When your business grows fast, your culture will either scale with you or collapse under the weight. Hans Dawson, President of Lannon Stone, knows this tension intimately. In an energizing conversation we had recently, Hans shared the story of how Lannon Stone scaled from a small, family-run quarry business into a high-performing company with over 130 employees, without compromising the values that made it special in the first place.

The story is packed with insights for growth-minded CEOs who want to build unshakeable business endurance by strengthening their culture.

1. Growing Pains: From Everyone Reports to Dad, to Chaos

Hans didn’t start with a perfect cultural blueprint. “Where we are now,” he said, “is the result of a lot of growing pains.”

Lannon Stone began as a close-knit, flat organization. Everyone reported directly to Hans’s grandfather, then to his father. That worked when the team was small. However, rapid growth, from 20 people to over 130, and an 11-fold revenue increase, meant the “everybody knows everybody” culture fractured.

Subcultures emerged. People started doing their own thing. Without structure or clear expectations, the business drifted. As Hans put it: “We found that we actually had the company the guys were building, not the one we were building.”

Lesson: Rapid growth without a clear culture creates chaos.

2. Step One: Buy Yourself Breathing Room

Before they could tackle culture, Hans and his family needed time to think.

“You can’t build a 30-year company if you’re just trying to get through the day,” he said. At one point, Hans and his dad were managing over 50 direct reports, in addition to fixing equipment, overseeing production, and emailing into the night.

They made a critical move: building a management structure. That included hiring poeple to lead departments [Operations (Dan), HR (Nate), Finance (Bobby), Engineering (Paul), and Sales (Paul)] and appointing Hans’s sister, Heidi, as Vice President to oversee all departments.

Lesson: Scaling culture requires structure, so you can stop firefighting and start leading.

3. Clarity Is Kind: Defining—and Living—the Right Values

Once the leadership team had the necessary bandwidth, they began identifying their core values. Not abstract posters-on-a-wall stuff. Real values. Lived values. Four of them:

• Respect Each Other
  
• Do Excellent Work
  
• Attack Problems
  
• Care About the Future
  

They dropped their original six-wordy values (“I couldn’t repeat them if you paid me a million dollars,” Hans joked) and replaced them with clear, memorable ones supported by specific behaviors. These values are everywhere, from break room signs to weekly team discussions.

But the fundamental shift came in implementation. Heidi led the way, building habits and systems that baked the values into daily work.

Clarity and buy-in moved the company into the Inspiring Culture zone.

Lesson: Your culture is what you do daily, not what you say annually.

4. No Bonuses. No Metrics. Just Values.

In a bold move, Lannon Stone eliminated all incentive structures.

“Your only path to advancement is living our values,” Hans said. There are no bonuses for hitting metrics, even safety ones. Instead, performance reviews center on the values and the “gets it, wants it, can do it” framework (from EOS/Traction).

Every hire is steeped in culture from the beginning: values appear in the job posting, the phone screen, and every interview. Then, new hires undergo a multi-week, 30-person onboarding process. The final “interview” is their first few months on the job.

Lesson: What you reward reveals what you really value.

5. Letting Go to Lead: From Hands-On to Strategic

Hans still loves getting in the trenches. But he’s learned to lead differently.

“There’s pride in being a great mechanic, a great operator. But I’ve had to replace that pride with the joy of helping others be even better than I was.”

This evolution from “how leader” (expert doer) to “why leader” (visionary guide) doesn’t mean checking out. It means choosing when to dive deep and when to stay high, resisting the “good idea fairy” and staying focused on long-term bets.

Lesson: You can’t scale your business if you don’t scale yourself.

6. Values as a Filtering Mechanism

One of Hans’s final takeaways hits hard:

“Our values aren’t right or wrong, they’re a filtering mechanism. Like dating. You don’t have to make a relationship work if it’s never going to happen.”

Not everyone is a fit for Lannon Stone’s “all-in” culture, and that’s okay. Clarity creates respectful partings, just as it fosters enduring alignment.

Lesson: Hire slow. Fire misaligned. Love your values like your future depends on them, because it does.

If you’re looking to scale without losing your soul, take a page from Hans Dawson: define your values clearly, live them relentlessly, and build a structure that frees you to lead with purpose.