On choosing slowness, staying small, and rethinking what success means.
Growth is one of the most celebrated metrics in entrepreneurship. More users, more funding, more reach, more scale. Success is often defined by expansion — and moving quickly is seen as a sign of vitality, innovation, relevance.
But what if a business doesn’t want to grow fast? What if speed feels misaligned with care? What if scale stretches things too thin? What if the most meaningful work is rooted not in expansion, but in depth?
These aren’t hypothetical questions. They’re ones I return to often — especially when working on projects that involve people, stories, and craft. Growth, in many ways, is appealing. But it comes with trade-offs. And when you’re building something from a place of values, rather than volume, those trade-offs become harder to ignore.
The Limits of Scaling Purpose
Most traditional growth models are built on repetition and replication — create something that works, then multiply it as fast as possible. But when your work is embedded in community, care, and place-based nuance, that model doesn’t always translate.
Systems that prioritise speed often demand simplification. They ask for efficiency over context, consistency over relationships. And in doing so, they can strip away the very things that made the work meaningful in the first place.
Some things are simply not designed to be scaled without losing their shape.
Staying Small by Design
Choosing to stay small isn’t the same as lacking ambition. It’s a conscious decision to build differently. To prioritise depth over breadth. To make space for attention and relationship. To grow sideways, not upwards.
It might mean working with a limited number of collaborators. Or focusing on one community at a time. Or taking longer to launch a product because the process matters just as much as the result.
It’s not always easy. It means saying no to certain opportunities. It means explaining your choices to funders, partners, or peers who expect metrics that show more, faster. And it means learning to find value in forms of success that don’t always fit mainstream narratives.
Rethinking Growth Altogether
In recent years, movements like degrowth and post-growth entrepreneurship have offered a different lens — one where thriving isn’t tied to endless expansion, but to sufficiency, wellbeing, and ecological balance.
Within this framework, business becomes a tool to support life, not outpace it. Value is measured not just by output, but by integrity, reciprocity, and long-term resilience. It’s about building something that feels sustainable not just environmentally — but emotionally, socially, and structurally.
This doesn’t mean avoiding growth altogether. But it does mean being more intentional about how and why we grow. Not all growth is inherently good. Not all slowness is a setback.
A Personal Note: On Growing at My Own Pace
For me, this has been more than theory — it’s something I’ve chosen to live.
When I began working with home-based workers and refugee artisans to create craft-based products, there was a moment where things could have scaled. People asked when I would expand, involve more communities, increase production. But I didn’t move in that direction — not because I wasn’t grateful for the interest, but because I was already working at a pace I could hold.
I had other passions I wanted to explore. Other parts of my life I didn’t want to sacrifice for the sake of speed. And more importantly, I wanted to take good care of the people who were already part of this work. Staying small allowed me to honour those relationships — to pay fairly, to listen deeply, and to keep promises without rushing past them.
Of course, it made my project less appealing to funders. It didn’t look like exponential growth. But it allowed me to grow in a way that felt true — slowly, steadily, without losing the integrity of why I started.
This doesn’t mean I did it better. It just means I chose a path that resonated.
And I believe there’s space in entrepreneurship for that kind of decision.
If you want to grow, ask why.
If you want to stay small, know that that too is a valid form of vision.