There is a choice that all business owners and leaders have to make sooner or later, and it may be the most important one you’ll ever face. That choice has to do with how far and how fast you want your company to grow. No one is going to warn you about it, or prepare you for it, or tell you at what moment you really have to make a decision one way or the other.
Chances are your business advisors will be encouraging you to grow as fast and as far as you can. The outside world will be sending you similar signals. We all want to be successful, after all, and our visions of success are inevitably shaped to a large extent by examples in the media, the spirit of the times, and the common wisdom about what’s possible. If you constantly hear about the need to grow or die, if the only companies being celebrated, or even taken seriously, are the biggest or the fastest-growing, you may never even think to ask about options other than growing your business as much as you can and as quickly as you can.
Nor can you necessarily count on your friends and family – those who really do have your best interests at heart – to point out that you might find more happiness by choosing another path. They’re probably not aware of any alternative. Like most people, they assume that getting big is the whole idea. But there is, in fact, an alternative, and the payoff for choosing the less-traveled path can be huge. It can affect every aspect of your business – from your relationships with the people you work with, to the control you have over your time and your future, to the impact you have on the world around you, to the satisfaction and fulfillment you get out of your professional life. For proof, you need look no further than the companies that I call Small Giants.
Small Giants
Chances are you already know some Small Giants. They’re different from the norm. They don’t fit comfortably into any of the three categories we normally put businesses in: small, getting big and big. Some are tiny; others are relatively large. Most are growing, often in unconventional ways, but a few have chosen not to grow at all. Size and growth rate aside, the Small Giants do have certain characteristics in common. To begin with, they are all determined to be the best at what they do. Most of them have been recognized for excellence by independent bodies inside and outside their industries. Not coincidentally, they have all had the opportunity to raise a lot of capital, grow very fast, do mergers and acquisitions, expand geographically, and generally follow the well-worn route of other successful companies. Yet they have chosen not to focus on revenue growth or geographical expansion, pursuing instead other goals that they consider more important.
These companies also have another characteristic in common – one that’s harder to define. Gary Erickson, the founder and CEO of Clif Bar, calls it mojo. I think of it as the corporate equivalent of charisma. If a leader has charisma, people want to follow him or her. If a company has mojo, people want to be associated with it. They want to buy from it, sell to it, work for it, read books and articles about it and wear its t-shirts and caps. Think of Apple or Harley-Davidson. The question is: Where does this mojo come from?
High Standards
It would take a whole book to answer that question, and I just happen to have written one – Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big (Portfolio). In it, I look closely at 14 Small Giants and identify the things they all do that give them their mojo. What comes through are the extraordinarily high standards that Small Giants set for themselves. And yet these are standards that other companies can aspire to and achieve. Although few startups have even a remote chance of becoming the next Google, Apple or Facebook, there is nothing to stop any business from becoming the Small Giant of its industry, provided the leader has the vision, the desire, the knowledge and the commitment to make it happen.
And that’s good news for the rest of us, because the more Small Giants there are, the better off we will all be.
Bo Burlingham is an editor-at-large of Inc. magazine and the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big.
