to grow. Personally, creatively, as a father.

But there’s one kind of growth that I don’t want: that’s scaling-up my business.

So when a woman reached out to me last week and said she could help my business scale to $1m, I said: ‘no thanks’.

In business, growth is drummed into us from day one. When I was running a radio studio business in the late '90s, the expectation was that upward growth would be forecasted every quarter. The board would accept nothing less.

Now, older and wiser - and celebrating 24 years of running my own business - I’ve come to realise that growing bigger is a headache I don’t need.

Our world is all about relationships. That’s why Zoë and I decided we would cap the number of business leaders we work with one-to-one. It’s important we retain our intimacy. We can respond rapidly and we’re immersed in their world. We’re not spreading ourselves too thin.

So I’m not trying to scale my business. I don’t want to hire collaborators, I’m not seeking to win loads of new clients. I feel we’ve grown into the right size and shape of our business. I’ve spent years building, developing, honing. That’s where we’re at, and it’s how we want it.

For us, small is just right. We don’t sell cans of beans. We trade on chemistry and intimacy. You can’t scale that.