Chapter 5

PROFILES IN GROWTH

DID YOU EVER WISH you could step for a brief time from your world into someone else’s small-business reality, just to gauge how others go about making crucial decisions, find out what they do when they make mistakes, or learn something you could use to refine your approach to your own business? Here’s your chance. In this section, you’ll meet four big-vision small-business owners—Stephen Marcus, Tony Canaletich, Shelby Putnam Tupper, and Nina Ummel. The profiles are snapshots into their experiences with and insights gained from growth that confronted or eluded them at some point on their journeys as business owners. Since each business owner’s story is unique, the profiles vary in length and composition.

And yet there are similarities, too, in that the challenges they faced deepened their experience and knowledge base, demanded clarification of their vision and reasons for being in business, and altered their perspectives about growth. By sharing their stories, they help all big-vision small-business aspirants view their own enterprises and journeys with greater clarity, patience, inspiration, and wisdom.

Perseverance: The Journey of Stephen Marcus and AIRS International

No one knows the transformative power of unexpected challenges more than Stephen Marcus, founder and president of AIRS International, a San Diego-based fragrance products company. After years in the fragrance industry, Marcus started his business in 1989 and appeared on the Inc. 500 list of fast-growth companies in 1993-94, having taken the company from $100,000 to $3 million in revenues in just a few years. It was in the mid-1990s, fresh off several high-growth years, that things started to unwind for Marcus and AIRS.

“You reach a point where you’ve got a place, you start buying equipment and hiring more people, and things are just rolling,” says Marcus. “Then you decide you want to grow the company further, so you start hiring so-called professionals, and the people who helped you in your start-up phase start to seem antiquated in comparison.”

For Marcus, hiring a series of senior people from outside the business was one key element that sent the company into a tailspin from which he spent several years recovering. In addition to Marcus’s challenge with a growing staff that was increasingly in conflict, a glitch surfaced in the manufacturing process for a new product in which he’d made a significant investment. According to Marcus, the company consequently became vulnerable and fell prey to a less than ethical investor who, in short order, hired away several of his key staff members, along with the proprietary knowledge they possessed, and established a competing business. With the loss of knowledgeable employees and a subsequent lawsuit to prevent the new competitor from using its client lists and other confidential information, AIRS teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, and Marcus found himself at a crossroads. In the face of a severe financial and business crisis, Marcus said he opted to rise to the challenge, put together a plan, and go back to the basics of what made the company a success in its earlier years.

“The trouble with the rat race is when you win, you’re still a rat.”

LILY TOMLIN

“We’ve had a lot of expensive lessons about doing business,” says Marcus, “but we’ve gotten through that period and out of the resulting debt.” He adds that the things that made the company unique at the beginning, such as the inspired fragrances and the company’s mythology-infused and story-rich packaging, ended up too easily in the hands of competitors. “But our competitors made the mistake of thinking that what they were copying was just packaging, and AIRS is about more than that,” Marcus says of his vision of bringing people together in a greater appreciation of beauty and nature. According to Marcus, who now has the wisdom of hindsight, the experience wasn’t without a silver lining, however stiff the challenges.

“In retrospect, it’s clear that the crisis situation forced us to grow and get creative about what really distinguishes this company, and about who we really are,” says Marcus, who went on to rebuild his team, redesign the product packaging, launch the company’s Web site, and pursue new products and markets. While running the company isn’t without fresh challenges, AIRS products can be found in a growing number of retail outlets, and Marcus feels the company is more grounded in its originating vision.

Redemption: The Journey of San Francisco Renaissance

For Tony Canaletich, cofounder and president of San Francisco Renaissance, expansion was the logical path during the real estate boom of the 1980s. His niche-concept renovation construction company grew to well over 100 employees, and he and his two business partners found themselves executives in a large, thriving business. More than a decade later, Canaletich is happily leading a smaller team of 14 employees in a transformed company that once again focuses on its originating vision and superior craftsmanship on some of San Francisco’s oldest Victorian homes.

What happened to San Francisco Renaissance in the interceding decade? Nothing less than a total renovation of the business, a renewed appreciation for the advantages of a smaller, tightly managed organization, and an owner’s reac-quaintance with his founding vision for the company. “I started San Francisco Renaissance because I love these old houses in San Francisco and I hate seeing them torn down,” Canaletich says. “So that mission of restoring Victorian houses, for me, has a very high value. I wanted to stick to the purity of my vision, which was either to build something that would last for at least a hundred years or to work on something that needed restoration in order to last another hundred years.”

Like many business owners, Canaletich has the satisfaction and wisdom gained from persevering through a crisis that threatened the very existence of the business. A different feeling comes from being able to see and talk about such a challenge from the other side, having weathered the challenge a bit wiser and perhaps more resilient for his troubles, which started with the temptation to grow with an economic boom.

• EXPANSION

“It’s tempting to grow, because your gross sales are easy to expand. The numbers go up, and it’s exciting for everyone,” Canaletich says. “New people come in and everyone sees the gold mine, but what they don’t realize is that it’s temporary. I’ve learned that market booms don’t go on forever.” Canaletich and his two partners rode the wave, increasing to 150 employees at the firm’s numerical peak. And, as with many rapidly expanding companies, Canaletich saw what he now believes was a negative effect on the owners’ roles, as well as on the quality of the firm’s work, its organizational culture, and financial health. “We were doing so many jobs in the late 1970s that I didn’t even know about half of them,” he remembers. “We had supervisors, and I was basically an executive.”

As the company grew in size and his role changed from craftsman to company officer, Canaletich found himself more distant from his clientele and field employees and more focused on getting increasing numbers of large accounts. As the client list grew, the company’s mission—and stability—shifted. “We were going to be the biggest remodeling and reconstruction business in the Bay Area. That was our bottom-line goal,” Canaletich says.

For many people in our culture, looking in from the outside, such a fast-growing business, with its 150 employees and hefty client list, appears the ultimate success. But not for Canaletich, who saw quality and financial issues—as well as the marked departure from his founding purpose—as increasing problems. First, the company’s rapid growth required aggressive hiring. “When you’re hiring for expansion, the pressure is so monumental to fill those slots and get the numbers up that you make compromises,” he says regarding the fit between the employment candidates and the company’s core vision. With the quickly growing roster of new employees and clients, quality deteriorated.

“We were in such expansion mode that our quality and customer service started to suffer,” says Canaletich. “It’s really hard, with new personnel and an old system, to keep that system running at 100-percent optimal. You find yourself maxed in terms of key personnel time and resources, and when the economy finally started to contract, we had clients out there who weren’t as satisfied as they should have been; and those are the key clients you want when the business does slow down.”

“Also, when there’s a boom, you can borrow a lot of money to fund an expansion,” says Canaletich. “We were able to get loans based on the amount of business we had at the time, and we were able to borrow more money than we’d be able to pay off, personally, if the business became no longer viable.”

• CONTRACTION

When the construction industry flattened in the early 1980s, Canaletich and his partners found that their worst fear had come true. “We had all these construction loans out, but we were no longer doing several million dollars worth of business, and we were no longer able to pay the loans,” he remembers. “We had to default on some of the loans but were lucky enough to be able to work with our bankers, who gave us time to pay back the money we owed.”

The effects of the firm’s financial crisis unfortunately didn’t stop with renegotiating loan payment terms. Seeing that the company was on the brink of collapse, Canaletich decided to radically reorganize and return to the ideals upon which the business had been founded. A painful part of his reorganization plan was downsizing to 10 employees and having to go forward without the participation of his two business partners.

“It was a very devastating experience, and there was a great sense of shame,” he offers candidly. “But I also thought, ‘This could be an opportunity; this could be where I tailor this business to be more of a lifestyle than the expansion business it had become.’ I realized that wasn’t the lifestyle I wanted to live; it didn’t make me feel good. What makes me feel good is doing a job well, knowing the client, making sure the job’s done with a high standard of quality, and getting paid for it.”

• REDEMPTION

Canaletich found himself wanting to rebuild the business not from the perspective of size but with a strong grounding in its vision and a connection to how craftspeople had once operated: “When the craft system was first developed, one’s life and what one did for a living weren’t separate, and certainly weren’t separate from one’s spiritual life.”

With the gift of the wisdom gained from the crisis, Canaletich now caps expansion during building booms like the one San Francisco enjoyed during the 1990s, opting to add employees carefully to ensure a compatible devotion to high quality and the building craft. “If I allow myself no more than 25 percent expansion during a boom period, I can accommodate that with a minimal impact when the market contracts,” he says. “I’ve learned to be realistic when business is booming, meaning I have a target for how many jobs I can do and what my gross sales are going to be, and I don’t go beyond that. It’s really learning to say ‘no,’ and knowing and sticking to the limits required by my business to function at its peak.” And also learning, Canaletich says, not to succumb to the prevailing trends during a boom.

“It comes down to a choice you have to make, and not getting caught up in the mass hysteria,” he says. “There’s a momentum that seems to happen when the company is doing well and the economy is strong. It’s like the Gold Rush, with a lot of speculation. The companies that emerge through that have a very clear vision of their capacities and their limits, and of what they want to achieve, and they stick to it regardless of the mass hallucination.”

Renewal: The Journey of Shelby Designs & Illustrates

When the crisis at hand is the result of a blazing dot-com employment market and staff turnover, the stress and expense can be significant, and the whole experience can test the business owner’s resolve. For Shelby Putnam Tupper, founder of Shelby Designs & Illustrates in Oakland, California, a staffing crisis—during a period when demand for graphic designers was high and she was starting a family—took her to near breakpoint and back to basics. The result? A thorough spring cleaning and a renewed sense of momentum and enthusiasm for her six-person graphic design company.

Tupper’s firm produces award-winning work for an impressive array of clients ranging from wineries to health care systems and technology companies. She and her staff produce memorable visual images, and she’s very particular about the service provided by her firm, the work environment she creates, and the reputation that results. During her first seven years in business, she maintained a loyal staff with little turnover. Thanks to the dot-com boom with its frantic hiring and inflated salaries, she also survived a several-year period during which she saw more than 20 staff members come and go. That experience was the source both of extreme stress and of dedication to renewal. “I feel traumatized by the last several years,” she says. “But we’re still here, and we have a greater number of clients, the majority of whom are very, very happy. It was the skeleton beneath the business that needed repair.”

“We grow because we struggle, we learn and overcome.”

R. C. ALLEN

Tupper started her firm as a one-person, home-based business in 1989 and soon after hired her first employees: a part-time intern and a full-time multital-ented staff member. “All three of us were in the upstairs bedroom,” she remembers. “The living room was turned into a reception area, the dining room turned into a conference room, and it got so crazy we finally moved the business out of the house.”

Tupper maintained her group of three for another year, before a growing client list prompted several additional full-time hires, bringing her staffing roster to about six—a number she considers near optimal to maintain the variety of work and office atmosphere that is consistent with her vision. For a period of several years, business was constant, client referrals increased, and employees stayed with the firm for several years at a minimum. Then, in 1997, in the midst of the dot-com frenzy, several longtime staff members left the firm, starting a rumbling that would become a several-year avalanche.

“It’s been very awkward for me, because I’ve had to replace a lot of people in a relatively short period of time,” Tupper says. “Half of those people left for legitimate reasons, like a spouse got transferred. But you have that many transitions and you think, ‘Am I awful? Is my business terrible?’”

Tupper, intent on maintaining the same level of projects and staffing, started what has seemed like a nonstop recruitment effort. Looking for staff members who are dedicated, creative, and professional and fit with the firm’s small, highly creative and service-oriented organizational culture, Tupper found herself with limited prospects and worse—designers who would accept a job only to leave for another employer in short order. “You do your best during the interview, and I’ve got an interview form and a list of questions I ask, and I wouldn’t hire anyone who didn’t seem like a good match,” she says. “Yet I’d list four ads over a period of four weeks and get little in response. On paper, candidates would seem appropriate for an interview, but would arrive with green hair and a bone in their nose, which isn’t an image my clients would find acceptable.”

Tupper persisted in her recruitment efforts, replacing individuals who left and working nearly around the clock herself, despite having a toddler and a baby on the way in the middle of her staffing crisis. When the situation seemed endless and both her energy and resolve had started to wane, Tupper got a boost in the form of several former employees who returned to help her stem the flow and get the business back on stable ground. “It felt spiritual in nature,” Tupper says of the return of her first full-time employee at a time when she was most needed. Two other former employees, one who had been with the firm for five years and left to become a freelance designer, another who had worked part-time while going to school, also returned for temporary stints, allowing Tupper to craft a turnaround strategy and begin to stabilize the staffing situation.

With the help of her team, Tupper put together what she called her October Plan, which called for a reorganization of the 10-year-old business. As part of the program, Tupper and her employees would be reviewing and updating everything from technology systems to client lists and floor designs. For Tupper, a self-described antichange freak, the overhaul was not easy. “I don’t like change, and that’s not a good quality for a small-business owner. I can be fully aware that things need to happen and put them on the back burner. So, in this situation, I was very lucky,” says Tupper about having the assistance of a former employee who was more objective and less reticent about pointing out what needed to be overhauled.

“Having worked with me for several years at the start of this business, she knows I don’t like change, I know I can trust her, and we both know that change is necessary right now for our growth. In reviewing everything, we found all sorts of things that hadn’t been done properly. I’m just unloading cash on new people, new furniture, new technology. I’m looking at what’s wrong, and I’m changing it.”

To keep her focus on the highest priorities, Tupper also had to learn to delegate activities over which she’d maintained control. “I’m delegating administrative tasks that I’d held onto because I like to have control,” she says. “But I looked at it and saw that by holding onto those tasks so tightly, I ultimately didn’t have control at all. It’s killing me not to butt in and get focused on [office management details]. It shouldn’t matter to me, but it does. But I’m encouraging my staff to fix what’s broken and letting them do what they need to do. That’s all part of the plan.”

While staff members implement the administrative and operational transformation, Tupper gives her attention to business development, client service, and of course, recruitment and employee management. “I’ve had interviews with existing staff members too,” she says, “to discuss the changes and make sure they’re happy here. They’ve committed to riding out this wave, even though it means working extra hours; and in return, I’m remunerating them with extra vacation and other perks.”

Tupper also found that her staffing crisis, aside from being the catalyst for a thorough spring cleaning, brought her face-to-face with her original vision. “I started the business to have freedom, and that backfired. I found myself a slave to my business,” she remembers. “When I started, I was completely unencumbered, so working until two o’clock in the morning was fine. That was okay and rewarding then; it invigorated me. Now I’ve got two small children, and I’m pooped.” Tupper’s October Plan was created, she says, to renew the business and to help create some balance between the demands of business ownership and the other priorities in her life. “I want to make sure the business doesn’t collapse if I’m not here, and right now it does. My goal is to balance it out so I can have the flexibility, the freedom for which I started the business.”

“It’s tough,” she continues. “We’ve got a lot going on right now, and a lot changing. But it’s also very exciting. We’re updating technology, changing our floor plan, referring inappropriate business or smaller accounts, celebrating 12 years in business, and revisiting our founding vision. We’re really streamlining, and there’s a lot coming to fruition.”

Emergence: The Journey of Ummelina International Day Spa

Although containing quantitative growth is the perfect choice for some small-business owners while a larger business is more appropriate for others, there are times when a business owner finds that, through deliberate expansion, her vision unfolds and the business blossoms. While she may ultimately choose to cap quantitative growth, a certain amount of expansion allows the business to find its optimal size for manifesting her vision. Such was the case of Nina Ummel, whose Ummelina International Day Spa has more than doubled its payroll, from 25 to over 50 employees, and quadrupled its square footage since her 1998 decision to move to a new location and expand services.

“The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness intoour awareness.”

PIR VILAYAT KHAN

Ummel graduated from college intent on teaching inner-city children, a desire that took her from her Indiana farm home to Seattle. When offered positions in Washington’s rural areas, she decided that she’d have to create other options for her livelihood. Since her grand-mother was an herbalist, her father a farmer, and her sibling an entrepreneur, Ummel decided to parlay her interest in skin-care, wellness, and education into a career, and ultimately her own business. After five years of work in other salons, Ummel launched her own three-person salon, Ummelina Day Spa, in 1986.

“It was clear to me that the direction everyone was taking in skin care was different from what I envisioned,” says Ummel. “I had started using natural products, essential oils, and aromatherapy, which wasn’t even talked about then. And there were no happy, soothing environments that supported that approach, so I decided to create my own.”

After 10 years, Ummel found herself at a fork in the road: to maintain her business as it was, with about 20 employees in an increasingly cramped space and a resulting inability to take on additional clients, or to expand the business into a larger space that would accommodate a wider client base. She chose to expand. “It was a real debate. For 10 years, I had this little space and got to the point where I felt my wings were clipped. We just couldn’t grow anymore. I saw expansion as a way to polish my gem,” says Ummel. “I debated whether to stay fairly small, because I was concerned about finding enough high-quality, qualified employees required for an expanded business. Instead, I decided to have more space to allow people to move freely, create an environment, and allow more treatments. I opted to look for new space and grow.”

• EXPANSION CHALLENGES

As is the case for many business owners who choose to expand their business, Ummel faced challenges that preceded her staff recruitment concerns: finding an appropriate commercial space and gaining the financing required for her plan. She spent two years searching for a new location in Seattle’s increasingly tight commercial real-estate market; while she searched for space, leasing costs in the city tripled.

“It came down to four months before my lease was up, and I still didn’t have a space,” she remembers. “I couldn’t look for a space on the street level, not for a service business. My ideal was to have my retail area at street level and my services either upstairs or down below street level. But every time I’d find a space, the big guys, the national chains, would come in and just blow away my offer. No matter how much the landlord liked me or my concept, the chains seemed like a more secure choice to them.”

Ummel finally found a space two streets from her original location, but financing remained a challenge. While she ultimately obtained an SBA loan, the search wasn’t an easy one. “Even though I felt very established in Seattle, with 10 years of experience and success with my business, the bankers really didn’t understand what a spa did,” she says. “I really had to take them by the hand, take them through the business, show them the figures, explain what we did.”

The larger banks in the city continued to deny her loan applications—even the bank with which she had a 10-year relationship. “They told me that they might consider it if I had a manufacturing business, but not for the spa,” recalls Ummel. At another bank, Ummel was told that the small business department was really just a hand-holding operation for minorities and women while those parties looked for another source of funding. At yet another bank, the loan officer told her they didn’t understand her business and wouldn’t take the chance. Ummel was finally referred to a more community-oriented bank branch that might better understand the needs of her small business.

“I had to go outside of the city to find a loan,” she says. “So it was almost a matter of what philosophy the bank had, with many of the city bank branches being larger as a result of mergers and having offices 25 floors above the street. There was a big difference, for me, between the community bank and the big, downtown corporate bank. The bank was used to loaning money to small businesses, and didn’t need all the protocol that the larger bankers required. Large, urban banks just didn’t understand small business, and they just didn’t get what a service business was about.”

From a financial perspective, the expansion was more expensive than Ummel anticipated. “The cost of moving, settling in, finding the right employees, training people—it took more money and more time,” she says. She found that costs expanded beyond the obvious, due to inefficiencies following the move and while the company was growing. In addition, making financial projections for the business was completely different since she could no longer use historical, pre-expansion numbers to project future costs. She also found that, due to higher costs for space, her profit margins decreased.

A neighboring hot-dog stand proved to be one of Ummel’s frustrations at the spa’s new address, primarily because the smell of boiling hot dogs was incompatible with the environment she was trying to create. The owner of the stand was supposed to have vacated the spot prior to her arrival, and she was to have had that space as part of her lease. But the hot dog vendor stayed. Ummel and her group, trying to make light of a challenging situation, nicknamed the business Spa Dogs. But less than one year after moving to the new location, she found herself faced with a surprise—and another challenge. The hot-dog vendor suddenly relinquished the space, forcing her to assume responsibility for the extra square footage or risk having an even more aromatic neighbor. She signed another lease, expanding her square footage, and her risk, well beyond her plan.

“Many people think that business owners are protected from financial misfortune if the company is incorporated, but you’re not. You sign everything,” says Ummel, referring to the risks business owners take in pursuit of their dreams. Like many of her peers, Ummel found the added risk level inspired her toward greater mastery. “Fortunately, I don’t think I’m here to learn the effects of failure. That’s a very powerful motivator!”

• THE MYTH OF MANAGED GROWTH

One of the things Ummel heard from her lender, among others, is that the quantitative growth she planned was fraught with peril. “People talked to me about managing growth, how that would be my biggest challenge, and I had no idea what they were talking about,” she says. “Now I do. It’s like a whole different business.”

For Ummel, as for other business owners, quantitative growth challenges fall into several key categories: people, systems, and culture. First, in growing her staff from 20 to over 50 employees in eighteen months, Ummel noticed distinct changes in her employees and in her own role as the group’s leader. “I’ve always loved change, and didn’t realize that most people don’t,” she says. “There’s a very clear disorientation that occurred, even in those very qualified employees, as a result of the move to a larger space and staff. We were so crammed in the old space, and now we look for people and can’t find them! Everything was in a different place, so finding things was a challenge. Things just don’t run as smoothly.”

Ummel and her group had to adapt to the larger space and the growing staff and client roster while simultaneously creating new systems for working more efficiently in the revamped business model. Whereas they’d once used only two computers to run the business, they now had many computers, a new network, and new software that required working out a fair number of bugs. “Just the amount of time it takes to computerize functions that we’d been doing on paper has added to the challenge,” she says. “We’re very close to moving solely to the automated functions, but the biggest concern is that, with our scheduling and record keeping, that’s where our money is. If it goes down without a backup, it’ll kill us. So we’ve been duplicating computer and paper for six months until we’re confident with the system.”

Ummel also found that her familylike group, by doubling in size, had become more factionalized. “Former employees started regaling [new ones with] the good old days, and I noticed that, with people in positions of new responsibility, a more corporate structure started appearing, and people started worrying about who was above whom,” she says. “I didn’t want to allow that kind of work environment.” So Ummel sought out a new vision of her organizational culture and found a new metaphor for Ummelina Day Spa: “It’s a village now, a tribe instead of a family, and there are many families within the tribe. So that’s how I’m running my business: not as a corporation, but as a tribe.”

Having studied herbalism and tribal concepts, Ummel took a closer look at how tribes work and drew inspiration from that to find a new language and build a new culture at Ummelina. Treatment therapists became guides, reinforcing the experience of being taken on a journey at the spa. And Ummel adopted a circular, rather than hierarchical, structure. “It’s a circle, rather than a pyramid,” she explains. “Everyone is in the outer circle of guides, and we have an inner circle we call the Council. You have the chief and his or her council who have the decision-making responsibility within the tribe. And I created a group called scouts, who look ahead and scout out what’s happening. The families within the tribe are divided up into different licensing areas or environments within the spa, and each family has its scout, who talks with the people within his particular group and brings any issues to the Council for discussion.”

And the staff’s response to this new cultural model? “Everyone comes in with this concept of the boss being at the top and all these people in between. They’re programmed like that, whether from school, family, or other work environments where authority figures are the bad guys, the ones who tell you what to do,” Ummel says. “So having to figure things out on their own and do them, sometimes that works better than other times. It just takes constant focus and attention, guidance all the time and reiterating that this is how we do things here.”

Ummel says she learned a long time ago that not everyone is a right fit for her business. “Some people are better at understanding the concept and working within it than others, but that’s what makes the decision of who should be here and who shouldn’t,” she says. “One of the pieces of advice I most remember when I was a new employer was from someone who said, ‘Nina, you’ve planted your garden, and you have to weed it.’ And you do. There are some people that have to be removed so others can grow and your garden is a healthy one. I know that the right employees only walk through the door when the door is open and other people have left, creating space for them.”

To maintain a positive work environment and keep right-fit employees on staff, Ummel offers some standard benefits plus those that are unique to her environment. She offers free classes to employees and clients, and the former Spa Dog space has become a soothing Tea Spa that clients and staff members can use to relax, rejuvenate, host special events, and have educational conversations with the resident herbalist.

• FINDING SUPPORT DURING THE GROWTH SPURT

Ummel has an advisory council that includes one of her investors and a retired banker, and she meets in person or talks by phone with them when necessary. “They’ve been a tremendous support, sometimes just an emotional support when it gets really scary,” she says. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember what you’ve accomplished, which to other people seems pretty incredible. But to me, I’m still trying to create the best. So my advisers are good at reminding me what I’ve done and what’s normal, since I can be very critical of my own business.”

Ummel says she also gets support from employees, in the form of feedback on the work environment she’s creating, and from her clients. “Hearing from our clients what Ummelina’s done for them, what changes we’ve helped them make in their lives, and how much they enjoy coming in, how much healthier they are and how we’re a part of their celebrations, that’s a tremendous source of support,” Ummel says. “So anytime it feels like it’s overwhelming, just get around your clients more and listen!”

• MAKING THE CHOICE TO EXPAND

So what advice would Ummel pass along to other business owners considering quantitative growth for their companies? Not that it will be easy, and not that it’s the only sure bet, but that each business owner has to follow his own heart.

“You have to be quiet enough to hear what you’re really supposed to do. As business owners, we have the power to make those decisions,” says Ummel. “We can ask ourselves whether we really want to take those risks to grow, how much more time we are willing to spend, and what kind of risks we’re willing to take financially. In facing the decision, you learn what it’s like to be an entrepreneur, that you have to know everything or learn everything, that you have to be willing to do it all, and that you have to sacrifice time that would otherwise go to other, often personal, things. You can easily lose a part of yourself.”

“It would be easy, in growing as much as we have, for some people to feel desperate,” Ummel continues, “where you get to the point where you have so many people asking for your services, and you need extra people to provide the services. But it’s never a good idea to grow just because you’re desperate, where you’re hiring people who may not be right for your environment. It’s better sometimes to call and reschedule clients so that when they do come in, they get the quality service that your reputation has been built on.”

Creating a Personal Definition for Growth

In reviewing these stories, and others, about the choices business owners make regarding growth, we can see that there are advantages and disadvantages in staying compact and concentrated or choosing the path of expansion. Ultimately, the choice depends heavily on the vision and preferences of the business owner: what’s most important to him, personally? What does she want her role to be? What’s motivating him to add employees, clients, or space in the first place? What’s most important about the business? What differentiates it from others? What’s the relationship between the size of the business and its products or services?

The answers to these questions may evolve, too, with the business itself. At one point, it may be appropriate to contain the business’s growth. Two years later, in response to new opportunities to add products or services, increased size may be required. Perhaps the most important action a business owner can take regarding growth is to free himself from the limitation of thinking that there’s only one way and one time to grow and to adopt instead an appreciation for the evolutionary nature of the business and himself.

The rest of this book provides forays into three avenues for qualitative growth—vision, right relationship, and wisdom and mastery—that a big-vision small-business owner pursues to enhance the meaning and value of her journey and distinguish herself from both large-company and small-business peers.