Growth is often treated as the natural measure of business success. More clients, more staff, more revenue and greater market share. But before starting Vanta Advisory, Alex and I questioned whether that approach was necessarily right for the business we wanted to build. We decided early on that remaining relatively small wasn't something we would tolerate until we became bigger. It was part of the design.

When growth becomes the objective

Before Alex and I started Vanta Advisory, we spent almost as much time discussing what we didn't want the business to become as we did thinking about what we wanted to build. We came from quite different professional backgrounds, but both had enough experience across businesses and industries to have seen organisations at different stages of their development. One observation that stayed with us was how easily growth becomes the objective rather than the consequence of doing something well.

The conventional progression is understandable. You establish a business, build a client base, increase revenue, employ more people, expand your capacity and repeat the process. Eventually, a business that began with a particular expertise can become a much larger organisation with very different priorities. There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach and, in many industries, scale improves efficiency, accessibility and ultimately the customer experience. But we questioned whether the same logic applied to the kind of commercial property advisory business we wanted to establish, particularly when so much of the value being delivered depends on experience, judgement and the time available to exercise both.

Defining enough

One of the more interesting questions we asked ourselves was also one of the simplest: what is enough? We spend a lot of time in business discussing how to generate more revenue, attract more clients and increase profitability, but there seems to be considerably less discussion about what level of activity is actually required to build a financially successful and sustainable business. Once a particular revenue target is achieved, the next objective is usually to make it larger, often without much consideration for whether the business or its clients would genuinely benefit from that growth.

Commercial property advisory gave us an opportunity to approach that question differently. The economics of our industry mean that a relatively small number of successful transactions can support a good business, without necessarily requiring a large organisation or significant transaction volume. That distinction matters because growth tends to create its own requirements. More staff generally means greater overheads, greater overheads require more revenue, and more revenue requires more clients and ultimately more transactions. Over time, a business can find itself needing to generate activity simply to support the structure it has created, regardless of whether the underlying opportunities justify that activity.

We wanted to avoid building an organisation whose financial requirements might eventually influence its willingness to transact. Defining what we considered to be enough gave us the freedom to establish those boundaries before commercial success potentially made them more difficult to maintain. It also meant we could approach the business with a different set of priorities, where financial performance remained important but wasn't the only measure against which every decision would be made.

Not everything valuable can scale

There is another consideration that is particularly relevant to our industry. Commercial property acquisition is heavily dependent on experience, judgement and time, and while there are many aspects of the process that can become more efficient, the core of what clients engage us for is considerably more difficult to replicate. Research, information management, technology and administrative processes can all be improved, and we invest time in doing exactly that. But assessing a commercial property requires understanding the asset, its tenant, lease structure, market conditions, future adaptability and potential risks. Some of those considerations can be modelled or documented, while others require experience and the ability to recognise problems that aren't necessarily obvious in a spreadsheet.

Importantly, the outcome of that work is often a decision not to proceed. We can spend considerable time assessing an opportunity only to conclude that the most appropriate recommendation is to do nothing, and that is a perfectly acceptable outcome within the model we have chosen. There is also a limit to the number of genuinely suitable opportunities available in the market. If we double the number of clients we represent, the market doesn't automatically produce twice as many properties that meet our criteria. We simply introduce more capital into a relatively finite pool of opportunities, which doesn't necessarily improve the investment outcomes available to those clients.

That reality influenced one of our most important decisions: limiting the number of mandates we accept at any given time. We wanted to preserve the ability to assess opportunities thoroughly, reject properties without commercial pressure and remain personally involved in the decisions our clients are paying us to make. While processes and technology can improve our efficiency, we don't believe that the experience, judgement and individual attention underpinning our service can be expanded indefinitely without eventually changing the nature of what we provide.

A constraint worth protecting

Of course, this model has limitations, and we are conscious of them. There is a ceiling on the number of clients we can properly service, and our growth potential is different from that of a business designed around increasing transaction volume and expanding its team. We accept those trade-offs because they protect the characteristics we believe are most important to the service, even if that means deliberately forgoing opportunities that might otherwise contribute to revenue.

I am a strong believer in low-volume, high-value businesses where the economics support that approach, although I wouldn't suggest it is a model that works in every industry or is necessarily preferable for every business owner. For what we do, however, it makes sense. Vanta was never designed to become the largest commercial property acquisition business in Australia. We wanted to build a commercially successful business that allowed us to remain selective, personally accountable and focused on the quality of our work.

Nearly a year into that journey, the principle hasn't changed. Small isn't something we are temporarily tolerating until we become bigger. It is part of the design.