Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine you start a small business — a real one, not the theoretical kind used in TED Talks or too-good-to-be-true LinkedIn screeds about “disruption.” Maybe you bake sourdough, or design websites, or clean gutters, or fix vintage typewriters (which you sell to people who then use them to write sad poems about vinyl records and the loneliness of dogs).
Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine you start a small business — a real one, not the theoretical kind used in TED Talks or too-good-to-be-true LinkedIn screeds about “disruption.” Maybe you bake sourdough, or design websites, or clean gutters, or fix vintage typewriters (which you sell to people who then use them to write sad poems about vinyl records and the loneliness of dogs). You get good at it. People like you. You make a decent living.
Then someone — an overzealous podcaster, a blogger, or maybe just a guy in finance who uses the word “leverage” a lot — tells you it’s time to scale.
But what if scaling is the wrong move? Like, not just financially risky or emotionally draining, but existentially misguided? What if keeping things small isn’t an act of cowardice or inferiority, but rather the last sane and authentic thing left in capitalism?
The mythology of business in North America is built around one (often unspoken) idea: more is always better. More customers, more leads, more markets, more employees, more software that you don’t understand but are definitely paying for. Growth is good, the story goes — so good it’s practically spiritual. CEOs are high priests. EBITDA is scripture. Tech bros? Apostles.
But here’s the problem: that logic only holds if you assume that the sole desirable endgame of business is infinite expansion. That’s the logic of cancer cells, not craft.
Mostly, the startup-industrial complex is designed to make you feel inadequate for thinking small. If you’re not optimizing, you’re stagnating. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. If you’re not on the path to become something, you’re a nothing. But what if that’s nonsense? What if growth is just one option on the business buffet — and not even necessarily the most delicious one?
Having worked with, for, and around small businesses for a couple of decades, here’s how I quite often see this go: You starts a business because you like doing something. It could be anything. Designing t-shirts, rebuilding bikes, editing videos, or growing weird mushrooms in a hydroponic garage. But then you get “successful,” and suddenly you’re managing supply chains, hiring HR consultants, and pretending to understand tax law (and learning the hard way that you do not, in fact, understand tax law). The thing you loved doing becomes a thing you delegate, while you spend your days on Zoom calls talking about strategic integrated expansion, or something.
This is the hidden and underacknowledged landmine of growth: it slowly erases the founder. You sometimes become a managerial ghost in your own machine. It may be a reasonably well-oiled machine, and you may be a fairly wealthy ghost, but still.
Scale introduces complexity. This is a known fact. Like entropy, or the fact that every third start-up in the Coldbrook-to-New Minas corridor will be a pizza place. The more you scale, the more your business becomes a stack of systems and rules and accidental paradoxes. You hire more people to manage the people you already hired, and before you know it you need a full-time Chief Culture Officer to explain what the company is supposed to care about.
Small businesses don’t have that problem. They’re messy, sure. But the mess is understandable. It’s the kind of mess where you forget to invoice someone for three weeks, not the kind of mess where a small protectionist tariff increase somewhere in the EU wipes out 20% of your business overnight and leaves you wondering how you’re going to fire 8 people by next week.
Here’s a paradox: the very thing that makes a small business lovable is often the first thing to die when it gets big. You start with artisanal jam made from strawberries you pick yourself at dawn. You end up
outsourcing to a jam conglomerate in Mississauga, just to keep up with Loblaws demand.
You lose the magic. And you know it. Your customers know it too, but they don’t say anything — because they’re polite, and because the jars still look cute on Instagram. But still, you look around and you know deep down your scaling up has come at a cost.
There’s something performatively evangelical about the way venture capitalists talks about scale. You don’t just build a business — you “build for exit.” Which sounds like a fire drill but is actually the central rite of passage in startup mythology. You build the company not to run it, but to sell it. Preferably to a larger company that will quietly smother it with synergy until the original charm is gone, like a hot indie rock band getting signed and then being forced to record a collaborative pop single with some bubble-gum labelmate.
Some people call this ‘true entrepreneurship’, but sometimes I think it’s more like selling your diary to the highest bidder. Understandable, but still sort of sad.
The small business owner, on the other hand, is stuck in a different kind of dream — a quieter, analog one. You make stuff. You sell it. You try not to go bankrupt. You don’t get a yacht or a TED Talk. But you also don’t spend your days trying to gamify user retention with machine learning.
Maybe the weirdest part of this conversation is how loaded the word “small” has become. Small is a euphemism. A polite way of saying “not quite successful.” But what if we flipped that logic? What if “small” is just another way of saying “focused”? Or “deliberate”? Or “actually knows how to talk to their customer one-on-one without a policy manual”?
McDonald’s is big. So is Bell. So is Canada Post. That’s fine. None of them really inspire anyone, though.
Your favorite craft beer was probably created by a couple of oddball Gen Xers with Styx posters on their bedroom walls. The best coffee shop in your neighborhood is probably marginally profitable at best. But it doesn’t matter. Because what they offer isn’t scale — it’s soul.
Here’s a metric no VC firm ever includes in their pitch deck: contentment. Not hustle. Not grind. Not “10x.” Just, well, being okay. Being ‘enough’.
Small businesses give you that shot. They allow for a weird, improbable equilibrium where you get to do something you enjoy, on your own terms, without needing to become a lifestyle brand or a subsidiary of some behemoth you’d never heard of. You get to be a person, not a pitch.
Yes, you’ll never “exit.” And maybe you’ll only make a modest income instead of a fortune. Maybe you won’t make any income at all and all you’ll have is a story to tell. But you’ll also never be forced to spend your evenings and weekends reading The Lean Startup for the third time or thinking about how to squeeze ‘hockey stick growth’, ‘MVP’, ‘frictionless UX’, and ‘growth hacking’ into every third sentence.
And maybe — just maybe — that’s the whole point. Keeping your business small might be futile in the eyes of corporatists and Type A personalities. But futility, in this context, isn’t failure. It’s freedom. It’s the freedom to reject the narrative that more and bigger is always better. The freedom to know your customers by name. The freedom to choose enough.
It’s not a TED Talk. It’s not disruptive. But it’s honest. And in an economy built on illusion, honesty might be the most radical business model of all.
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