The case for anti-scale.

A consultant at a mastermind was doing $1.3M a year and wanted to 'scale.' The room's advice surprised him.

I was at a mastermind last month with twelve other online entrepreneurs.

To kick off the event, we went around the room sharing a little bit about ourselves, our businesses, and some of our biggest wins and challenges. One of the guys at the event was doing around $1.3M a year as a consultant helping businesses install AI processes to work more efficiently. A young woman was building a business that helped creators rank higher for AEO (answer engine optimization) and had grown to a little more than $900K per year in revenue. Both were solo, both were extremely profitable, and both seemed stressed out of their minds.

Not because business was bad. It was the opposite, in fact. They were stressed because they were both convinced they should be doing much, much more.

“I should be at $5 million by now,” the guy said.

“I need to hire a team and double,” the woman replied.

They each spent their entire turn talking about what they should be doing better instead of what they were actually doing very well. Which was making great money doing work they seemed to genuinely enjoy.

I sat there thinking about a question that would have sounded insane to ask out loud in that room:

What if you just didn’t scale?

But I didn’t ask it. Because in a room full of entrepreneurs talking about growth targets and hiring plans, suggesting that someone stay small sounds like you’re telling them to give up. Like you’re advocating for less ambition.

The thing is, I’ve been on both sides of this. Six years ago, I left my corporate job making good money to build a business that would give me more time and location freedom. And for the first three or four years, that’s exactly what happened. I built a business that paid me well, didn’t require much overhead, and let me work from wherever I wanted.

Then I hit a number that felt significant, and something in my mind shifted. I started thinking about what comes next. Did I need to finally hire people? Build a team? I thought about all the stuff that’s supposed to take you to the “next level.”

I built spreadsheets modeling different team sizes and revenue projections. I drafted job descriptions and mapped out potential org charts on napkins at co-working spaces.

When I noticed the benefits of my situation

One evening, I was sitting at my kitchen counter in Nashville, working on a job posting for a Chief of Staff. I got about halfway through writing the responsibilities section and decided to take a break.

As I did, I glanced around and took inventory of my situation. My three dogs were sleeping on the couch across the room from me. And my wife was in our bedroom reading a book and sipping a glass of wine. I was supposed to be done working for the day. But there I was, planning to hire someone whose entire job would be managing the complexity I was about to create.

I stared at the job posting for a while when I suddenly realized that I hadn’t been breathing for about ten seconds. I was holding my breath and my chest was tightening.

I closed my laptop, yelled to my wife that I’d be back soon, and went for a walk. And by the time I returned, I’d worked through something that felt almost embarrassing to admit: I didn’t want to hire anyone or scale my business.

What I wanted was to keep doing what I was already doing. Make good money, work on stuff I cared about, and have plenty of time for my life outside of work. The scaling fantasy had nothing to do with making my life any better.

It was something I thought would impress other people.

So I decided not to scale. I scrapped the job postings, and I just kept going. Same size and same structure as always.

The assumption nobody questions

There’s this default expectation in business that once you hit a certain revenue number, the next step is obvious. You scale. You hire. You build systems. You go from $1 million to $5 million to $10 million and more!

But there’s a lot more nuance to scaling outside of your revenue going up. Everything else gets bigger too. Your team size. Your business overhead. Your stress levels. The quantity of meetings. The new problems you have to solve and the constant fires you fight suddenly have nothing to do with the work you wanted to do in the first place.

You go from being someone who does the work to someone who manages people who do the work. And if you’re anything like me, you didn’t start your business to spend your days in Slack and on Zoom calls about HR issues.

The math nobody talks about

I know a guy who runs a small design agency. He’s been at $1.5 million in revenue for about eight years now. He’s right around that number every single year without fail.

When I first met him, I assumed he was stuck. That he’d hit a ceiling and couldn’t figure out how to break through it. But then I actually talked to him about his life and business.

He works four days a week and takes six weeks off every year. He has two part-time employees who have been with him for years because he pays them well and doesn’t burn them out. He saves a huge chunk of what he makes and invests regularly in the stock market. He’s on track to retire in his early fifties if he decides that’s what he wants to do.

He gets pitched constantly by people who want to help him scale. Consultants. Coaches. People whose favorite catchphrase is, “You’re leaving money on the table.”

“I probably am,” he told me. “But I’m taking home $700K a year after paying everyone and covering expenses. I work 30 hours a week. I hang out with my kids every night. And my wife and I take long weekends all the time. What part of that am I supposed to be unhappy about?”

He ran the math on scaling to $3 million. He’d need three or four more people, including some full-time designers. His overhead would increase and he’d probably spend most of his time in meetings and managing instead of doing the design work he actually enjoys. And after all of that, he’d maybe net $850K instead of $700K.

An extra $150K to work longer weeks and spend his days dealing with personnel issues instead of designing for clients. He looked at that trade and said no thanks.

That’s not leaving money on the table. That’s knowing what the money costs and deciding it’s not worth it.

What happens if you just stay

If you’re earning $500K a year, or $800K, or even $300K, you’re already in a position most people dream about. Depending on where you live and your lifestyle, you’re probably taking home enough to live well and save.

Maybe you’re not retiring at 40, but you’re also not dying to retire because, financially, life doesn’t suck. You get to say no to clients who are a pain. You can take three weeks off without stressing about money. You can work four days a week if you feel like it.

And when you want to change direction? You just do it.

In the next month, I’m changing my business model. I’m not spending six months building consensus with some team or figuring out how to transition without disrupting revenue or people’s livelihoods. I’m just going to do it.

No layoffs. No buy-in meetings. No crafting a narrative that makes everyone comfortable with the change. I don’t have to worry about how the decision will affect people’s mortgages or their kids’ college funds.

When you’re small or solo, you can take risks. You can try experiments that might fail. You can kill something that’s working fine because you want to try something different or more interesting.

That’s what staying small actually buys you. The people at that mastermind were making great money. But they were so focused on what they didn’t have that they couldn’t see what they already had. They’d built businesses that paid them well and let them work on stuff they were good at and enjoyed working on.

But they were stressed because they weren’t at $5 million yet.

Meanwhile, my design agency friend has been at $1.5 million for almost a decade. Same number. Same lifestyle. And he’s going to retire a millionaire in his early fifties without ever scaling, selling, or stressing about growth targets.

That’s the part most people miss. You can build a business to a number that works, then just stay there. Make that same amount for fifteen years or twenty years. Work less. Save more. Invest like crazy. And then you’re free to do whatever you want.

Not because you built some massive company and sold it. But because you made enough and didn’t spend all your resources trying to get bigger.

The bottom line

Back at the mastermind, I watched those two folks talk about their businesses like they were failing because they were “only” at $1M.

I didn’t say anything. But I wanted to.

Because sometimes the best move isn’t figuring out how to get bigger. It’s looking at what you’ve built and asking if it’s already enough.

So here’s my question for you this week: What if you didn’t scale? What if you took what you have now, optimized it slightly, and then focused on keeping more of it instead of making more of it?

Reply and tell me if you’ve considered this. While I can’t reply to everyone, I read every single response.

That’s all for this week.

See you next Saturday.

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This essay was originally published here.