Welcome to issue #002 of Unicorn Parents. Each week, I share practical insights and reflections to help you build a profitable business without missing the magic at home. If you're serious about winning at work while raising great kids, you’ve come to the right place. This is a community built for ambitious parents who want both.
Silicon Valley and Wall Street worship scale.
Double your headcount in six months? Applause.
Raise a massive round at a sky-high valuation? Envy.
Growth isn’t just seen as success.
It’s treated as destiny.
It’s like a new drug—we don’t yet know all the side effects.
But we already see the costs:
Families fractured
Founders burnt out
Communities hollowed out
Yet, we continue measuring everything by growth metrics.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that “bigger is better.”
But what if bigger isn’t always better?
That’s the radical premise of Bo Burlingham’s book Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big.
He tells the stories of businesses that said no to “grow at all costs.” They stayed private. They resisted the pressure to franchise, IPO, or sell out. Instead, they built enduring businesses rooted in values, culture, and community.
For business owners who are also parents—Unicorn Parents—the pressure to scale doesn’t just test your company. It tests your family, your relationships, and your sense of purpose.
Burlingham reminds us there’s another way.
What Makes a Small Giant?
Burlingham identifies several shared traits across Small Giants:
Intentional Scale: Choosing to stay human-sized, where leaders can know employees by name and customers by story.
Values Over Valuation: Resisting pressure to go public, sell out, or expand recklessly when it would compromise the company’s soul.
Deep Roots in Community: Businesses that are not just located in a place, but woven into it.
People-First Leadership: Building organizations where employees thrive, not burn out.
It’s a philosophy that flies in the face of Silicon Valley’s “unicorn or bust” culture. But it produces businesses with longevity, loyalty, and legacy.
Proof That Greatness Wins
Let’s look at two family-owned companies that chose greatness over growth.
Abt Electronics: Staying Power Through People
Consider Abt Electronics, a Chicago-based retailer founded in 1936. While competitors raced to build national chains, Abt chose a different path: remain family-owned, run from a single location, and focus on customer service so remarkable it borders on legendary.
Employees stay for decades. Customers return for generations. The Abt family sees its business as inseparable from the Chicagoland community. The result? A company that not only survives the Amazon era but thrives because it offers something scale alone can’t deliver: trust, loyalty, and a human touch.
In-N-Out Burger: Restraint as Strategy
Then there’s In-N-Out Burger. In a fast-food industry obsessed with franchising and global dominance, In-N-Out deliberately limited expansion. No franchising, no IPO. The family insisted on controlling quality, paying above-average wages, and keeping the menu simple.
By refusing to dilute its culture, In-N-Out built something far more valuable than geographic reach: a cult-like devotion among customers and employees. Its per-store profits outpace many larger competitors. Its brand is iconic, precisely because it resisted the lure of becoming “just another chain.”
Why This Matters for Unicorn Parents
For entrepreneurs raising families, the Small Giants philosophy is more than a business strategy. It’s a survival strategy.
Rapid growth can be intoxicating, but it often leaves fractured cultures, burnt-out leaders, and families stretched to breaking. Choosing to build a business that prioritizes greatness—defined as quality, integrity, and soul—offers a different path.
It means you can be present at the dinner table while still being proud of what you’re building. It means your kids inherit not just wealth, but a living example of how values shape enterprise.
A Different Kind of Unicorn
Not every business needs to be a unicorn—chasing sky-high valuations while burning through people and purpose. Some of the most admired companies in America chose a different destiny: to be Small Giants.
For Unicorn Parents, that choice is liberating. Because maybe the real mark of success isn’t chasing the fastest possible growth, but choosing to be a different kind of unicorn—the kind that builds a business with staying power and raises children who love you, thrive, and grow into their own gifts, talents, and callings.
Greatness over growth. Not just a business philosophy—but a family one.