Growing Without Losing Ourselves

In my last two articles, I wrote about what it means to build a creative business centered on care — from how we pace our work to how we choose our clients. But underneath many of those decisions is an ever-present tension: growth.

In business, top-line growth is treated as an unquestioned good. To many, it’s the metric that signals how hard you’re working and how successful you are or will be. If your company is doing things right, then you should continuously be building bigger teams, getting bigger clients, and seeing crazy revenue growth. Right?

Well, maybe not.

Since the beginning, we’ve really questioned that assumption. People would say, “How’s business? You guys look like you’re growing! That’s great!” — usually referring to hiring, working with bigger companies, etc.… we’d sort of smile and nod knowing that wasn’t really how we defined success.

That version of growth is fundamentally at odds with the kind of business we’re trying to build.

At Edelmade, we’ve chosen to stay intentionally small. Not because we lack ambition (staying at a soul-sucking job and raking in the dough would have been much less ambitious than starting a design agency), but because we’ve seen what “traditionally-accepted” growth tends to require from business owners and their employees. Pressure to keep business coming in at potentially unrealistic rates, more dependence on bigger projects, and more people whose livelihoods hinge on consistency in an inherently unpredictable industry.

We have grown.

We’ve grown as leaders: learning how to support a team, make hard decisions, and take responsibility for more than just ourselves.
We’ve grown as designers: pushing our expertise further, expanding how we think, and delivering work that is more thoughtful and impactful than what we were capable of years ago.
We’ve grown in how we show up for our clients: not just executing, but truly partnering, guiding, and helping shape their businesses in meaningful ways.
We’ve grown in what we can offer: building services and capabilities that didn’t exist when we started, simply because we invested the time and energy into learning and evolving.

That kind of growth is harder to quantify. It doesn’t show up cleanly on a year-over-year chart. But to us, it’s the kind of growth that actually matters.

And yet, that’s not the kind of growth the system tends to reward.

Growth doesn’t only scale revenue… It also increases risk, and with that risk often comes a shift in how decisions are made.

When a business grows beyond a certain point, the margin for care will undoubtedly shrink. Timelines tighten. Client selection becomes less discerning. Internal processes prioritize efficiency over thoughtfulness. You start making decisions not for the quality of the work or the wellbeing of your team, but for the survival of a larger system you’ve created.

At times when we lose sight of the bigger picture, I’ve felt this tension, and I’ve also seen this happen to people I admire. Smart, thoughtful people are slowly pulled into a pace and pressure that leaves less and less room for the very values they started with.

And this doesn’t happen because they overtly decided one day to flush their ideals down the drain, but because the system they built required something different to sustain itself. We don’t talk about that part enough. Growth isn’t neutral. It fundamentally changes your business, and in turn, what your business asks of you.

For us, staying small has been a way to stay close to the work and to one another. With a team of four, every decision is made thoughtfully. Every project matters. We still design. We still write. We still discuss life alongside work. We’re not removed from the work or from the relationships that make the work meaningful.

That said, choosing not to grow traditionally also comes with its own trade-offs.

If I’m being honest, there are moments when that feels uncomfortable. There’s a voice inside my head that sometimes yells “why aren’t you a 7-figure agency after 10 years?”

But each time we’ve felt that pull, we come back to the same question: What are we actually doing this for?

If the answer is profit at all costs, then approaching growth in the traditional manner makes sense. But that’s not our goal.

We’ve built a business that is sustainable not just financially, but emotionally. One that allows our team to do great work without burning out. One that creates space for life outside of work. One that doesn’t require us to compromise ourselves and our health and our lives in order to keep it running.

And when we measure against those things, staying small looks much less like a limitation and more like a very thoughtful, very strategic decision.

That doesn’t mean we haven’t grown our revenue, or we won’t grow our revenue or our team even more in the future. It means our type of growth is very intentional: aligned with our values, our capacity, and the kind of business we want to be in the long term.

Growth isn’t inherently good or bad. But it is a powerful force, and if you don’t define what it means for your business, it will be defined for you. And you might not actually be that happy with the results.