Hal Elrod argues the best things in life don't scale. He contrasts extractive business models with regenerative ones that have natural limits, using a farm with half a dozen cows as an example of right-sized operations. Entrepreneurs should chase the right size, not endless growth.
Chapters
The best things in life don't scale. In business, we are taught, how do we scale this? Immediately? The question that shows up when I speak in rooms of other business leaders is, but does it scale? Yeah, but I would posit that the best things in your life don't scale. So in agriculture, most of the world's food is grown through an extractive paradigm, meaning we extract from the land, we bring in fertilizer from an outside source, we pile it back on the land that we extract from, and we repeat this process. We pull from the other, but there's not an infinite other. And in our business, what we do is we extract from ourselves. We work ourselves to the bone until there's nothing left, and then we burn out. And then we wonder, why is this not working? A regenerative paradigm, on the other hand, has a limit to its growth, meaning there's only so much that we can do. On my farm, on our farm, we have half a dozen cows. That's what the land supports. There's a thermodynamic reality, and business is the same paradigm. Not every business is meant to scale to the moon. Every business has a right size. And I believe that it's more valuable to understand what is the right size of your business as opposed to how do I scale?
