I Grew to 20 People, Then Went Back to 6

Here’s a number that took me twenty years to properly understand: I make as much money from Davies Construction with six people as I did with more than twenty. Same profit. A fraction of the stress. And a couple of hours a week of my time instead of all of it.

Nobody says this out loud in the building industry, so I will: growth sucks. Not always, not for everyone, but far more often than the business content on your feed admits. Every builder is told the ladder goes up forever: more staff, more jobs, more revenue, and implicitly, more success. I climbed that ladder. Twenty-plus people at the peak. And what I found up there was a big engine I was personally responsible for feeding, every week, forever.

What the big crew actually costs

The maths that nobody shows you: every person you add doesn’t just add a wage, it adds to the volume of work you must win to keep everyone fed. More houses just to feed the machine. More moving parts that can go wrong. More exposure when the market moves, because a downturn that’s uncomfortable for a six-person crew is existential for a twenty-five person one.

And the prize for managing all of that, most years, is a profit that a tight small crew could have matched. I know builders running big teams who are doing it brilliantly, and I take nothing away from them. Mates of mine run 38 people and make it work. But when I’m honest about what I want from a building company, the trade never made sense for me, and I don’t think it makes sense for most of the builders who feel obliged to attempt it.

The sweet spot for a quality residential builder

If I were describing the target to a builder five years behind me, here’s the shape I’d draw:

• Four to six million dollars a year of turnover. Enough to run beautiful projects and a real team, not so much that you’re hostage to volume.
• A small crew that knows each other. The size where everyone knows everyone’s family, new people absorb the culture by proximity, and quality is a shared standard rather than an inspection regime.
• A few hundred grand a year of owner’s salary, taken reliably, not theoretically.
• The owner working a couple of hours a week in it, because the team and the systems carry the rest.

That last point is the real flex, and it has nothing to do with headcount. It comes from having the right people carrying your standard, which I’ve written about in talking through your reasoning, and systems that surface problems without you looking for them.

Past that four-to-six range, in my experience, every extra million buys you more reliance on the market staying kind, more layers between you and the work you loved, and surprisingly little extra money at the bottom line.

Enough is a strategy, not a compromise

I got into building because building houses is fun, and I’d bet you did too. Somewhere in the growth years that got lost for me, and the way back wasn’t scaling further, it was scaling back to the size where the business served my life instead of consuming it.

If your vision genuinely is a hundred people, go with everything you have. But if you got into business to create a workplace you’d want to work at, with a crew you enjoy, building homes you’re proud of, while being present for your family, then hear it from someone who went up the ladder and came back down: the small, excellent, systemised building company isn’t the consolation prize. It’s the prize.

The honest question isn’t “how big can I get?” It’s “what size lets me do the parts I love and skip the parts I don’t?” Answer that first. Then build exactly that, and not one person more.