As we gained experience and strengthened our portfolio, we needed to decide is how big a company we wanted to be. For a while we were seriously considering opening an office in the United States which meant a rapid further growth of the company into that large market. In 1999 we had twenty-two employees with three good sized projects simultaneously on the go in three Canadian cities a thousand miles apart. It was an exciting and very busy time and we had an awesome team. The projects were off the charts. But as I travelled between cities keeping things on track I realized that the job I was doing wasn't what I desired. I really wanted to be hands-on with both the design and build and not just a manager of lots of people. Too many people meant that I only got to be a band leader. Too few people meant we got little done which limited the size of projects we could handle. We had to find the balance.

Over the next year we purposely downsized our workforce, resolving that quality of project and a relaxed family lifestyle were far more important than the quantity or size of the jobs. We learned to be more selective in how we scheduled our commitments and more importantly how to say no to projects that weren't the perfect fit. Those policies proved to be the right decision for us and we follow that same path to this day.