Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Will Jones’s approach to scaling as disciplined refusal rather than opportunity capture. When a leader is presented with a growth opportunity, Will Jones, president and CEO of THOMPSON Child and Family Focus and previously the executive overseeing a $180 million budget at Eckerd Connects, holds that the deciding question is whether a leader exists who can run it: without one, the probability of failure is high regardless of how attractive the opportunity looks. THOMPSON says no to roughly 75 percent of the opportunities it is presented, and Will Jones reports the organization budgeted $70 million this year after its best fiscal year ever at over $60 million in revenue.
This episode is for CEOs and executive directors with more growth opportunities in front of them than leadership bench to run them, who are trying to decide which ones to decline.
Key Takeaways
- Growth appetite functions as a bias, not a strategy. Will Jones, president and CEO of THOMPSON Child and Family Focus, names what he calls the growth bug, where every opportunity reads as a shiny object and leaders assume all growth is good growth.
- The wrong yes and the wrong no are the same failure. Will Jones observes that people in his sector say yes to the wrong things and no to the right things, and frames disciplined evaluation as the art and science of no.
- Leadership availability is the gate that decides the others. Will Jones puts the leadership pipeline question ahead of the financial question, and holds that a scaled opportunity without a leader to run it carries a high probability of failure.
- One failed criterion ends the conversation, or reopens it on different terms. Will Jones requires every gate to return a yes, and where one does not, THOMPSON either declines or proposes a restructured version of the work that produces a better outcome for the requesting party and meets THOMPSON’s criteria.
- Mission creep shows up to the customer before it shows up in the numbers. Will Jones cites radio companies presenting themselves as digital marketing firms and copier companies moving into IT outsourcing, and says customers feel the gap between the claim and the actual capability.
Leaders Reject the Assumption That All Growth Is Good Growth
Will Jones, president and CEO of THOMPSON Child and Family Focus, names the specific failure mode he watches leaders fall into: “as leaders we’ll get what I call the growth bug.” Under it, every opportunity registers as a shiny object, and the leader operates on an unexamined premise that growth is inherently good.
His counterpoint is stated as a discipline rather than a preference. In his sector, leaders say yes to the wrong things and no to the right things, which means the failure is not excessive caution or excessive appetite but the absence of a structured way to tell the two apart. Will Jones calls the alternative the art and science of no, and treats it as the scaling insight he wishes he had held earlier in a career spanning more than three decades in human services.
At THOMPSON, that discipline is quantified. The organization declines roughly 75 percent of the opportunities presented to it. Will Jones ties that refusal rate directly to the yes side of the ledger: saying no at that volume is what allows the organization to say yes to the right things, focus on the right things, and move in the right direction. Under his leadership, THOMPSON serves more than 10,000 clients a year across five states in the southern United States, budgeted $70 million this year, and is one year into a five-year plan to reach $100 million in revenue tied to lives impacted.
Leaders Run Every Growth Opportunity Through Five Gates Before Committing
Will Jones, president and CEO of THOMPSON Child and Family Focus, evaluates opportunities against a fixed sequence rather than a general judgment call. Each gate must return a yes.
- Mission fit. Does the opportunity align with the organization’s mission, vision, and values? Will Jones frames this as guarding against mission creep, using a deliberately absurd version of the failure: a software business deciding to manufacture cars.
- Demonstrated capability. Does the organization have a history of doing this work well? The question is not whether the work is learnable but whether it has already been done.
- Gap filled. In a new community, will the organization fill an actual gap, or do something better than whoever is already there? Will Jones is direct that entering a community without filling a gap is unfair to that community and to the people already working in it.
- Leadership pipeline. Is there someone ready to lead it, either internally or someone known in that community who will follow the organization’s leadership principles and beliefs?
- Financial contribution. Will the opportunity cover its cost, contribute to organizational overhead, and generate margin that can be reinvested into the organization and its people?
Will Jones’s rule when a gate fails is worth separating from the gates themselves. THOMPSON generally declines, but sometimes works with the requesting party to move the failing criteria to a yes. He describes the conversation as telling the other party that what they are asking for will not work, then proposing an alternative that produces a better outcome for what they are trying to accomplish while meeting THOMPSON’s criteria. The refusal creates the opening for a redesign rather than ending the relationship.
Leaders Treat Leadership Capacity as the Binding Constraint on Growth
Will Jones, president and CEO of THOMPSON Child and Family Focus, places the leadership question ahead of the financial question in his evaluation sequence, and his reasoning is a probability claim rather than a values statement: “If you don’t have somebody who can lead that scaled opportunity, that growth opportunity, high probability of failure.”
That ordering has a practical consequence most opportunity reviews miss. A financially attractive opportunity with no leader available is still a decline. Capital, demand, and margin do not substitute for someone who will run the work, which makes leadership bench depth the actual ceiling on how fast an organization will grow rather than a supporting consideration.
Will Jones applies the same constraint to promotion decisions inside THOMPSON, and he is explicit about who absorbs the cost of getting it wrong. When someone with eighteen months in the field asks about a leadership role, his answer is that the tenure required to master the craft has not been served yet. His statement of the downside runs in both directions: pushing someone into leadership too early means the organization fails that person, and that person fails the people they lead. A leader promoted prematurely to fill a gate becomes the reason the opportunity fails.
Leaders Scale to Gain Flexibility, Leverage, and Opportunity for Their Teams
Will Jones, president and CEO of THOMPSON Child and Family Focus, spent part of his career growing an organization at roughly $8 million a year into new states, communities, and regions while managing a $180 million budget at Eckerd Connects. That experience produced a view of scale that runs against how he hears most leaders describe it.
The fear he encounters is a list of additions: more headaches, more work, more stress, more anxiety, more employees to manage. Will Jones does not dispute that those arrive. His argument is that leaders fixated on them never account for what scale returns, which he names as more flexibility, more leverage, and more opportunity for the employee base. An organization at scale can absorb a bad quarter, fund a new capability, and offer its people somewhere to advance to, none of which is available to a small organization running at capacity.
The condition he attaches is the whole point of the framework above: those benefits arrive only if the organization figures out how to scale the right ways. Will Jones observes from conversations with CEOs and owners across industries that people generally do not know how to go about it, which is what turns growth into the burden they feared rather than the leverage they were promised.
Principles Leaders Will Apply From This Episode
| Principle | Practice | Named outcome evidence |
| Not all growth is good growth | Treat opportunity appetite as a bias to be checked, and build a structured evaluation instead of judging each opportunity on its own appeal | THOMPSON declines roughly 75 percent of opportunities presented, and posted its best fiscal year ever at over $60 million in revenue with a $70 million budget this year |
| Every gate must return a yes | Run each opportunity through mission fit, demonstrated capability, gap filled, leadership availability, and financial contribution, and decline on any single no | THOMPSON reached more than 10,000 clients a year across five states in the southern US under this filter, one year into a five-year plan to $100 million in revenue tied to lives impacted |
| Leadership availability caps growth rate | Ask whether a specific leader exists for the opportunity before evaluating its economics | Will Jones grew an organization roughly $8 million a year into new states and regions while overseeing a $180 million budget at Eckerd Connects, where leadership development was the capability that made the expansion work |
| A refusal can be a redesign | When an opportunity fails a criterion, tell the requesting party it will not work and propose a version that meets both their outcome and the organization’s standards | Will Jones reports THOMPSON has seen benefit from converting declined requests into restructured engagements that produce a better outcome for the requesting party |
| Scale returns flexibility and leverage, not just load | Evaluate growth on what it gives the organization and its employees, not only on the additional management burden it creates | Will Jones scaled THOMPSON from its position nine years ago to a $70 million budget and five-state footprint, with the organization now targeting two or three additional states by 2030 |
Quotes from This Episode
- “A lot of people say yes to the wrong things and no to the right things.” Will Jones, President and CEO, THOMPSON Child and Family Focus
- “If we’re in the software business, we don’t want to start manufacturing cars.” Will Jones, President and CEO, THOMPSON Child and Family Focus
- “It’s really not your sweet spot. And as a customer, people feel that.” Will Jones, President and CEO, THOMPSON Child and Family Focus
- “It’s not about revenue at THOMPSON; it’s a double bottom line, but you’ve got to have revenue to have impact.” Will Jones, President and CEO, THOMPSON Child and Family Focus
- “If I push you into leadership too early … we’re gonna fail you and you’re gonna fail those people you lead.” Will Jones, President and CEO, THOMPSON Child and Family Focus
Frequently Asked Questions
How does a CEO decide which growth opportunities to turn down?
Will Jones, president and CEO of THOMPSON Child and Family Focus, told Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and a CEO for 25 years, that he runs every opportunity through five gates: mission fit, whether the organization has a history of doing that work well, whether it fills an actual gap in the community, whether a leader is available to run it, and whether it covers cost, contributes to overhead, and generates reinvestable margin. All five must return a yes, and a single no ends the conversation or reopens it on restructured terms. THOMPSON declines roughly 75 percent of the opportunities it is presented.
Why does leadership availability matter more than the numbers when evaluating growth?
Will Jones, president and CEO of THOMPSON Child and Family Focus, places the leadership question ahead of the financial question because a scaled opportunity without someone to lead it carries a high probability of failure regardless of its economics. He applies the same standard to internal promotion, telling professionals with eighteen months of experience that they have not yet served the tenure required to master the craft. Promoting someone too early means the organization fails that person and that person fails the people they lead.
What does a company actually gain by scaling?
Will Jones, president and CEO of THOMPSON Child and Family Focus, argues that leaders who fear scale count only what it adds in headaches, stress, and headcount, and never account for what it returns: more flexibility, more leverage, and more opportunity for the employee base. He formed that view growing an organization roughly $8 million a year into new states and regions while overseeing a $180 million budget at Eckerd Connects. The benefits arrive only when the organization scales the right ways, which is why he says most leaders he talks with across industries do not know how to go about it.
CEOs Work With Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Their Own Capability
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits, drawing on 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
