Startup Advice

High Growth or Small Business? Here's the Real Difference

Not every business is supposed to become an empire, and not every business is supposed to stay small. Two Tennessee companies show exactly what each path looks like.

By Emma AyalaJuly 2026Johnson City, TN

Every day, we log into our email here at FoundersForge and find a handful of messages asking the same thing: how do I get investment, what does that look like, can you help me find investors. And a lot of the time, the honest answer is that the business isn't even eligible for outside investment yet, and might not need to be.

FoundersForge actually started out focused only on high-growth startups. But the longer we did this work, the more we saw how strong the need was for small business support too, so that became just as central to what we do. Because of that, our advice is almost always the same: bootstrap as long as you can. The minute you take on an outside dollar of investment, you take on a lot more risk and a lot more responsibility, and that isn't the right fit for every business.

So let's talk about what actually separates a high-growth startup from a small business, using two Tennessee grown companies as the proof.

High Growth vs. Small Business

So what's the actual difference? A small business is built to be sustainable and profitable at a size the founder can manage themselves. A high-growth business is built to scale well beyond that, in revenue, reach, or production, whether that scale comes from outside investment or from reinvesting the business's own profit back into itself. Investment is a tool some high-growth companies use to move faster. It's not a requirement to count as high growth, and it's not a measure of which model is more legitimate. Both are real businesses. They just optimize for different things: control and steadiness on one side, speed and reach on the other.

Kylie Wade is a good example of what that second mindset actually looks like day to day. She thinks in terms of scalability from the start, building systems and processes designed to keep working whether she's in the room or not. That's the instinct that separates a business built to scale from a business built around one person's daily effort.

Small Business, Done Right: Lazy Lady Baking Co.

Maren Close started Lazy Lady Baking Co. in 2018 out of the Mountain Harvest Kitchen, selling pastries at regional farmers markets and wholesaling to local coffee shops. Four years later, she opened a retail storefront in downtown Johnson City. She's still the owner-operator, still sourcing from local farms and mills, and still building relationships with the producers around her rather than a national supply chain.

That's a small business, and it's exactly what a downtown needs. Lazy Lady didn't need outside investors to grow from a farmers market table to a real storefront with wholesale accounts across Johnson City, Jonesborough, and Bluff City. She grew it on her own terms, at a pace she could manage herself, and stayed rooted in the community that supported her from day one.

High Growth, Done Right: Bellhops

Now look at Bellhops, a Chattanooga company that started in 2011 with two Auburn University students helping classmates move in and out of their dorms. That's about as small and local as a business idea gets. But the founders built a tech-enabled logistics model for an outdated industry, and they went after outside investment to scale it. Chattanooga's own Lamp Post Group backed them first, then venture firms from California and New York followed with millions more.

That funding is what turned a dorm-move side hustle into a company operating in dozens of cities across the country, all while keeping its headquarters in Chattanooga. Bellhops needed capital to move fast, because scaling to dozens of cities can't be funded out of pocket. Scale at that speed is what makes outside funding an option in the first place.

High Growth Without a Dime of Investment: Dave Hatley

Dave Hatley started his first business at seventeen with no outside capital and no safety net. Today he's the founder and operator of LPI, a 740,000-square-foot manufacturing operation in East Tennessee and the number one hot tub manufacturer in the country. No investors funded that growth. He built it dollar by dollar, survived the 2008 financial crisis, and kept the jobs in East Tennessee the whole way through, adding employee-ownership and profit-sharing along the way instead of giving up equity to outside money. He shared that story on stage at our Startup Mountain Summit last year. High growth and bootstrapping aren't opposites. Dave proves you can scale from a single storefront to a national manufacturing brand entirely on your own terms.

High Growth, With Investment: Personality Pool

Lauren Glass Mullins is a different flavor of high growth. Personality Pool, the Tennessee tech startup she co-founded, did take outside investment to scale. But her startup journey didn't start with a term sheet. It started with Beds for Kids, where she learned to stretch every dollar and turn donated furniture and volunteer hours into thousands of deliveries a year, long before she ever pitched an investor. That's why Personality Pool taking investment doesn't look like the Bellhops story. She already knew the bootstrapping game cold, so the outside capital got layered on top of habits built the hard way, not used as a substitute for them.

When Growth Can Cost Your Mission

Scaling isn't free, even when it works. Turkey Feather Farm, one of our own Avante graduates in Dickenson County, Virginia, is a small business built on locally raised, small-batch food. If she scaled into wholesale chicken production for grocery chains, she'd be stepping into high-growth territory too, but she'd also be trading away the exact thing that makes her business hers. Starbucks is the bigger example of this. Their original mission talked about becoming the finest coffee purveyor in the world while holding onto their principles as they grew. Whether that still holds up today is something you can decide for yourself, but quality control gets a lot harder once a business has locations everywhere instead of one founder pouring the coffee themselves.

So look hard at your own mission before you decide which direction to grow in. Without the passion behind it, there isn't much of a business to scale in the first place.

Why Small Business and High Growth Need Each Other

None of this means one model beats the other. A local economy actually needs both, and neither one thrives on its own. High-growth companies need the small businesses around them just as much as small businesses need them. A company like Bellhops or LPI still needs somewhere for its employees to grab lunch, get their coffee, and spend a paycheck close to home, and that's Lazy Lady, not a national chain. Small businesses need high growth right back. A high-growth employer bringing hundreds of jobs into a county brings foot traffic, spending power, and stability that keeps every storefront on that same street in business.

That's why FoundersForge supports both paths instead of picking one. A healthy Main Street and a headquarters with a manufacturing floor aren't competing for the same win. They're both proof the local economy is working.