I’m reading The Business of Expertise by David C. Baker.

And one passage on p. 26 stopped me in my tracks.

Baker is describing what an ‘expert firm’ should do when business opportunities are increasing. He says that ideally you would “measure the opportunities against each other, choosing the opportunities that allow you to compromise less and be more of an expert.”

Sounds good so far, right? When given the choice between two clients, choose the better one. Fine.

But then he drops the truth bomb.

“The minute you upsize your capacity to handle the additional opportunity … you lose the ability to say ‘no’ to clients who aren’t a good fit because you feel pressure to feed that new capacity you’ve built. The right [firm] size is always this: slightly smaller than the amount of opportunity within reach.”

Oh. Snap!

Read that again if you need to. I’ve read it like 10 times to help it sink in.

What Baker is saying is that if you grow your capacity enough to match client demand, you lose the ability to be choosy about your clients and projects.

Put another way, if you’re under a lot of pressure to meet payroll, you’ll say yes to just about anything.

EVEN IF you claim to be a specialized firm. The commitment to that specialty goes out the window when the rubber hits the road and you’ve got bills to pay.

This advice flies against how most agencies and other service businesses often operate. Getting more demand? Hire more staff. Getting less demand? Lay off some staff. (And we all know how fun that is…) It puts your business size at the whim of your opportunities. Which, when times are good, defaults to growth for growth’s sake.

But y’all… bigger isn’t always better. In fact, bigger is often much, much harder. It’s more costly and more complicated. And, as Baker described, it can drastically decrease how personally empowered you are to steer the ship toward work you actually want to be doing.

So instead of saying yes to everything — and growing your business as a result — take your smaller size as an opportunity to say no to the stuff you don’t want. And focus on becoming better and more profitable with the projects you do want.