It’s hard to believe that my journey with Grand began almost 10 years ago. Luke and I started our web design business from a living room in Luke’s house and we built it up from there. In the past couple years we’ve been learning that great design is about understanding pains and motivations of people and then creating products that address those points. It’s been a really great experience applying that knowledge and being back on the front lines of making things that work.

At the same time, I’ve been grappling with the idea of scaling a service business. Based on Grand’s previous growth experience, I knew that scale meant changing roles and moving away from making things and moving into management and sales. I learned that growing requires a full time, ongoing effort to sell and fill the pipe with business. Cash reserves aren’t long lived in a design business and— as I once read in a blog post by Jon Lax — even the biggest and best are perpetually 4 months from going out of business because of that. The idea of scaling and moving away from the creative process was hard to reconcile. I asked myself the question: “do we really need to grow?” Ultimately the answer was yes, at least a little. When running a bigger business — to keep yourself sane — you have to start delegating work; you can’t do it all on your own. To do that you need people to delegate to. More bodies means growth and when you have staff you need to grow at a rate that matches your surrounding economy. Salaries increase, overhead goes up, cost of goods increase, and so on. There is a minimum growth rate to stay alive and ultimately you need to grow a little beyond that if you want to pad yourself against future uncertainty or make that next hire.

When helping clients through the process of understanding their customers, I learned a lot about my own pain points and what motivated me. What I discovered was the process of researching, creating and sharing a product with people who enjoyed it was what fired me up. This cycle of learning, creating and sharing is why I get out of bed in the morning. It’s how I can contribute to a team, it’s where I operate at my best. Knowing this, I had to make a decision about how I could contribute to the growth of Grand moving forward. The conclusion I came to was to not scale a service company at all and instead focus on supporting others who did.

With this new direction, I have decided to step away as a partner of Grand. My future lies in playing a supportive roll to design companies who need a hand, to businesses who want to grow their internal design teams and to incorporate my other passions like the outdoors, photography and story telling into my work. I want to support people with innovative and risky ideas while at the same time support organizations that want to make positive change in the near future. Perhaps most importantly, I want to work on projects where everyone is having a lot of fun. Being solo offers me the ability to work in more flexible ways, diversify my skills and plug into teams remotely or right in their offices. The idea of not scaling the size of my organization is what will keep me grounded in the work I love to do.

I’m excited about keeping things simple and lean, being able to move freely and meet some great people doing great work. For more information, please check out my website: HeadlandsDigital.com.

I’d love to hear from you! I can be found on Twitter, Instagram and of course through email.

Thanks! — Matt

I’ve started an email list where I’ll be sending out wallpapers once a month so you can gussy up your phone’s background. Sign up here! You can check out Instagram for a preview of what you might see.