On intentional smallness, craft, and building a business worth having. Published weekly on Substack, archived here.
Everyone in business believes that success requires growth — more revenue, more clients, more employees, more scale. But the happiest entrepreneurs I know are the ones who stopped growing on purpose. Here's what they figured out that the rest of us are still learning.
The math on subtraction nobody teaches you. Every bad client you keep costs more than the revenue they generate — in energy, in focus, in the slow erosion of standards.
Happiness isn't euphoria. It's the default state when you stop chasing more. I spent years thinking I needed to reach some destination. Turns out I'd already passed it.
A champagne bar in the West Village that only serves twelve people at a time — and why it's the most ambitious restaurant I've ever seen.
The CEO asked, "How do we scale to fifty million?" I asked him why. He didn't have an answer. That's the whole problem.
The creator economy looks like freedom from corporate. It's not. It's the same dependency with a different landlord.