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The Entrepreneurs Council: prioritizing growth vs. profitability

Growth fuels ambition. Profitability secures the future. But which matters most when you’re building a business that lasts? The answer often depends on where you are in your journey, how you’re funded and what the market is signaling. Members of the Entrepreneurs Council share how they navigate this landscape, the trade-offs involved and the strategies that help them stay ahead.

Q: What lessons have you learned about capital discipline that you wish you knew earlier?

Keith L. Harper, A&B Talent

Early in my entrepreneurial journey, I had the misconception that momentum alone would sustain growth. After many hard lessons, I’ve learned that disciplined cash management is just as critical as innovation or vision. Planning with discipline is key to achieving the vision. Every investment must be strategic and have a clear measurable return. Every dollar has a job to do, and it must earn its return.

Some of our best results have come from simplifying instead of expanding, focusing resources on what works, not what’s trendy. The discipline to pause, evaluate and realign has proven to be one of the most valuable forms of leadership I’ve learned.

That mindset has helped A&B Talent to grow significantly with stability, integrity and intention.
Dan Oliver, Dan-O's Seasoning

If there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way, it’s this: you've got to protect the money.

Early on, I handed out too much freedom with spending, assuming people had good intentions. These days, I look at every dollar like it’s got a job to do. If it’s not working to grow the business or make us better, it doesn’t get spent. That means knowing our numbers, like EBITDA and ROI, and making sure every “yes” actually moves us forward. It’s not about saying no to big ideas or holding people back. It’s about being smart, which means spending with purpose and making sure every bit of it goes toward something that makes a real difference.

I wish I’d learned sooner that being generous isn’t the same as being careless. Capital discipline isn’t about tightening the reins; it’s about building trust, staying sharp and running this business with the same kind of care we put into our seasonings: thoughtful, intentional and full of flavor.

Q: How have investor expectations around growth and profitability impacted your company’s strategy?

Elvia Chavez, MC Electric

Potential investors are heavily focused on EBITDA, past performance, and recurring or scalable service work. And I get it; it’s a lot easier to plug predictable numbers into that growth model. But new business, new builds and one-and-done projects are just as valuable. That’s harder to model but it’s what we’re really good at.

When it comes to capital, I’ve learned that loans or outside investors aren’t always the answer. We’ve built our strength by executing “one-and-done” projects with excellence. That’s what builds trust and reputation in our industry. While we’re aware of the investor buzz around what makes a company sellable, we also know when to turn down the noise.

Our strategy is simple: build a great team, stay sharp on execution and focus on the customer in front of us. The numbers follow when the fundamentals are strong.
Christopher Barnett, ABA Centers and ICBD Holdings, LLC

Investor expectations around growth and profitability have certainly shaped the greater healthcare landscape in recent years, but in our case, the most defining strategic decision we made was to self-fund our growth.

We did that intentionally because our commitment to clinical excellence was – and remains – a non-negotiable. Outside investors often push for rapid scale and near-term margin gains and, at times, that can conflict with building a care model that truly puts the patient first.

During our formative years, we sacrificed short-term profitability to build a brand and a standard of care that would redefine the way the autism care is provided. We set out to build a disruptive company, one that reimagined what care could look like, and that vision required a higher cost of services. When considering a strategic partner over the years, we were worried that they wouldn’t appreciate the value in remaining rigid to our principle of not scaling without an ability to ensure clinical excellence.

We believed – and we still believe – that if you build the best clinical model while looking to find efficiencies through data-driven decisions and technology, profitability will ensue. Alternatively, if you chase profitability at the expense of clinical excellence, you lose both. Remaining self-funded has allowed us to maintain full control – control over culture, control over pace, control over quality. That’s rare in healthcare, and it’s been one of our greatest advantages.

Furthermore, because we didn’t have a strategic growth partner to bail us out of any bad business moves, every decision had to be disciplined. Every expansion had to be justified with data. Every dollar had to move us toward measurable outcomes. And, most importantly, every resource allocation had to be guided by our mission to change lives. Refusing to bring on a strategic partner forced us to be lean and intentional in how we scaled.

The result is that, today, our growth is both strong and sustainable. Our clinical standards are uncompromised. Our brand is differentiated. And we didn’t have to deviate from our mission to get here.

Q: How do you balance the need to innovate for long-term growth with the discipline of achieving short-term profitability?

Suneera Madhani, Worth

For me, it starts with setting clear strategic anchors. Every opportunity gets weighed against three priorities:

Does it drive revenue?
Does it deepen product value?
Does it compound enterprise value?

Innovation is essential, but not all innovation deserves resources right now. I’ve learned to run the business on two tracks simultaneously:

Track one: short-term operational discipline (profitability, repeatability, efficiency)
Track two: long-term innovation (R&D, product evolution, strategic bets)

What keeps us grounded is sequencing: you don’t build everything at once. You build in the order that the market pulls. Innovation must be market-validated, not founder-fantasized.
Katherine Kostereva, Creatio

I don’t think CEOs have the luxury of choosing between short-term profitability and long-term innovation anymore — not at the pace things are changing nowadays.

Every industry is transforming rapidly because of AI, and the tech industry itself is moving faster than anyone else. If an organization focuses only on short-term goals and ignores how AI is reshaping business models and operations, a business will become irrelevant faster than you'd expect — we're talking two to three years, not a decade.

That's why focusing on long-term changes and innovation that will keep a business relevant for years is more critical today than it has ever been. More critical, frankly, than today’s profitability numbers. Because if a company ignores these shifts, there may simply be no business to run in a couple of years.

Key takeaways:

In today’s fast-paced environment, entrepreneurs can’t simply choose between profitability and growth. Both matter, and innovation is the bridge that connects them. As these leaders demonstrate, success starts with setting clear priorities, sequencing growth initiatives around market signals and maintaining disciplined capital management. Every dollar should have intent and every decision should reinforce the company’s mission.

Balancing profitability with bold, market-driven innovation is not just a strategy. It’s the foundation to building businesses that thrive today and endure tomorrow.