Katie and I spent an afternoon with Jay Goltz in Chicago recently, getting a behind-the-scenes look at his furniture and picture framing businesses. We wandered through the Jayson Home showroom, past velvet sofas and marble tables and shelves of finds from around the world, and back into the workshop where his people frame more pictures than anyone else in the country.
These businesses are two of the four businesses under the Gotlz Group umbrella. As Jay walked us through his space, I could see the pride and intentionality that goes into every square inch.
Oh, and something important about our host: this is the man who coined the term "Small Giants."
When Bo Burlingham was trying to name his book about companies that chose to be great instead of big, it was Jay who coined the now beloved term. And he named Finish Big too. So when Jay talks about growth, I pay attention.
Here's why he's earned the right to. Jay opened Artists Frame Service in 1978, fresh out of college with an accounting degree he hated, in an abandoned factory district on Chicago's Clybourn Avenue. Everyone told him he was wasting his degree. His mother said, "You went to school for four years and you ended up like your father."
Three years later, when the average frame shop was doing $150,000 a year, Jay was doing a million. Today the Goltz Group employs 110 people and takes up nearly the entire block we walked that afternoon. The city even renamed it “Honorary Jay Goltz Way”.
So you'd expect a gospel of growth. That's not what I got.
As we sat on one of his showroom sofas, Jay told me he never woke up one day and decided to build something great instead of big. "I was trying to do both," he admitted. And for ten or fifteen years, it nearly broke him. He went through ten production managers in three years. He hired whoever showed up. He grew 30 to 40 percent a year while scraping by on a 3 percent bottom line, because he thought being the cheapest in town was a strategy.
Two realizations pulled him out of this slog.
First: great companies have great hiring protocols, full stop. You need exceptional people (and the right people) in order to have an exceptional business.
Second: there is only one appropriate price – the one that supports a decent bottom line and lets you serve your customers properly. Wanting to charge less isn't generosity. It's a slow leak.
My favorite line from the whole afternoon: for years Jay spent his days putting out fires and assumed that's just what bosses do as companies get bigger.
"No," he said. "The answer is get rid of the arsonists."
The shift in Jay's thinking wasn't philosophical. It was earned.
In the spring of 1997, overextended on a building renovation and a new venture in an industry he didn't understand, he was sleeping three hours a night. A few years later he burned several hundred thousand dollars on a failed internet venture. Finally, he came to the conclusion that calm, controlled growth – the kind of thing his younger self would have dismissed as weak – was actually the win. Bo tells that whole story in Small Giants.
When we spoke, Jay described himself as an entrepreneuraholic who finally has his vice under control. What did it for him was a simple yet profound mindset shift: he has enough.
Which brings me to the idea I keep chewing on, a word Jay says he's replaced "balance" with as he's gotten older: alignment.
Balance isn’t necessarily a helpful word to aspire to. Life demands that we constantly shuffle what is the priority – by the year, by the week, sometimes even within one day. It’s impossible to balance all things evenly at all times. Instead, alignment calls for something different: not evenness, but rather harmony.
Here's how he put it: “I'm making enough money. My employees are happy. My customers are happy. I don't want more stress, and I need money less than I need peace. So why on earth would I be planning to open 40 more stores? That decision would be out of alignment with everything I actually want.”
Jay sees owners unconsciously resist alignment constantly. Not because growth serves them, but because they've never stopped to ask the questions.
"We don't pray to the growth gods," he told me.
Now, that doesn't mean Small Giants don't grow. Jay grew for decades. It means growth isn’t given the power to smother the things that matter.
This isn't late-career mellowing either. Back in 2011, writing for the New York Times, Jay described the steady stream of real estate agents knocking on his door with the perfect second location, and the investment bankers dangling capital. His answer, over and over: no. "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should," he wrote.
The most important word in business might be no. The second most important is why. Always ask yourself, “why exactly should I take this risk?” If the honest answer is ego, then you better reevaluate your decision, because working out of ego is a surefire way to get yourself out of alignment.
As the man who coined the term, Jay’s definition of a Small Giant comes down to four commitments.
That fourth one is rarely celebrated. It takes courage to be content in a culture that celebrates the Inc. 500 even though, as Jay points out, many of those companies are losing money. He told me about a fellow framer who opened three shops in three months and was out of business within a year. Jay's counterpoint: "Twenty percent growth is tremendous growth." And even 10 percent a year, the rate nobody brags about, compounds into a very big company over 20 years.
Some people would look at a 110-person business held deliberately at a size the owner loves and call it a lifestyle business, like that's an insult. Jay's spent 48 years proving it's the opposite. It's a business in alignment.
Run Jay's alignment check on your own company this week. Ask yourself four questions:
If your plans contradict your answers, the plans are the problem, not the answers.
If that exercise feels familiar, it's the same question Sam Adiv answered when he deliberately shrank OpenTent to 15 people rather than wander into No Man's Land. Two owners at very different points in the journey, arriving at the same truth: growth is a decision, not a default.
That’s it for this week. If Jay’s perspective brings up anything for you, I’d love for you to shoot me a message and tell me about it. It’s stories like Jay’s and Sam’s that can make the Small Giant experience feel bigger than ourselves.
Cheers,
Jean