Three weeks, a few thousand miles, and more conversations than I can count. Courtney and I have just come off the road visiting a handful of Small Giants companies, and I'm still buzzing.
We sat in on a Zingerman's huddle, stood through a Menlo Innovations stand-up, graduated a Leadership Academy class at Text-em-All, and at Choice One, Matt and his team shared the secrets to employee-driven growth.
Along the way we spent hours with founders, CEOs and the people who actually do the work. Zoom calls and Summit conversations only get you so far. Being in the building lets you peel back the layers: what's hard, what nearly broke, what they'd do differently.
And then there's Courtney. How many fathers get to spend three weeks on the road with their daughter, doing work they both care about? I don't take it lightly. Everywhere we went, people welcomed her like one of their own, and she repaid them by noticing things I didn't. She's from a generation that thinks differently about work, and that turns out to be a pretty useful lens for figuring out what makes a company great.
That's where the stories in this newsletter come from now, and it's only the beginning. Courtney and I are on a mission to go deeper, inside the companies that choose to be great, not big, to find out not only what gives them their mojo, but how they hold on to it.
Funny thing, though. One of the things that jumped out at me on this trip didn't come from any of those conversations. It came from a supermarket somewhere between visits. Protein water. Protein Cheerios. Protein popcorn. Protein in everything. I stood there amazed at how a nutrient had turned into a marketing campaign, and something about it bugged me.
Not long after, I was sitting with Ari Weinzweig at Zingerman's in Ann Arbor. I mentioned that Clif Bar, whose founder gave Bo the word "mojo," now belongs to Mondelez. Ari wondered aloud how many of the companies in Bo's book are still Small Giants. His answer: not that many.
And there it was. Fewer of the original Small Giants are still standing, yet more companies than ever call themselves purpose-driven. If purpose were the answer, we'd have more Small Giants, not fewer. Protein has found its business equivalent.
Purpose is the new protein
Even Protein Pints couldn't resist. Their April Fools' protein toothpaste. When the word ends up in toothpaste, it has stopped meaning anything. I worry purpose is heading the same way.
When everyone puts it on the label, the label stops telling you anything.
Every company has a purpose now, and every pitch deck leads with one.
So I went back to the question Bo was actually asking when he wrote Small Giants. It wasn't "how do you build a purpose-driven company?" Bo had spent decades at Inc. watching companies with real mojo, the kind of business you just want to be associated with. Most of them lost it. He wanted to know why a handful didn't, and how they held on.
In our community we've summed up the answer as people, values and purpose. I still believe in all three. But they describe what a great company looks like. They don't explain how it got there, or how it stays there. Somewhere along the way, we started treating the description as the definition.
Heart and engine
Two things jump out when you go back to the source. Every company Bo wrote about was very profitable. And what struck him most was the extraordinarily high standards they held themselves to.
So here's how I'm starting to think about it. A Small Giant has a heart and an engine. The heart is what we already talk about: deep relationships, values that drive decisions, a clear sense of why. The engine is the unglamorous stuff that keeps the heart beating: pricing properly, hiring with discipline, growing only as fast as you can bring people with you.
Heart without an engine is a lovely company that runs out of cash. An engine without a heart is just another business.
The question the new generation is answering
Here's what gave me the most hope on the road. The newer generation of Small Giants, companies like Tasty Catering, Text-em-All and Choice One Engineering, think about this differently. They're far more conscious about transitions. They're building companies designed to outlast the people who started them.
At Text-em-All, I sat down with Johnathan Melton, their new head of product. He's been there more than ten years, apart from a stint elsewhere that showed him how rare this place is. Within weeks of leaving he felt like a cog in a machine, so he came back. When I asked what it feels like to work there, he said he's building something that should outlast his career. Somewhere, a kid in elementary school right now will do his job one day, and will probably poke fun at whoever made today's decisions. His hope is that the people who come after him will "make it even better than where we left it."
That isn't a founder talking. It's someone rising up in the company. When that mindset reaches that far in, you've built something that can outlast you.
That's the answer to Ari's question. Many of the originals were built around a remarkable founder, and when the founder moved on, the mojo often went too. This generation of Small Giants is treating succession as part of the design, not something to figure out at the end.
Maybe that's the missing piece in our model. A great business isn't just great today. It's built to stay great when you're no longer in the room. Asking that question about your own business? We're digging into one intentional answer, Employee Ownership Trusts, with Common Trust at an upcoming virtual event. [Register here.]
Over to you
This is thinking in progress, not a finished model, and I'd love you to poke holes in it.
Does heart and engine ring true in your business? Is purpose really becoming the new protein, or am I being too cynical? What would you add, change or throw out entirely? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one, and the pushback is often the most useful part. I'll share some of what I hear in a future issue.
Cheers,
Jean
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