Growth and compromise are inseparable, right? It’s a common and deeply ingrained idea: that growth comes at the expense of quality. The idea is that somewhere on the path of scaling a company, the product will dull, the experience will flatten, and the culture will give way to the financial model. People talk about this in a hundred ways, but it all reduces to the same resigned belief: “If you scale, you dilute experience and the way value is delivered.”
I don’t believe that. In fact, I believe the opposite: scaling can be done without dilution. Growth doesn’t require compromise.
Let’s talk about how.
The quiet moment when the product changes
I’ve run both large and small organizations. One thing I’ve found is that, as you scale, there is a great temptation for the product or service to change. It’s a slip in quality and standards that feels inevitable, even unconscious. It just… happens.
When you have 50 people and a single product or service, you have a certain way of delivering it. A certain scope. A certain level of complexity. A certain way customers experience value.
It may not happen immediately. When you go from 50 to 500, that model may or may not change. But when you go from 500 to 5,000, that service will definitely change. At 5,000 people, the value proposition changes too — along with leadership, the delivery style, and the underlying financial model.
And the question becomes: did you design for that change? Or did you just let the changes happen around it?
In digital business transformation, where I spend my time — and in many other growth-stage businesses — this change point is where most organizations cross an invisible line. They stop solving customer and business problems and start solving capacity problems, setting goals that sound like: “I need X number of people with Y skills, in Z location, at the lowest possible cost.”
If you crack open the financial model, you can see what’s really going on: large pools of talent deployed at high utilization and acceptable margins over long periods of time. Necessary, maybe. But different. And that difference shows up clearly in customer experience.
Why smaller teams often feel better to work with
Boutiques — firms with fewer than 500 people — tend to have very high Net Promoter Scores (NPS). Why? Because they’re high-touch. They do one thing (or a small set of things), year after year, and they show up with experienced teams that solve specific problems in repeatable ways.
This dynamic isn’t unique to consulting. You see it in agencies, software services, and even internal corporate teams.
The large pyramid model, which I’ll define below, changes that. And customers feel it.
Pyramids, diamonds, and the bait-and-switch
There’s a phrase in our profession for how this typically plays out. The experienced people — the architects, designers, and specialists — show up in the sales cycle. Then, at delivery time, you “back the school bus up,” and the customer meets the people they’ll actually be working with: the younger, much less experienced team.
Customers don’t love that.
But that’s the natural way of the pyramid model. The bigger a company gets, the more experience lives at the narrow top. Meanwhile, the base of the “pyramid” shape are folks who are younger and less experienced.
But we chose a different shape.
At Argano, our model is not a pyramid. It’s a diamond.
We have an experienced top (where our leaders are), a big middle layer of highly experienced professionals who directly create value for customers, and relatively little junior capability at the base. And that’s where we get the diamond shape imagery.
I know this empirically. From our open enrollment data, the average age of someone working at Argano in the U.S. is over 40. The people showing up with customers often have 10, 15, or 20 years of experience. So our shape is built differently, by design.
We embrace the boutique mindset, and we treat our customers accordingly — rather than forcing them to engage with a generic pool of less-experienced employees. If we did that, we’d end up exactly where much of the industry already is: with middling NPS, middling employee engagement, and a very familiar story of dilution.
Scaling by aggregation, not homogenization
Another thing that makes Argano unique is the way we built our company out of many different unique firms. We’ve scaled not by homogenizing, but by aggregating boutiques, because we value what they represent to customers. And at every point, we ask the same question: How do we express broader and deeper capability without destroying the intimacy and quality that made these teams special in the first place?
The answer for us has been to maintain tight coordination between specialized teams. We do this instead of forcing everything into one giant delivery engine with one set of goals, or one company-wide way of doing things.
Rejecting the integration playbook
This is where our approach to M&A comes in.
Most people talk about “integration” as a one-way pipeline: you acquire, then you integrate, then you declare success when everything looks and feels the same.
We went the other way. We said: integration is not inherently valuable until you prove that it is.
So we don’t think of companies as acquisitions. We think of them as joiners. They join a platform — and then we ask a very specific set of questions:
To what extent does integration add value? Where does it actually destroy value? And if integration does add value, is that value reinforcing the very things that made this company great in the first place?
Sometimes the right answer is full integration. Two years later, you’d barely know that firm ever existed separately.
Sometimes the right answer is very light integration: shared visibility, some brand alignment, some shared systems (yes, we like to be on the same CRM so we can see each other’s customers), but otherwise, nearly untouched.
This integration philosophy directly shapes how we decide who joins us in the first place.
We use what we call the ‘three C's’ approach — Completeness, Connectedness, and Claims — as a way to evaluate whether a team strengthens the whole without requiring it to lose what makes it excellent. These filters help us ensure that when companies join the platform, integration becomes a choice — not a forced correction.
Our playbook is uniqueness. Our playbook is having no single playbook.
It’s counterintuitive in an industry that loves checklists, methods, and “best practices.” But I have no time for best practices if they’re just fossilized models of past success. They’re not designed for the future we’re all living into.
NPS, ENPS, and defying gravity
Does any of this actually work? Or is it just an attractive theory?
The data helps answer that.
Large service organizations typically run an NPS in the 30–40 range. Boutiques run roughly double that, around 80. When a new joiner comes into Argano, we measure their NPS immediately — and the average is exactly what you’d expect from high-performing boutique firms.
Then we measure Argano’s own NPS across the platform.
And here’s where the model defies the supposed laws of gravity: our platform-level NPS is actually higher than the boutique-level NPS of the firms that join us. In other words, we haven’t diminished the quality that made them special — we’ve added to it.
The same pattern shows up internally.
Roughly 70% of our people didn’t originally choose to work for Argano. They chose to work somewhere with a boutique feel, and their firm later joined Argano. From day one, we recognized a special obligation to them.
So we built culture into the DNA of the company when it was still on a whiteboard. We invested deliberately in employee experience, and we measure engagement rigorously.
In our most recent engagement survey, 94% of our people participated. The resulting eNPS landed in the mid-80s. Those are boutique-level numbers or better, achieved at scale, during a period in which we doubled the size of the company. And, we’re on track to do it again.
So when people ask whether scale inevitably dilutes quality, experience, or culture, I say this:
Only if you let it.
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