In the public imagination, a company’s decision to pursue growth is often framed as a virtue or a vice, but honestly, it’s not a choice. It does, however, look different from company to company. For publicly owned companies, growth is non negotiable and relentlessly tracked, with the goal of ‘making the quarter’ trumping all else. For venture capital backed and private equity owned companies, the pressure to grow can be even more intense. For privately held companies, and especially those that are committed to People and Purpose–in other words Evergreen® companies–growth can feel more fraught. Neither virtue nor vice, it is necessary for survival, but dangerous if it becomes the sole measure of success.

At David Weekley Homes, the homebuilding company of which I am my family’s second-generation President, we have chosen to approach this not as a tension but as an accepted reality. The question to address is not whether we will grow, but rather how.