Bigger Doesn’t Mean Better: What Healthy Growth Actually Looks Like

Growth is often measured by bigger numbers, but a growing business is not necessarily a stronger business.

In this special compilation episode, Christina May revisits conversations with Mark Flavin, Spencer Teel, Lacey Snyder, Jeff Schwartz, and Shane Warren about what healthy growth looks like and what it takes to build a business that can handle it.

They share stories of managing capacity, growing in a controlled way, expanding around customer needs, staying lean, and preparing for the challenges that come with scale. From making sure growth does not overwhelm people and operations to maintaining financial discipline when good years turn into bad ones, these conversations reveal a common lesson: healthy growth is about becoming stronger, not simply becoming bigger.

Cold Open:

Mark Flavin: So the big question is not just how do I grow, but how do I grow smart, and how do I grow within the realms of my financial capability as well.

Christina May: I don't measure success sometimes by the headcount. That's not how I measure success.

MF: Just because you get more revenue doesn't mean you're going to have more profit.

Jeff Schwartz: It's just a matter of how many zeroes are after your problem.

Spencer Teel: Organic and very controlled and healthy growth for the company.

Shane Warren: You don't have to be the smartest person in the room. You have to be the most disciplined person in the room.

Chapter 1: Grow Smart, Not Just Big

Welcome back to The Breakout Moment. In business, growth is usually treated like a scorecard. More revenue, more employees, more locations. Bigger must mean better.

But growth only works when the business can actually support it. More work can mean more opportunity, but it also means more people, more expenses, and more capacity to manage.

So what does healthy growth actually look like? For Mark Flavin, the question became less about how to grow and more about how to grow smart.

TBM #6 | The Long Game: How Manifesting Talent Changed Everything with Mark Flavin

Mark Flavin: I had already had a lot of initial processes and procedures in place, but the biggest thing was when you start a company, and you're a family-owned business, the hard part is how do you scale to that next level? You're a $3 or $4 million company, $5 million company. And you're doing great work, and people are calling you to do more work, but you can only take on so much that your company's growth is going to allow you to.

So the big question is not just how do I grow, but how do I grow smart, and how do I grow within the realms of my financial capability as well.

CM: That's a risk because, I mean, that's what I think is the hardest part. Even the same thing for us. We're a service-based business. More work means more people. It's just the way it is. You can take on more work, but if you aren't really allocating those resources, you're going to wear out the great people you have.

We get into these horrible middle spots where it's not quite enough work to bring on more people. And those are really painful moments. And there's just these certain, I feel like, cliffs of scale. It sounds great to scale. That's buzzy to say, you know. But I always say to people, too, I don't measure success sometimes by the headcount. That's not how I measure success. You know, there's a reason it's more money, more problems.

MF: One of the guys that I worked with in the past used to tell me that there are different levels of growth. And when you get to, say, $20 million, your profitability is great. This is 20 years ago.

CM: The numbers are all different and are different for different industries, too. I mean, I think what you were saying, the $3, $4 million company for a different industry, that's the $300,000 to $400,000 company. It's a big difference between that and a million for them. So, in a completely different industry, it's the same break points.

MF: It is. Knowing when to bring people on so that you can scale is very tough. It takes a lot of thought, and you have to look at your vision and where do you want to be. Just because you get more revenue doesn't mean you're going to have more profit.

We looked at that as a whole, and I knew for a fact that if I was to grow and scale, I had to bring more people into the company that could handle those phone calls and technical capabilities and manage the field. And that's where Tommy came in. Tommy's ability to handle general contractors and handle that side of the business for me, while I could focus on the financial aspect, estimating, administration, and the project management portion, really kind of balanced the company out rather than constantly putting fires out and just waiting until the next fire happened.

That was a must. I knew that that was the way that we would be successful.

Chapter 2: Healthy Growth is Controlled

Growth itself isn't the problem. Growing without a clear idea of where you're going is. Spencer Teel has nearly doubled his company's revenue, but the word he uses to describe that growth isn't fast. It's controlled.

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Spencer Teel: So, to rewind a bit, we've had a strategic plan, and we're an EOS company, inspired through Jim Collins' book Good to Great.

CM: EOS, for anyone who is not in the know, it's basically an operating system for a business.

ST: Yep. So what comes with that is a really foundational strategic plan. You've got a 10-year, a three-year, and a one-year plan. But putting that on paper without descriptive detail, with just numbers and revenue goals or employee headcount, it doesn't provide a lot of meaning. So, again, using this vision as a bit more descriptive detail really helps create that spark.

CM: So real quick, you guys have had so much growth since then. Talk about the growth that you had since implementing this.

ST: We had 65 people on the day that we issued that first vision back in 2022. We had booked about $55 million in revenue in '21. And that next year, it shot up another $20 million. And this year we're expected to do over $100 million with, we've got 93 people right now.

So gradually, it's been, I won't say meteoric growth in any way, but organic and very controlled and healthy growth for the company.

Chapter 3: Grow Capability, Not Just Headcount

And growth doesn't always have to mean building a bigger team. Lacey Snyder's company has expanded into entirely new services by following customer needs, while staying intentional about overhead and keeping the business small and nimble.

TBM #8 | The Power of Adjacent Markets with Lacey Snyder

Lacey Snyder: You know, we started in the lending space, residential to commercial, added fleet, maritime, aviation eventually. But our big breakout, our big thing we never saw coming, was when a client needed a structural steel building, couldn't find it, couldn't find where to get it from. And we were like, okay, whatever you need, we'll figure it out. And then we were having some issues finding it.

So what we ended up doing was doing the research, finding somewhere where we could wholesale from. There's plenty of dealers, but there's no wholesalers. We basically created a partnership, and now we can provide those buildings. So that is a wild way to go from lending to something else, because lending is boring. Even if you have a ton of verticals, if you're not going through the process of purchasing an oil tanker or a commercial building, it is kind of boring.

And this just really did give us a whole new life and excitement about our business, just adding something in. We're still doing all those things. They're still great. We're still very successful. But this just added something so much more fun and different.

CM: Wow. And you know, that inspiration came from a customer. A customer need.

LS: Absolutely a customer. Absolutely. As does everything. I think that with every good business, you have to be open-minded. So if you hear something and you're like, wait a minute, I think I can do that. I can fill that need. I can figure that out. Adding it certainly doesn't hurt.

CM: Have you ever run into, as you've grown the company, this perception of size? What I mean by that is, you say the word enterprises. Enterprises sounds...

LS: Sexy and big.

CM: Big. Hundreds of people, right?

LS: Of course.

CM: We're not.

LS: We're not.

CM: We have big impact, but we're smaller teams.

I always judge when someone is very vocal about headcount, and I'm just like, you just have a lot of overhead. That's not my definition of success.

LS: Amen. Our office is small. I am a Frugal Fanny. We are in the process of building another room in our office, and I am on Wayfair, I am in Ollie's. I am the most frugal person, so we don't have a lot of that overhead.

Chapter 4: More Zeroes, Same Problems

Of course, sometimes getting bigger is exactly what the business needs. Jeff Schwartz grew his company from three employees to more than 100. But as he learned, growth doesn't necessarily make problems disappear. Sometimes it just adds more zeroes to them.

TBM #11 | Building Culture and Creating Community with Jeff Schwartz

Jeff Schwartz: You know, as I look back on our growth, next year we'll be in business for 25 years, and we have been profitable every year of those 25. We've never really hit a bump in the road and had a tremendous off-year or a year where we lost money or it wasn't profitable.

When I think back on what has propelled our growth to over 100 employees now from the three we started with, and probably over about 55 trucks, one of my many business advisors, mentors, and people brought to me a group called Vistage.

Being in a peer advisory group of some kind has really helped me have a sounding board for a company like ours that doesn't have a board of directors. It's just a place where, as an owner, you're able to unload things and talk to people about problems. I find more and more it's less about the type or the sector of the industry, of businesses, and the problems are so much more common than you think.

CM: One hundred percent. And it doesn't matter the size either. I can have a smaller team, same problem that you have with a larger team. Someone who has 500 employees is going to have the same problem.

JS: Absolutely.

CM: It's just a different scale of the problem.

JS: I used to tell people as I was mentoring people along the way, it's just a matter of how many zeroes are after your problem. The problems are really the same problems. It's just the size and scale. And it doesn't mean that the owner has less stress or fewer headaches than the bigger company.

Chapter 5: Build For Staying Power

Which brings us to another way to measure a healthy business: how well can it handle the bad years?

After living through a major downturn, Shane Warren became more focused on flexibility, cash, and financial discipline.

TBM #20 | Shane Warren on Resilience, Risk, and Building to Last

Shane Warren: I mean, the biggest thing, and I think it applies to the personal as well, is the technical accounting term, fixed expenses. Basically it means don't go buy that big old car, big house, because you're making money during an upturn of the market, because a downturn is going to come.

CM: Yep. It's inevitable.

SW: It's inevitable. I've seen so many of the companies that were just making money hand over fist during the building boom, and now they're out of business. So I told myself, don't ever let myself get in that situation.

It's hard, you know, because you work so hard and you want to get some nicer things, or always thought you were going to have those things. I mean, every year it slipped for me. I want to buy this nice watch when I'm 30. I want to buy it when I'm 40. I'm going to buy it when I'm 50. I still don't have that watch.

CM: You still don't have that watch?

SW: I can't get myself to do it. Because I'm afraid, symbolically, if I do it, then I'm giving in to allowing myself to get ruled by these things that are fixed expenses, or not having cash, available cash on hand, to stomach the downturn or to navigate or mitigate the downturns that are inevitably coming.

So when COVID hit, I'm ready. You're not going to get me again. I'm now that older guy that was saying, how did they let that happen to them when they have already been through recessions before? So I'm like, all right, I'm ready. But it didn't really hit the commercial industry.

CM: No. Not like hospitality. Not like a lot of travel, hospitality services, restaurants. They're not even close. Not even close, you guys.

SW: So ours is coming. Who knows, maybe in the next five years or so, but I think it's coming. So really just minimizing those fixed expenses and establishing more variable costs instead of fixed costs. Meaning that when you want to pull the lever up and ramp things up, you can up those variable costs, or then pull them back because things are getting tighter.

So focusing on that. And then, at the end of the day, like Warren Buffett, it's like, you don't have to be the smartest person in the room. You have to be the most disciplined person in the room. I have that on my wall in my office because that really speaks to me, of just having financial discipline and fiscal discipline. If you do that and you're always focused on that, then I think you'll always be able to navigate a downturn or any kind of bad moment.

CM: I think you could take that advice and even pull it out further. Every great athlete talks about not just showing up, but showing up consistently. I think a really great example is whether it's Tom Brady, there's others where they talk about, if you really look at my stats, I'm not that much more outstanding than anybody else. I'm more outstanding because I consistently tried more than everybody else did.

Grow With Intention

None of these stories say that you shouldn't grow. They say growth needs a reason behind it. More revenue isn't automatically more profit, and more employees aren't automatically more success, and a bigger company isn't automatically a better one.

The better question might be: are you building a business that's stronger because it grew?