Staying Small
Company of One, Wall Street, and why growth isn't always the answer.
Deep Life Reflections | Essay 106 | James Gibb
Growth feels right, until you question what it’s costing you.
“We don’t need an attitude of world domination and crushing it in our work in order to make a great living or even have a substantial impact. Our work can start and finish small while still being useful—focused on moving toward being better instead of more.”
—Paul Jarvis, Company of One.
Growth is one of the most celebrated words in modern life. It’s assumed to be good—morally, socially, even spiritually. If we’re not growing, we’re standing still. Or worse, failing. It’s hard to think of a word more positively associated with being human. Growth is hard-wired into us.
In business, growth isn’t just expected, it’s demanded. Organisations are built on the assumption that scale is the only direction. Bigger teams, bigger clients, bigger goals. It’s the default.
But growth doesn’t have to mean bigger, and success can still be achieved by staying small.
Paul Jarvis left the creative agency he worked for because they prioritised the next sale over the clients they already had. His goal was simple: find a new agency that better suited his desire to build relationships. But then his former clients started calling him. They wanted to know which new agency he was joining so they could move with him. It suddenly struck him for the first time: what if I did this alone?
It sounds like a typical story. Leave the agency, go solo, apply the skills you’ve learned. But what makes Jarvis’ story so jarringly different is his commitment to stay small on purpose. To not scale. To not hustle. His book, Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business is an antidote to the prescription that scale equals success.
Jarvis makes the case for just the opposite: that staying small offers more freedom, more time, and fewer of the headaches that come with traditional growth-oriented businesses. He’s still working with those same clients, just with more freedom and stronger relationships than ever. His focus is on being better rather than being bigger.
In 2010, Jarvis and his wife left their city life in downtown Vancouver for the remote island town of Tofino on Vancouver Island. Population: under 2,000. He scaled down every aspect of his life, and with that came clarity. He realised he’d been quietly building a business “full of resilience, driven by a desire for autonomy and, on most days, enjoyment” for two decades, without consciously recognising the model he’d already built.
Society has ingrained in us a very particular idea of what success in business looks like. You work as many hours as possible, and when your business starts to do well (or even before it starts to do well), you scale everything up in every direction. This is the engine of hustle culture. But research shows the only noticeable impact of this mindset is higher job stress, greater work-life conflict, and deteriorating health.
Jarvis believes an organisation’s default tendency to solve problems by adding ‘more’ to the solution is a problem in itself. It suggests anyone who stays small hasn’t done well enough to add ‘more’ to the mix.
Jarvis challenges this thinking, asking:
“What if staying small is what a company does when it’s figured out how to solve problems without adding ‘more’ to them?”
This reframes success less as accumulation and more as clarity.
In this way, we all have the potential to be a company of one, whether you run your own business, or work inside someone else’s.
Jarvis isn’t anti-growth or anti-revenue. Rather, he is anti-default. He argues growth should be a choice, something to question because it might not always be the best path. He advocates for being more intentional rather than blindly pursuing what is traditionally accepted as the only path.
Wall Street. 1987. Directed by Oliver Stone
That word—default—is important. In business culture today, scale is rarely examined. It’s simply assumed. If we follow that logic to its extreme, we might find one of capitalism’s most infamous characters, the ruthless corporate raider, Gordon Gekko, from Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street.
1985. Lower Manhattan. It’s one of the longest bull runs in U.S. stock market history. Brick-sized mobile phones. Slick-backed hair. Striped shirts with white collars. Chunky beige monitors flashing green text on black screens. This is Stone’s hugely entertaining critique of unchecked capitalism, dressed up as a morality tale for the MTV generation.
Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is a hungry young trader desperate to make it. His idol is Gordon Gekko (an Oscar-winning Michael Douglas) who doesn’t believe in lunch, handouts, or a world without information: “the most valuable commodity I know”. When Bud finally gets his two minutes with Gekko, he’ll do anything to stay in the room, even if it means selling his soul.
His real-life father, Martin Sheen, plays his onscreen father too, and he’s the moral compass of the film. A union man, the embodiment of hard work. Blue-collar. Principled and proud. Gekko is the other kind of father-figure: magnetic, mythic, and dangerous. It takes Bud the full length of the film to realise which path is the right one.
It's been almost 40 years since Wall Street. While the technology and fashions are outdated, the ideology and motivations are evergreen. What drove people then drives them now. If anything, the divide between the haves and have-nots is even greater in 2025.
Michael Douglas is brilliant as the slick and smooth Gekko, delivering the film’s most famous (and misquoted) line: “Greed is good.” Except that’s not quite what he says. The real quote deserves closer inspection:
“The point is ladies and gentlemen, greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit…Greed, in all its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind.”
Gekko sounds more like a philosopher than a financier. That’s the brilliance of Stone’s writing. There is a logic to Gekko’s speech. It’s seductive because it contains just enough truth. He rebrands greed as progress.
Gekko is immoral but he knows exactly what he’s doing. He is about taking. Gekko worships growth because it elevates him, feeding his ego. He is a rabid consumer of anyone who gets in his way.
Depending on who’s watching, Gordon Gekko is either a role model or a parasite. That ambiguity makes him alluring. Through Gekko, Wall Street gives a face and voice to unrestrained ambition and the transfer of power. As he says later in the film:
“Money isn’t made or lost. It’s simply transferred from one perception to another.”
It frames wealth as something captured. A sleight of hand. The seduction of more, presented in a way that shows not only that it’s possible, but that not taking it would be the real crime.
The chameleon in full colour, blending into whatever story sells.
Stone was onto something.
Jarvis and Gekko represent two worldviews. One builds, the other devours. They are polar extremes but offer a powerful lens for rethinking what success actually means because that tension is everywhere in business today.
Growth is still the default setting, often unquestioned and glorified. But I admire those, like Jarvis, who’ve intentionally stayed small because it works for them and their business. It offers more freedom, more focus, and potentially stronger relationships. It’s a different kind of success. And critically they are still economically successful.
“There’s no such thing as perpetual growth. Yet, that’s what traditional business people crave. But what is growth meant to achieve? If Oxford University is so successful, then why isn’t there a branch in Washington, D.C.? If a symphony is successful with 120 musicians, why not even more so with 600? “To grow bigger” is not much of an effective business strategy at all.”
—Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco Partners
I see many small businesses chasing growth and scale. LinkedIn is full of these posts. And maybe that’s the right move for them. But I think it’s worth asking two questions:
Is scale what’s really needed or just what’s expected?
Is the desire for growth ambition or insecurity in disguise?
Staying small comes with its own rewards.
The freedom to be selective. To have more control. To spend more of your time using your skills to help others, and, yes, still be well paid for it.
The question then isn’t whether you can grow. It’s whether you need to.
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