Grow or die. That's the motto of our time. Every LinkedIn feed, every business podcast, every airport bookshop shouts the same thing: if you're not scaling, you're failing.
So let me tell you about Sam Adiv.
I sat down with Sam not long ago for an episode of the Growing with Purpose podcast. Sam is the founder and CEO of OpenTent, a Salesforce consultancy for nonprofits, and a member of the Small Giants Community since 2023. Two and a half years ago, his company peaked at 25 people.
Today it has 15.
Here's the part that should make you sit up: they kept the same client workload. Average employee tenure is now more than four years. Everybody, in Sam's words, is finally in the right seat. Less management overhead, less training, more trust. The business didn't shrink. The headcount did.
Let's take a step back, and gain some context.
Doug Tatum wrote a book years ago called No Man's Land, about the dangerous stretch where a company is too big to be small and too small to be big. Tatum puts this tough landscape at roughly 20 to 100 employees and under $5 million in revenue: you've outgrown the founder-does-everything stage, but you haven't yet reached the scale where proper management structures pay for themselves. And the crossing is brutal: 95% of the growing businesses that attempt it never reach the other side. Many go out of business trying.
Sam, at 25 people, was standing right on the edge. He looked across, weighed it up, and deliberately stepped back. To get meaningfully larger, he told me, OpenTent would need to push through the 20–25 range and go all the way to 40 or 50 people, where the management math starts working again. Half-crossing doesn't work. You either commit to the journey or you don't set out.
And here's what I love: he and his team talk about this openly. They're open to crossing one day. They're interested in it. But they don't feel they have to. As Sam put it, everybody feels like they can have a great time at this size.
The discussion and the decision equate to the lesson here. Growth isn't wrong. Staying small isn't wrong. What is wrong? Drifting. Operating without purpose and direction. The companies that end up stranded in No Man's Land are usually the ones that grow out of pressure rather than intention.
It helps that OpenTent has an unusual Big Hairy Audacious Goal: to be the best Salesforce consultancy to work for in the world. Not the biggest. Not even the best to work with. The best to work for. Every decision gets filtered through one question: will this improve the health and quality of our workplace? When that's your lens, 15 great people beats 25 every time.
Now, before you conclude that Sam has stopped growing — he hasn't. He's just growing along a different axis. While the org chart got smaller, the culture got deeper. And this is where there's something every one of us can Rob & Deploy™ in our own businesses.
OpenTent has been fully remote since 2018. Sam, who once planned to become a rabbi, believes a healthy community should gather once a week. Not to work, but to embody Seth Godin's phrase: people like us do things like this.
So every week, the whole team meets for 25 minutes for something they call tea and toast. Here's the recipe:
That's it. Less than half an hour, once a week, deliberately goofy. Nothing to do with operations or KPIs, and everything to do with why people stay four-plus years.
They've gone further, too. The team is split into stable "portfolio teams" of five or six people who work the same clients together, week in, week out. Each team picked its own brand color, voted in a mascot (nobody asked them to), and runs its own rituals. Micro-communities inside the greater community.
So here's what I'd ask you to sit with this week: are you growing because you've decided to — eyes open, prepared to cross no man's land — or because you assume you should?
And whichever answer you land on: what's your tea and toast? What's the small, weekly, slightly silly ritual that tells your people who you are?
Sam found his sweet spot by refusing to let growth happen to him. That might be the most purposeful growth strategy of all.
That's it for this week. Let me know if you've got a tool or mindset that shaped how your business shows up in the world. I read everything, and the good ones end up in here.
Cheers,
Jean