Scaling Without Losing Your Soul

You scale without losing your soul by deciding what the soul is before you grow. If you cannot say what makes the company yours, growth will decide for you.

What I mean by soul

I mean the people and the questions behind a company. For me that is the craft of surfacing, the contractors I train and the curiosity that made me look at the USA in the first place. Take those away and what is left is a distribution business that happens to have my name on it.

Resin Rock began with a mission to bring resin bound to the USA. It has grown into a multi-location network with seven distribution locations serving contractors, homeowners and commercial partners. That is a lot of growth. The mission is still the reason I get up.

Growth changes your job

Early on, you do everything. You know every customer and every job. As the company grows, you stop doing the work and start building the system that does it. That is a real loss, and it is also necessary.

The risk is that you drift away from the people the company serves. Reports replace conversations. A dashboard says things are fine while the contractor on the other end is quietly frustrated. You only notice later, when the damage is done.

If you cannot say what makes the company yours, growth will decide for you.

One family of companies, one set of values

I run Resin Rock along with Resin Rubber, Glow Surfaces, Wavefront Studio and Resin Trims. Each has its own customers and its own work. Wavefront Studio is the digital arm, building websites, calculators and chatbots. Glow Surfaces created Glow Rock, a luminescent aggregate for resin bound surfaces.

Having several companies makes the question sharper. If each one drifts into its own culture, the group loses its shape. The standard I want across all of them is the same: stay close to the craft and look after the people who rely on us.

Questions worth asking

Who did we help this month, and do I know them? A company that cannot name its recent customers has lost touch. What did we decide to do slowly because it mattered? Speed is attractive, and some things need patience, such as training a contractor properly.

What would I be embarrassed to explain to the first installer who trusted us? That question catches decisions that look sensible in a spreadsheet and feel wrong on a job site.

Training as a way to stay close

Installer training is one place where scale and closeness meet. Forbes Scotland wrote about the network that training built, with contractors across multiple states applying the same techniques. Teaching a person to do the work means spending time with them. It keeps the company honest about what the work is really like.

After the award

In 2026 I was honoured with the Business Elite “40 Under 40” Award in New York. Recognition looks backwards. The test is how the company treats people next year. You can see more of the events on the awards page.

The temptation to standardise everything

As a company grows, standard procedures are useful. They save time and reduce mistakes. They can also flatten the things that made the company interesting. Every exception starts to look like a problem to eliminate.

Keep a place for judgment. A contractor with an unusual project deserves a real conversation, even if a form could handle it. If the team learns that only the form counts, you slowly lose the people who care about the craft.

Hiring and handing over

Growth means giving away work you used to love. Handing it over to someone else is hard, and holding on to everything is worse. Look for people who share the curiosity behind the company, then give them room to do the job their own way.

Your job is to be clear about what matters and then step back. If you hand over a task without handing over the reason for it, you will get a copy of your method with none of the thinking behind it.

Questions people ask me

How do you grow without losing culture?

Decide what the culture is before you scale, and keep making decisions that match it. Growth tests values more than it creates them.

How many companies do you run?

I am the founder of Resin Rock and its sister companies: Resin Rubber, Glow Surfaces, Wavefront Studio and Resin Trims.

Can you help me scale my business?

That is a big part of my business strategy work in consultations. We start with what you want the company to stay true to.

Grow with a plan you can live with

If your company is growing faster than your sense of who it is for, let us talk. Book a call with me. You can also read my story to see how I think about it.