13 Founders Reveal the One Decision That Shaped Their Company’s Growth
Every founder faces countless decisions, but some choices carry disproportionate weight. The decision to niche down, bring on a partner, or invest in a specific channel can reshape a company’s entire trajectory.
We asked successful entrepreneurs and business owners to identify the single decision that had the biggest impact on their long-term growth. Their answers reveal a clear pattern: sustainable growth doesn’t come from chasing every opportunity or maximizing short-term revenue. It comes from strategic focus, aligned partnerships, and the discipline to say no to the wrong things so you can say yes to the right ones.
Bring In A Complementary Partner
Bringing my brother Caleb on as partner in 2010 was probably the single most important decision for my business’s long-term growth.
By 2010, I had been managing properties for eight years, growing the business organically but still operating largely as a solo founder. When Caleb joined as co-owner and CFO, everything changed. Scaling a company requires different strengths and perspectives than those needed to get it off the ground, and his partnership made that evolution possible.
Caleb brought financial systems, operational structure, and a different way of thinking about the business that complemented what I was already doing. I’m the visionary, the relationship builder, the person focused on values and culture. He’s the one who helped us scale those things systematically.
Partnership also meant I wasn’t carrying every decision alone anymore. We could challenge each other, divide responsibilities, and build something bigger than either of us could have built individually. That kind of partnership creates resilience. When one of us is struggling with something, the other can step in.
The other thing that mattered is that we share the same fundamental values about how we want to run this company. We both believe in being people-forward, in doing the right thing even when it’s harder, in building relationships that matter. Without that alignment, partnership can tear a business apart. With it, it becomes your biggest strength.
Sustainable growth requires letting go of doing everything yourself and trusting the right people to build alongside you.
Jennifer Fox, Owner/CEO, Fox Property Management
Focus On Outcomes, Not Activities
The most consequential decision was ensuring to anchor every engagement around the outcome the client actually needs, not the activity they first describe. For instance, when I provide project management services, I ensure the role is not treated as coordination of tasks. The focus is on delivering the benefit the project is meant to create. A project can run to time and budget yet still fail to move their business forward. The real proof is whether the work changes something that matters.
In sectors like aerospace and manufacturing, this means starting with questions that cannot be left unanswered. What problem are we solving? What risk are we removing? What operational reality must look different when this is finished? Once those points are clear the project can be steered towards the outcome the client is genuinely seeking.
The impact on long term growth is clearly visible, as clients remember the project leader who stabilised a failing product development, recovered a supply chain transfer or protected their production line. They return because the outcome was felt across their operation. Focusing on outcomes creates a reputation that cannot be manufactured through marketing or any other route.
Nikos Apergis, Founder, Alphacron
Put Customers Before Sales
For me, the one decision that changed everything was fully committing to a borrower-first model. During the infancy days of my company, it was tempting to run volume just to demonstrate momentum. But, I saw too many brokers burn up quickly as their clients became too much of a transaction and not enough of a relationship. That’s when I decided that the beginning of any loan should not start with a quota, but a conversation. That change slowed us down initially, but it created an unmatched level of trust. The most surprising aspect of doing this was how rapidly referrals started to replace cold lead contacts. Every step we have taken since (adding loan programs, expanding our team, refining our software) all come from the same borrower-first foundation.
That decision created value because trust grows exponentially faster than any other aspect of business. As soon as clients realized that we were more focused on education than sales, they started sending their friends and families to work with us. I still find myself astonished at how often new clients will begin a phone call stating that they were sent to work with me by 2-3 separate people. That trust established a reputation that no amount of advertising can create. My transparency became the best marketing tool we have ever employed. Because our clients are well-informed regarding the rationale behind every decision related to their loan, they are more confident and loyal to us.
Ryan McCallister, President & Founder, F5 Mortgage
Turn Down Work Outside Your Niche
Saying no to projects outside my niche. Early on I took everything. Website copy, social media management, random admin work, whatever paid. But I was exhausted, my portfolio was all over the place, and clients saw me as a generalist they could lowball.
The change happened when I turned down a project because it had nothing to do with what I actually wanted to build. Scary at the time. But that opened up space for better work to come in. I started positioning myself specifically around PR and SEO content and suddenly the right clients found me. Referrals got better too because people could actually explain what I do. The long term impact is huge. I was only competing with others in my specific lane. That one decision to get focused changed the whole direction of the business.
Matias Rodsevich, Founder & CEO, PRLab
Niche Down To Scale Up
The decision that had the biggest long-term impact on my business was niching down.
In 2015, at our peak, my company was filming 100 weddings a year. We were busy nonstop. From the outside, it looked like success. I remember telling my mentor how slammed we were and casually mentioning I was paying myself about $2,000 a month.
He looked at me and said, “How are you eating?”
That question woke me up. Hustle had fooled me into thinking I had a great business, when I really had a high-stress job with low profit. So I made a shift and launched corporatefilming.com to start doing business videos. Corporate work paid 10x what weddings did, was easier, and wrapped faster. Eventually the business became a 50/50 split between weddings and corporate.
Then in 2020, I fell into franchising. Around that time, I read “Focus” by Al Ries, and it changed everything.
Here are three lessons from that book that directly shaped our growth:
First, don’t be everything to everyone. The book explains that broad positioning makes you invisible. Narrow positioning makes you memorable.
Second, be the shiny fish in a small pond. It’s better to dominate a specific niche than fight for attention in a crowded market. When someone has a clear problem and you are known for solving it, they choose you faster.
Third, focus creates leverage. When you commit to one audience, your marketing, sales, messaging, and referrals all get easier and more effective.
Once we fully committed to franchising, everything changed. We tripled revenue, grew the team, built better systems, and enjoyed the work more.
The biggest lesson? Busy does not mean profitable. Focus does.
Trevor Rappleye, CEO, FranchiseFilming
Build For Scale, Not Customization
The decision that had the biggest impact on my company’s long-term growth was choosing to build around a clear, repeatable problem instead of chasing short-term demand. Early on, we had opportunities to customize the product heavily for individual customers. This would have generated faster revenue, but it would have pulled us into a services mindset.
Instead, we committed to solving one core problem well: helping teams consistently create and distribute high-performing marketing content without adding headcount. That decision forced us to say no to custom work and invest more deeply in product, automation, and workflows that could scale.
It was uncomfortable at first. Growth was slower in the short term, and saying no to paying customers is never easy. But it paid off by keeping the product focused and making every improvement compound across all users. It also clarified who we were building for and what success looked like.
In the long run, that focus made hiring easier, product decisions clearer, and growth more predictable. The biggest impact did not come from a single feature or channel. It came from committing early to building something scalable, even when the easier path was right in front of us.
Ahad Shams, Founder, Heyoz
Prioritize Culture Fit Over Credentials
I decided to stop hiring based on resumes alone. That was my biggest turning point. Early in my career, I brought on a brilliant developer. He knew more than anyone else in the room. But he was impossible to work with. He refused feedback and belittled junior staff. The atmosphere in the office turned toxic.
I made the hard choice to let him go, even though it meant missing a deadline. It hurt in the short term. But the team immediately rallied. Morale improved, and we actually started shipping products faster. Prioritizing cultural fit over raw talent saved my company. You can teach skills, but you can’t teach someone to care about their teammates.
Nikhil Pai, Founder, Chronicle Technologies
Get Your First Hires Right
Hiring the right people had the biggest impact. When I was just starting my business, I was lucky to meet technical specialists who helped me build the company’s foundation. Early employees define the company’s culture and quality standards for the future team, and I’m proud that many of them have grown alongside the company over the past eight years. For example, one of the first developers is now the company’s CTO. Getting the right hires early made it easier to attract strong talent later and scale engineering expertise without chaos.
Mykhailo Kopyl, CEO & Founder, Seedium
Invest In Being Found First
We made SEO and digital visibility our foundation, not a follow-up.
We decided early on that we wouldn’t just “do marketing” for clients — we would become experts at being found. That meant investing in our own SEO, AI search optimization, and analytics before chasing leads. We optimized our own content, ranked locally and nationally, and let our visibility generate credibility.
It completely shifted how we sold and scaled. Clients came in warmer, more educated, and often already convinced of our value. That allowed us to focus on results, not convincing people we were legit.
It also meant we could practice what we preached: Every recommendation we make to a client, we’ve tested ourselves first.
Growth isn’t just about doing more — it’s about being discoverable, trustworthy, and consistent. For us, SEO made that possible.
Christopher Kemper, President, EMILY Revolutionary Marketing Group
Specialize Instead Of Generalizing
The biggest decision we took was choosing to specialize instead of saying yes to everything. In the early days we took any project that came in. Websites, apps, branding, random builds. It paid the bills, but focus was scattered and retention was negligible.
Once we focused on doing just 1-2 things as best as we could, things started showing up. Sales got easier, referrals were better, and our work improved because we were solving the same kinds of problems over and over.
I have seen this with a lot of teams we work with too. The ones that grow steadily are not chasing every opportunity. They pick a lane, go deep, and let that depth turn into reputation and actual long term growth.
Siddharth Vij, CEO, Bricx Labs
Choose Focus Over Speed
The largest and most important long-term growth decision we made was to prioritize focus over speed. Rather than pursuing every opportunity as they arose, we concentrated on our strengths early on by minimizing our service offerings, creating a strong industry position, and rejecting too many opportunities that didn’t fit our vision. Although taking this approach took us longer to achieve our status, it provided a tremendous amount of clarity for our entire organization.
Our team has a clear understanding of who we are as a company, and as a result our clients also know exactly what kinds of services they should buy from us. Due to establishing clarity, our systems were able to grow and scale without breaking. Having a focused approach has allowed us to develop a repeatable series of business processes, hire strategically for the future, and to produce consistently high-quality deliverables. Predictability of growth has come from having a clear vision and direction, rather than an over-indulgence of hard work.
Gabriel Shaoolian, CEO and Founder, Digital Silk
Hire For Culture, Train For Skill
The biggest decision that’s impacted our long-term growth was getting really clear about our culture and making sure the people we hire truly align with it.
In the beginning, we focused a lot on skill and experience, which of course matter. But over time, I realized some of that can be taught. What can’t be taught is whether someone fits your culture.
Our culture requires passion, integrity, hard work, respect, being team-oriented, self-directed, and no drama. Those aren’t traits you can train into someone, they’re either part of who they are or they’re not.
When you have the right fit, people are focused, invested, and genuinely happy. When you don’t, too much energy gets pulled away from moving the company forward. Skill matters, but culture fit is what sustains long-term success.
Talia Mashiach, CEO and Founder, Eved
Invest In Long-Term SEO
For us, it’s been investing in SEO as a long-term growth marketing strategy.
SEO requires you to be really patient and have a lot of faith in your initial strategy — months of work can lead to minimal improvements and you start to wonder if you’re just throwing cash out the window.
But for us, that investment has paid off. Instead of investing our marketing budget in paid ads that, yes, would have had a predictable and repeatable ROI but would never stop demanding more money, instead we can now reallocate that marketing budget to scale while our SEO pays for the leads by itself.
Get your SEO strategy right and invest in it properly and you’ll have a much healthier foundation to scale from long-term.
Luther Yeates, Co-Founder, UK Expat Mortgage
The most consequential business decisions aren’t always the flashiest ones. As these founders demonstrate, sustainable growth often stems from choices that feel counterintuitive in the moment—turning down revenue, narrowing your focus, or prioritizing culture over credentials.
What stands out across these stories is the willingness to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term positioning. Whether it’s investing months in SEO before seeing results, letting go of a brilliant but toxic employee, or saying no to projects that don’t fit your vision, the founders who scaled successfully were the ones who had the clarity and conviction to make hard choices early.
The question isn’t just what decision you’ll make—it’s whether you’ll have the discipline to stick with it long enough to see it pay off.
