There’s actually two kinds of business growth

Mark Biwojno
2 min readJun 27, 2022

In business we look as growth = good. But is it always?

In this article, I argue that there’s actually two very distinct and different leadership mentalities behind the desire for business growth:

  1. Growth for the sake of growth. -> Most companies are here. They simply wish to grow revenues, they don’t even know exactly why — aside from the simple fact- everyone knows that’s how you get rich in business.
  2. Growth for the sake of progress. -> If you build a solution that’s better, the only way society progresses is if you distribute it wide and far to displace the lesser alternatives.

There’s so many companies that are on the Dark Side:

Growth for the sake of Growth.

Unfortunately, the majority of companies simply want to grow. Because. They’re lacking in a corporate identity, a “soul” so to speak. Many companies just want to grow to please their investors or so their founders can exit. This is in part why so many companies resort to dubious tactics. All they see are numbers, not people’s lives being impacted positively or adversely by what they’re doing. The ends, justify the means with these companies. They’re frequently making headlines, with their latest scandal.

The Light Side of Growth

For mission-driven entrepreneurs, this is where you want to be:

Growth for the sake of Progress!

There’s no point in scaling a company up until you have a product that’s truly better. Even if you could find a way to sell a garbage product profitably, doing so would make the world a worse place for having displaced better solutions.

Once you have your solution or product that is better (or the beginning of something better, in the case of software) from existing alternatives, it’s your duty to distribute it. Be read to scale up, when your solution is worthy. Not to please investors. But to help society progress. If you design a tractor which uses less fuel than existing tractors while sharing the same characteristics, you can truly make the world a better place by distributing it, and replacing the less efficient tractors with something better.

Your staff should be employed to help society progress by bettering or distributing the company’s breakthrough solutions, rather than as a vanity number (oh, I employ 200 people!) to dupe investors into thinking there’s massive “traction”. Anything less, is to waste people’s lives in a vanity project. Life and time is too precious for that. Unfortunately, a lot of startups are vanity projects.

That’s the light side of growth. The good growth.

So. Which side are you on?

--

--