In Ballarat, Ellen Foley runs a bookbindery her grandfather started in 1958. She is the third generation to own it, and the first to decide, against the advice of every adviser she has ever paid, that she will not grow it.
“When I took over in 2019 I had a plan,” she told me. “Three sites, regional distribution, a wholesale arm. I had a spreadsheet. I had a board.”
She does not have any of that now. She has seven employees, two machines her grandfather bought in 1971, and a waiting list. “I realised I was designing a business I didn’t want to work in. So I stopped.”
The slowdown is a choice, not a failure
You can tell a lot about an industry by what people starting out assume is possible. For two decades, the assumption inside Australian trades was consolidation. Roll-ups were glamorous. Private equity would take your thirty-year business and make it a hundred-year one, the pitch went. Family ownership was a charming anachronism.
That pitch is less persuasive in 2026. The consolidated players are struggling with labour. The roll-ups are struggling with debt. Foley’s bindery is doing fine.
She is not alone. A hundred kilometres south-east, Sam Okereke took over his father’s fencing business in 2022 with a promise to his staff: no expansion, no new regions, no new products for five years. His revenue is up 22% over that period. “We got better at what we already did,” he said. “That turned out to be a strategy.”
What changes when you decide not to scale
The operational decisions cascade quickly. You stop hiring generalists. You stop chasing contracts that don’t fit. You invest in the same five customers instead of the next fifty. You train slowly and well.
“The word we kept coming back to was dignity,” Foley said. “If I’m going to ask people to work here for twenty years, the work has to be worth twenty years of their life.”
The financial case is not romantic
The romantic version of this story gets repeated at conferences: craft matters, care matters, the soul of the business matters. All true. But the three founders I spent time with were all former finance people, or had finance partners, and they all ran their numbers the same way.
“The financial case for going slow isn’t about margin. It’s about cost of capital. You raise less, you owe less, you compound for longer. That’s just maths.”
Foley described her bindery’s trajectory as a “slow compound”. Seven percent growth, year after year, fully self-funded. Okereke’s five-year plateau in scope but double-digit growth in revenue is the same curve. “Nobody writes about this because it’s boring,” he said. “But boring is where the money is.”
The trade-off they do accept
Slow operators pay a real cost in optionality. None of the three founders I spoke with could tell me with a straight face that they were building businesses a strategic buyer would ever pay a premium for. They’re not. They’re building annuities: businesses that throw off cash reliably, and whose owners intend to still own them in 2046.
That’s not a sellable story to a VC. It is a sellable story to a bank. All three told me their relationships with their lenders had improved since they stopped chasing growth.
What this means for Australian SMBs
There is no lesson here that generalises to every small business, and the founders I spoke with were the first to say so. Some markets reward scale. Some businesses have to grow or die. But for the owner-operator who is quietly wondering whether the received wisdom of the last decade still applies (whether the pitch about growth, consolidation, and exit is the only pitch), the answer increasingly looks like: no.
“We got sold a story,” Foley said, looking around her bindery. “About what success looked like. I think a lot of us are writing a different one now.”
Eleanor Pike reports on Australian founders for Blogbox. Names in this story have been checked and used with permission.