When Is Enough, Enough?

Why more isn't always the best measure of business growth.

Grow your business.

It's practically a command when you own one. More customers, more revenue, more employees, more everything. Whatever you did last year, the assumption is that this year should be bigger.

But lately I've been wondering: When is enough, enough?

I'm not asking because I've lost my ambition. Actually, I'm asking because I've had some interesting opportunities come my way lately.

That's a good problem to have. It's also still a problem.

Favorite Daughter is a small consulting business. There's me with some fantastic administrative and social media support (shout out to Andrea and Alyssa from DCA Virtual). So when a new opportunity comes along, saying yes isn't as simple as deciding whether I want the work. I have to think about what that yes means for everything else I'm already doing.

It has me asking a bigger question: Am I trying to build a bigger business or a better one?

I don't entirely know the answer yet. What I do know is that “more” isn't specific enough to be a business strategy.

So What Counts as Growth?

Revenue is the obvious answer. And let's not pretend revenue doesn't matter. We are running businesses, not expensive hobbies. We need to make money.

But I've become much more interested in the things that don't show up on the top line.

These last two years, for example, I took vacations. Real ones. I didn't spend the entire time checking email or worrying that everything would fall apart while I was gone. Nearly ten years into owning a business, that felt like growth.

So does getting clearer about the work I want to do and the clients I can help the most. So does having better systems. And yes, so does making more money without automatically filling every available hour with more work.

None of that is particularly sexy. You probably won't see a breathless LinkedIn announcement that says, “Thrilled to share that I've finally stopped saying yes to work I don't want!” Although maybe you should.

Bigger Isn't Automatically Better

Somewhere along the way, we've made “scaling” the assumed destination for every business.

I've spent a lot of my career around independent businesses, and I've seen what happens when growth becomes the goal instead of a means to something else. The restaurant gets another location because the first one is successful, or the product that built a loyal following in a handful of stores suddenly needs national distribution.

Sometimes that's exactly the right move.

Other times, you wake up running a business that's bigger, more complicated, and not necessarily more profitable (or enjoyable) than the one you had before.

And, of course, there's the modern version of the American dream: grow it enough that someone with a private equity fund decides your perfectly good business would be even better with more debt and fewer people. But that's a blog for another day.

Growth has a cost. It asks something of the owner, the team, and the business itself. That's not an argument against it. It's an argument for knowing why you're pursuing it.

Are You Growing the Business You Actually Want?

This is the question I've been sitting with. Businesses evolve and so do the people who own them.

The business you wanted five years ago might not be the one you want today. Sometimes that happens so gradually you don't even notice it. You add an offering because customers keep asking for it or you take on a certain kind of client because they're willing to pay. One perfectly reasonable decision follows another, and suddenly your job looks very different from the one you originally created for yourself.

You can become very successful at building something you no longer particularly want.

That's why I think there's value in looking at the business you have now before you start making plans to grow it.

Where is the business working really well? Where does it still require too much of you? What have you outgrown? And if you weren't worried about what you're supposed to do next, what would you actually want next?

I keep coming back to that last one.

Enough Doesn't Mean You're Done

This is probably the uncomfortable part. We tend to hear “enough” as settling. Especially in business.

But knowing what enough looks like doesn't mean you've stopped being ambitious. It means you've decided what you're ambitious for.

A few of my business owner friends have participated in the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. One of the questions they've been asked is whether they see themselves continuing to own and lead their business, growing it to eventually sell, or bringing in investors. Not everyone knows the answer when they start the program.

And why should they? When you're busy running a business, it's easy to assume that the next step is simply more of what you're already doing. But those are very different paths, and the choices you make today can determine which ones are available to you tomorrow.

Next year marks 10 years of Favorite Daughter. That's a milestone I want to celebrate, but it's also making me think about what the next decade might look like. There are opportunities I want to pursue, and yes, I want the business to make more money. But there are also things about the business I've built that I don't want to lose in pursuit of growth.

I don't have a perfectly tidy answer yet. And maybe I don't need one right now.

As I start thinking about 2027, I'm realizing that the groundwork isn't just about setting revenue goals or figuring out how to bring in more clients. It's about deciding what I want this business to become.

Not just asking how much Favorite Daughter can grow. But asking what kind of growth will make this a better business and a better business for me to own?