Small Giants

What makes a business truly great if not its size? In Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, Bo Burlingham answers that question through a series of company portraits—businesses that deliberately resist the pressure to grow for growth’s sake. These companies—Anchor Brewing, Clif Bar, Zingerman’s, Righteous Babe Records, Reell Precision, and others—define greatness through mastery, purpose, intimacy, and community. They choose to stay private and human-scaled while becoming legends in their fields.

Burlingham argues that every enduring business eventually arrives at a crossroads where growth ceases to be purely an economic decision and becomes a moral one. At that moment, leaders must decide: Will they chase the conventional dream of unlimited expansion, or will they build meaning, culture, and craft into something lasting? The companies he profiles choose the latter, crafting organizations that embody the founders’ values while remaining financially solid and creatively alive.

The Core Philosophy: Greatness Over Growth

Choosing greatness over growth doesn’t mean rejecting success. It means redefining what success looks like. Fritz Maytag of Anchor Brewing refused to mass-produce because doing so would dilute the soul of his beer. Gary Erickson of Clif Bar walked away from a $120 million acquisition offer to preserve control of his mission-driven company. Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw of Zingerman’s charted a third way—building a family of local, interdependent businesses instead of franchising nationally. Their decisions prove that restraint, when rooted in clarity of purpose, can amplify rather than limit a firm’s impact.

What Sets Small Giants Apart

Small Giants share a distinctive psychology. They treat ownership and finance as tools to protect identity, not just to fuel growth. They root deeply in place—what Burlingham calls the Mona Lisa Principle—understanding that the surrounding community shapes a company’s artistry. They cultivate intimacy with employees, customers, and suppliers, letting their values show through service and design. And all of them exhibit what Burlingham calls mojo—an invisible yet palpable energy that draws people to them.

Each decision—who owns the company, how it treats its people, whether to open a new branch or take on investors—flows from one question: what kind of life do we want this business to create? The stories reveal that financial choices are moral choices; ownership structure and governance aren’t technicalities but cultural anchors.

What You’ll Learn

Throughout Burlingham’s narrative, you see how founders wrestle with competing pressures. You’ll learn from those who managed to preserve control through internal financing, debt discipline, or employee trusts (like Reell and O.C. Tanner). You’ll explore how companies cultivate mojo through everyday practices—open-book management, training rituals, and storytelling. You’ll discover practical levers for customer intimacy and how enlightened hospitality drives loyalty. You’ll also see how even the most values-driven cultures must bow to financial reality when crises hit—as in Reell’s layoffs or Rhythm & Hues’s tragic bankruptcy.

The deeper argument of Small Giants is that greatness is not a by-product of growth; it is a distinct pursuit requiring discipline, humility, and fierce clarity. To build something great, you must define the boundaries of enough, design structures that protect what you love, and treat every stakeholder—employee, customer, community—as part of the creative act. These businesses prove that when you align purpose, craft, and financial prudence, a company can remain both soulful and successful.

Every enduring business faces a quiet crossroad: the moment growth becomes a temptation rather than a necessity. Burlingham shows that this choice defines a company’s destiny. Fritz Maytag’s Anchor Brewing, Gary Erickson’s Clif Bar, and Ari Weinzweig’s Zingerman’s demonstrate that you can resist expansion without stagnating—if you replace the growth imperative with a pursuit of mastery, quality, and independence.

Redefining Success

When Anchor Brewing’s demand outstripped supply, Maytag could have outsourced production, raised capital, or gone public. Instead, he held to the brewery’s small-batch ethic, recognizing that scale would destroy what made Anchor beloved. Erickson, too, made an existential choice. On the verge of selling Clif Bar for $120 million, he realized the sale would rob him of creative control and meaning. Walking away from the deal, he took on personal debt to buy out his partner and keep the company private. These moments, Burlingham argues, are acts of moral clarity disguised as business decisions.

Alternative Growth Models

Zingerman’s created a community of local businesses—a deli, bakehouse, creamery, and training institute—rather than franchising. This model preserved the Ann Arbor terroir while allowing measured expansion. (Note: Burlingham contrasts this with companies like Starbucks, where scale often erodes local texture.) If you design structures that align with your values, you can grow without betraying your identity.

Why Saying No Matters

Growth brings hidden costs: lost intimacy, outside investors’ pressure, and cultural dilution. Saying no to growth protects autonomy and quality of life. The key is intentionality—recognizing the fork in the road when it appears. Burlingham’s stories remind you that greatness isn’t an accident; it’s a strategic choice to define ‘enough’ and live by it.

Money is never neutral in a values-driven business. Burlingham shows that financing and ownership structures either protect or erode your company’s soul. Founders like Erickson, Maytag, and Thompson treat capital as an architectural element: the beams that hold up culture and control. Once you sell equity, he warns, you also sell voice—and maybe the mission itself.

Controlling the Capital Flow

Growth in capital-intensive industries often demands outside investors. Martin Babinec’s TriNet, forced to raise venture funding, lost effective control and became unrecognizable to its founder. In contrast, Clif Bar’s Erickson financed independence through debt—even at punishing interest rates—so he could preserve Clif’s integrity. The principle: prefer debt or internal cash to equity unless investors share your mission.

Employee and Legacy Ownership

ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans) can align ownership with values when structured carefully. ECCO, Reell, and O.C. Tanner used them to keep equity in trusted hands. But ESOPs carry obligations—future stock repurchases that can stress cash flow. Owners like Jim Thompson recognized the risk and disciplined their balance sheets accordingly.

Choosing Partnership Intentionally

The Small Giants mindset reframes investors, successors, and even lenders as custodians of mission. If you must take outside money, choose partners who honor stewardship over short-term gains. Ownership, in Burlingham’s world, is the ultimate act of design: it decides who shapes the company’s future and what values endure when the founder steps away.

Mojo is the intangible energy that tells you a company is special before you know why. Burlingham uses the term to describe a spark that binds employees, customers, and community. It’s visible at Clif Bar’s lively trade-show booths, audible in Zingerman’s passionate staff huddles, and tangible in the way customers talk about Anchor’s beer or Righteous Babe’s music. Mojo is culture made visible—and like any living thing, it requires care.

How Mojo Arises

Mojo grows when people align around a clear mission and feel emotionally connected to purpose. Gary Erickson embedded the term in Clif Bar’s culture; employees wrote essays defining their own version. Ari Weinzweig institutionalized reflection through ZingTrain workshops. In each case, leaders designed rituals to keep purpose alive and teach new members the story of why the company exists.

Culture of Intimacy

At CitiStorage, employees were encouraged to surprise customers with personal gestures—a smile, a welcome letter, a tour from Norm Brodsky himself. At Reell, governance structures like co-CEOs and open forums made debate safe. Companies as diverse as O.C. Tanner and LFS Touring used transparency, profit sharing, and care to turn employment into community. These cultures produce ‘psychic ownership’—a sense that every worker co-creates the business.

Losing and Regaining Mojo

Growth, bureaucracy, or financial panic can kill mojo. Burlingham’s examples caution that once it fades, restoration demands honesty and systems of learning. Ask employees what mojo means to them; connect everyone to the customer; and tie daily practices to values. Mojo isn’t magic—it’s a renewable energy that powers great companies when culture and purpose stay aligned.

Small Giants flourish not in abstraction but in place. Burlingham’s ‘Mona Lisa Principle’ holds that a company’s frame—its community, geography, and relationships—shapes its beauty. These firms thrive by embedding themselves in their surroundings and treating customers as neighbors rather than segments.

The Power of Place

Ari Weinzweig calls it ‘terroir for business’: the food, history, and people of Ann Arbor became part of Zingerman’s identity. Righteous Babe’s decision to restore a derelict church in Buffalo made the company a civic symbol as well as a record label. These examples remind you that community investment is not charity—it is brand embodiment. Place tells customers who you are.

Customer Intimacy as Practice

Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group built its empire on emotional connection. Servers are taught to act with empathy—every mistake becomes a moment to impress. Clif Bar sponsors small athletic events instead of mass ads, trading scale for authenticity. ECCO collaborates directly with customers to engineer bespoke alarm systems. In these firms, intimacy and excellence reinforce each other.

Designing Intimate Systems

To sustain intimacy, hire for emotional intelligence, build rituals that honor customers, and keep communication loops short. Let your product, city, and story intertwine. The more specific your roots, the harder they are to copy—and the stronger your connection to those who care most.

Purpose doesn’t pay the bills. Burlingham emphasizes that financial discipline is the lifeline of any mission-driven firm. Norm Brodsky’s warning—‘You live or die on cash flow’—echoes through every chapter. The Small Giants that endure treat balance sheets and margins as moral instruments: they ensure culture has a home.

Guarding Margins and Models

Chasing volume often erodes profitability and freedom. Reell’s laptop-hinge expansion inflated revenue but collapsed gross margins, nearly bankrupting the company. Rhythm & Hues accepted fixed-price film contracts to preserve staff but bled cash until Chapter 11. By contrast, CitiStorage thrived by managing costs and density, proving that small efficiencies can protect both profit and integrity.

Culture Meets Reality

Reell and Rhythm & Hues show how ethics can collide with survival. Delaying layoffs or refusing price increases feels humane—but can become fatal. When cuts become inevitable, doing them transparently and quickly preserves more trust than slow attrition. The painful truth: to preserve culture, you must sometimes sacrifice comfort.

Financial Craftsmanship

Burlingham distills three survival imperatives: protect gross margins, maintain a strong balance sheet, and stress-test the business model. Cash reserves and sustainable pricing buy you the freedom to live your values. Without that discipline, even the noblest mission can crumble.

No company stays small and soulful by accident; it must evolve wisely. Burlingham explores how founders pass the torch and reinvent without losing purpose. Whether through ESOPs, family succession, or strategic pivots, the principle is the same: protect the essence while modernizing the form.

Succession as Stewardship

ECCO’s Jim Thompson sold to an ESOP to anchor ownership among employees, while grooming his son Chris for leadership. Reell did the same, though it later struggled with repurchase liabilities. The lesson: succession planning must balance liquidity, governance, and sustainability. Selling to aligned insiders may preserve identity better than a lucrative buyout to outsiders.

When to Sell

Some founders eventually sell to strategic buyers when personal or regulatory constraints loom, as Carl Schmitt did at University Bank. But selling often erases mojo. Fritz Maytag softened the blow by selecting buyers committed to Anchor’s legacy. If you must sell, negotiate terms that guard the company’s culture beyond the transaction.

Reinventing the Small Giant

Adaptation is a form of succession too. Hammerhead Productions shifted from visual effects services to owning film IP; O.C. Tanner transformed from awards manufacturing to recognition solutions. Both reinvented while keeping core purpose intact. Reinvention, Burlingham shows, is not abandonment—it’s a reaffirmation of values through a new business model.

Behind every Small Giant lies operational craftsmanship—simple, transparent systems that make excellence habitual. Burlingham uncovers three levers common to his exemplars: empowerment, lean improvement, and financial openness. Together they turn ideals into repeatable performance.

Empowerment Through Teach–Equip–Trust

Reell’s “TET” approach replaced inspectors with self-checking operators, doubling throughput and deepening engagement. When you teach people to master their craft, equip them with tools, and trust their judgment, you build self-correcting teams rather than obedient workers.

Lean and Visual Management

Companies like Reell and Artists Frame Service use visual cues—production boards, daily huddles—to turn performance into something everyone can see. Visibility fosters accountability and pride, transforming continuous improvement from management mandate to shared habit.

Open-Book Management

Financial transparency, when paired with education, turns employees into partners. At Zingerman’s, staff review the books in weekly huddles, propose ideas, and share sacrifices when times are tough. Rhythm & Hues did the same, teaching film artists to read cash forecasts. The principle is universal: when people understand the numbers, they make better, more human decisions.

Burlingham ends by reframing entrepreneurship as art. Small Giants treat their companies as creative media—ways to express values, vision, and mastery. Whether you’re a perfumer, brewer, or record producer, the artistic impulse pushes you to create something beautiful and enduring, not just profitable.

Forms of Creative Enterprise

Selima Stavola keeps her couture atelier intentionally tiny so each gown remains a personal artwork. Norm Brodsky turns logistics into a creative game—his warehouses are puzzles waiting to be solved. Ani DiFranco and Scot Fisher divide creative and operational labor, balancing art with enterprise. Each model honors artistry by structuring business to serve it rather than consume it.

Your Creative Choice

As Bernie Goldhirsh put it, “The entrepreneur is like an artist, only business is the means of his expression.” Burlingham invites you to decide what kind of artist you are: do you want a masterpiece few will see, or a public gallery run with integrity? In either case, mastery, not magnitude, defines greatness. When you treat business as an art form, you commit to beauty through discipline, sustainability, and purpose.