“If you're not growing, you're dying.” Really?

You've heard that line a thousand times, probably from people who've never actually run anything.

"If you're not growing, you're dying."

I've never been entirely convinced.

Let me qualify that, because I'm certainly not against growth. I've spent much of my working life building businesses and helping other people build theirs. I love ambitious founders. I love seeing businesses succeed. And I have absolutely nothing against making money.

But there's a question I think we ask far too rarely:

What do you actually want the growth for?

For a long time, I didn't ask that question at all. More revenue, more people, more countries, more everything - that was simply what successful businesses did and, if I'm being fair to my younger self, I was pretty good at it. What I hadn't worked out was whether the definition of success I was chasing was actually mine.

Which brings me to a book I've just read.

Small Giants

Small Giants, by Bo Burlingham, is about businesses whose owners made a conscious decision about what sort of company they actually wanted to build.

That sounds obvious when you write it down. I'm not sure it is.

Most of us absorb an assumption somewhere along the way that a successful business grows, and then grows some more. You reach £10m and aim for £20m. You employ 100 people and start thinking about 200. Someone asks where the business will be in five years and, almost automatically, the answer involves a bigger number.

Burlingham writes about founders who questioned that assumption. Some chose not to grow in the conventional sense. Others grew substantially. What interested me was that they had thought about what mattered to them - their people, their customers, the quality of what they did, the lives they wanted to lead - and built their business around that, rather than the other way round.

Burlingham describes it as them  protecting their ‘mojo.’ It's not a very scientific word, but I know exactly what he means.

And reading it made me think about Turbosound.

A lesson I didn't understand at the time

I built Turbosound into something I was enormously proud of. Pink Floyd chose our

loudspeakers, we won Queen's Awards, and it was part of Edge Technology Group, of which I was MD. We had around a hundred people working across three factories with offices in New York and Tokyo.

Eventually, the business was sold and I moved on.

Years later, some former colleagues contacted me. Turbosound's new owners had put it up for sale and asked whether I could raise the money to buy the company back. I said yes - before doing anything resembling due diligence.

I loved Turbosound. It had been a huge part of my life, and my heart completely overruled my head. When I eventually got inside the business, I discovered it was in much worse shape than I'd been led to believe.

Fortunately we'd over-funded the deal, which probably saved us. We had enough cash to do a turnaround and, eventually, we sold the company again. Nobody lost a penny. Nobody made anything either.

At the time, I felt like a failure.

That's the bit I find interesting now, looking back. The business had survived. We'd protected jobs. We'd sorted out a very difficult situation. Investors got their money back. There were plenty of perfectly reasonable ways I could have looked at what we'd achieved but I didn't, because my scoreboard was money and growth, and the numbers hadn't gone up. Therefore I'd failed.

It took me rather longer than it should have to realise that perhaps the problem wasn't the result. Perhaps it was the scoreboard.

Then, in 2016, everything changed

I was at home on my own when the right side of my body stopped working. I managed to call an ambulance and spent the next 10 days in hospital while the doctors tried to establish what was happening. At one point I asked what the worst-case scenario was. The doctor was very straight with me. It was unlikely, he said, but I might not leave the hospital alive.

There are moments in life when all the stuff you thought was terribly important suddenly becomes rather less important. That was one of mine.

I was lying in a hospital bed, unable to move my right arm or leg, with no idea how much function I was going to recover. I had plenty of time to think about the businesses I'd built, the money I'd made and lost, the decisions I'd taken, my family, my relationships - and what on earth I wanted to do with the rest of my life if I was fortunate enough to have one.

While there I read Firms of Endearment. It looked at businesses that had achieved sustained commercial success while caring deeply about their employees, customers, communities and the wider world. And something in it hit me very hard: love and profit weren't mutually exclusive.

Until then, I think some part of me had assumed that business success required a certain hardness. You competed. You grew. You won. You measured the result financially and got on with the next thing. Yet here were businesses demonstrating that you could care deeply about people and purpose and still build something commercially successful.

I remember thinking that, if I made it out of hospital, I wanted to do business differently - not necessarily less ambitiously, just differently.

Thankfully, it turned out to be 'only' a stroke, from which I've made an excellent recovery.

Over time, my epiphany about doing business differently became a strong belief in The Quadruple Bottom Line: Purpose, People, Planet and Profit. All four matter, and yes, profit is absolutely part of it - without profit you don't have a sustainable business, however noble your intentions. But I no longer believe profit, or revenue, or headcount, or valuation, or any of the other numbers we like to compare, can tell you whether you've built a successful business.

Only you can decide that.

10 years later…

…along comes Small Giants.

Different book, different starting point but, for me, remarkably similar territory.

It also made me think about one of my clients. They'd built a genuinely good business and were doing what most founders naturally do: planning the next stage of growth. More people, more overhead, more revenue. So we started talking about what they actually wanted - not what the business could become, but what they wanted it to become. There's quite a difference.

Their answer, eventually, was a smaller business. They deliberately reduced headcount and overhead, and today the business is more profitable. But there's another measure I suspect matters even more: by their own account, they’re happier.

For another founder the answer could be completely different. They might want to build a £100m company, employ hundreds of people, expand around the world and eventually float it. Wonderful. Go for it.

I'm certainly not suggesting small is better than big. I'm suggesting you decide which  you actually want.

I wish I'd understood that sooner. Because there isn't a right size for your business, and there isn't a universally correct definition of success - yet we're surrounded by other people's definitions: investors, competitors, business books, LinkedIn, the media, and sometimes the younger version of ourselves who picked a target years ago and never stopped to ask why.

So perhaps there are just two questions worth asking.

If your business doubled in size tomorrow, would you actually be happier, or just busier?

And: what would success, on your own terms, actually feel like?

I know my answer now.

It only took me about 40 years to work it out.

If it would be useful for an outside perspective to help you clarify what success would look like for you, do get in touch. We can work it through together!