Jean Moncrieff

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Jean Moncrieff Small Giants CEO. Growing with Purpose host. Author of Finding Freedom (2026). Sharing lessons on intentional growth and values-driven leadership.

Company visit #2 on the Great, Not Big road trip: Legacy Retail in Bentonville 🚐These folks get products from brands in...
10/12/2026

Company visit #2 on the Great, Not Big road trip: Legacy Retail in Bentonville 🚐

These folks get products from brands into Costco, Walmart, Sam’s Club and Target all over the world. The business is impressive, but the culture is what matters here!

A few things I’m taking with me:
✨ Phone pods with doors that close, yet 90% of the time they stay open
✨ Core value “buckets” where teammates write notes about each other living the values
✨ An annual appreciation video where nearly every person in the company shows up for someone else
✨ “Nothing’s off the table.” Any idea can go straight to the CEO

When an employee broke her elbow and wrist (scooter, office, no helmet 😅), her boss told her to let people help, no matter how small. So the team did her hair, brought her lunch and carried her laptop for two months. She said she’s never laughed so much or felt so connected.

That’s a small giant.

Huge thanks to Brittany and Sarah for the tour, the stories and the Yoda cameo. 🙏

PurposeDrivenBusiness

Saturday morning on the lake ☕ Mist still hanging over the water, a blanket, a good coffee, and a book I picked up at Zi...
09/27/2026

Saturday morning on the lake ☕ Mist still hanging over the water, a blanket, a good coffee, and a book I picked up at Zingerman's this week: Ari Weinzweig's Why Democracy Matters.

Two lines caught me.

The first is from Maria Ressa: "Democracy is fragile. You have to fight for every bit." She goes on to say that staying silent changes nothing, and that speaking up is an act of creation.

I couldn't help scribbling in the margin: culture is fragile. After weeks on the road visiting some amazing companies, that's exactly what I keep seeing. Great cultures don't just happen. Someone protects them every single day, and someone has the courage to speak up when things start to fray.

The second is from Eduardo Galeano, about storytellers searching for "the footprints of lost memory, love and pain." That one feels a lot like this road trip. So many of the small towns we drive through are fraying. You can tell they were once thriving. Main streets full of people who knew each other, looked out for each other, celebrated together and got through hard times together. Now we're searching for the footprints.

A few pages later, Ari quotes Peter Block: "Accountability is the willingness to care for the whole." Not just your corner of it. The whole.

I think that's what those towns lost, and it's what the great companies we've been visiting still have. People who feel responsible for each other, not just for their own job.

Ari also shares a line from Leymah Gbowee: "I am what I am because of who we all are." Growing up in South Africa, we had a word for that. Ubuntu.

Whether it's a town, a company or a country, it only works when people stand together and care for the whole.

Now, back to my coffee (thanks for the mug, ChoiceOne! 😄) and a few more pages before the day gets going.

What are you reading this weekend? 📚

09/25/2026

There are two ways to bring AI into your team. One makes your people more powerful. The other makes their work feel meaningless.

It all started with a celebration 🎉 Courtney Moncrieff graduated from Small Giants Leadership Academy 🤠🧡🎉 Then the two ...
09/25/2026

It all started with a celebration 🎉 Courtney Moncrieff graduated from Small Giants Leadership Academy 🤠🧡🎉 Then the two of us embarked on an epic journey: Great, Not Big. In the coming months we’re visiting some of the greatest small businesses in the world. Companies that put people, values, and purpose first. We’re sharing their stories as we go. Follow along for the ride 🚗

You find these places if you're lucky…. Or your co-pilot has knack for locating hidden culinary gems. Off Sanders Ferry ...
09/20/2026

You find these places if you're lucky…. Or your co-pilot has knack for locating hidden culinary gems.

Off Sanders Ferry Road in Hendersonville, two people in their twenties looked at a tired fifty year old building, saw the windows and the view of the lake, and decided that was worth betting on.

Lyncoya Café. Named, after some crowdsourcing, for the Native American boy Andrew Jackson adopted. There's a clock on the wall that once belonged to Conway Twitty, and a framed newspaper clipping telling the story of two young owners who spent five months painting and sweating this place back to life.

Courtney and I rolled in hungry. Blackened shrimp and andouille over cheese grits for me, crispy green beans piled high over mashed potatoes and gravy for her. All of it made from scratch by people who clearly give a damn.

This is what our road trip is really about. Great American businesses hiding in plain sight. Not the biggest, not the loudest, just people who chose a place, put their names on it, and decided to do things right. Big isn't the goal. Great is the goal.

We'd go back tomorrow.

Day 7. Bentonville, Arkansas.When was the last time you heard someone say they genuinely enjoy coming to work? I heard i...
09/19/2026

Day 7. Bentonville, Arkansas.

When was the last time you heard someone say they genuinely enjoy coming to work? I heard it at least three times the past couple of days. Unprompted.

This morning Courtney Moncrieff and I spent the morning with Brittany Barker and Sarah Cracraft at Legacy Retail , right in Walmart's backyard.

If you've bought Pokémon cards at Costco or Magic: The Gathering at Sam's Club, chances are this team had something to do with getting them there. They handle everything from sales to logistics to compliance for some of the biggest brands in the world. But that's not why we wanted to visit.

We wanted to visit because Legacy Retail is different. They have the business equivalent of charisma, we call it mojo.

Here's a taste of what stuck with me today…

At Legacy Retail, people can just be themselves. This is showing up so often now that it's starting to feel like a pattern. At Text-Em-All, Sabrina White told me, "I am so lucky I can just show up and be who I am." Then at Legacy, without any prompting, Sarah said almost the same thing: "I feel like I can be myself. I don't have to pretend to be someone I'm not."

Two different companies, two different states, the same sentence. And both teams genuinely enjoy coming to work. I don't think that's a coincidence. When people don't have to spend energy playing a role, all of that energy goes into the work and into each other.

And then there's the story that really got me. Sarah broke her elbow and her wrist in an office scooter mishap (don't ask, or do, it's a great story). For two months her colleagues did her hair in the mornings, brought her lunch and carried her laptop. She told me it was the most connected she's ever felt to her team.

The cultures that these companies can’t be manufactured. They’re nurtured and protected over years, even decades. They’re worth fighting for.

This is exactly why we’re on this trip. Companies like Legacy remind me that being great has nothing to do with being big. It’s all about the people and being intentional about the company you build.

Next stop: Choice One Engineering in Sidney, Ohio.

See you next week,
Jean

09/18/2026

On the road to Bentonville in Arkansas to visit Legacy Retail.

21 years.That's how long Text-Em-All has been intentionally building their culture. Over two decades, they've built a cu...
09/17/2026

21 years.

That's how long Text-Em-All has been intentionally building their culture. Over two decades, they've built a culture code that's the foundation of the business and every decision they make.

The foundation is simple: build something genuinely good for the people who work here and the customers who depend on them. Greatness over growth. People above profit.

And it's worked. Happy employees lead to satisfied customers, and that leads to a healthy business.

We just wrapped stop one of the road trip, two days with the Text-Em-All team, sitting down with founders, leaders, and people across the company.

A few things that stuck with me.

People kept saying the same thing: I get to be myself here. No masks. No pretending. Just showing up as who you really are.

Then there's Ron. 30 years without real work boundaries. He took a sabbatical, completely reset, and came back knowing he didn't want to work that way anymore.

Here's the magic. He didn't have to leave to change. He changed his habits, and Text-Em-All celebrated it.

It took them 20 years to figure out how to build a company worth working for. And they plan to keep working on it for the next 100. The products might evolve, but the goal stays the same: a place people want to come to and create great things.

And once you've built a culture like that, you fight to protect it. That came up again and again. It's not something you set and forget. It's something you defend, every day.

Grateful for a phenomenal couple of days with this team. More when we stitch it all together.

Tomorrow: Bentonville, Arkansas.

The Montgomery Street Cafe doesn't care what you think of it. That's the first thing you need to understand. Second olde...
09/12/2026

The Montgomery Street Cafe doesn't care what you think of it. That's the first thing you need to understand. Second oldest joint in Fort Worth, and it wears every one of those years like a badge.

The Frigidaires behind the counter have been humming since the forties, back when men came home from a war and wanted nothing more complicated than eggs, coffee, and someone who remembered their name. Those fridges have outlived trends, owners, presidents, and every restaurant concept some consultant ever dreamed up. They'll outlive us too.

You walk in and there's a guy in a white cowboy hat who looks like he's been sitting on that stool since Eisenhower. He probably has. The tablecloths are red checkered vinyl, the ceiling fans turn slow like they're conserving energy for the lunch rush, and there's a mural on the wall of a Fort Worth that mostly doesn't exist anymore, except in here, where it never left.

Our waitress, Leisha, isn't even supposed to be here. She's lending a hand because the owner, eighty eight years old and still running the place, broke her arm. Leisha takes our order like we're old friends, all warmth and no hurry, and when we hesitate she doesn't. Get the biscuits and gravy, she says. You don't argue with that kind of certainty.

The food is exactly what it should be. Eggs over easy with lace on the edges. Hash browns that shatter. Bacon as that requires no adjectives. Pancakes the size of hubcaps, pale gold, no garnish. And coffee that needs no apology. Nobody here has ever said the word "artisanal" out loud and God willing nobody ever will.

This is the kind of place that's disappearing from America, one strip mall at a time. A place where the chef, Filipe, has worked since he was 16 years old and the regulars have nicknames and the register still has actual buttons. You don't come here for the food, though the food is good. You come here because for forty five minutes, on a stool at a black counter under a Coca-Cola sign, the world makes sense.

Eat here. Tip well. Say thank you. Places like this don't survive on nostalgia. They survive on people showing up.

Just boarded a flight to Chicago. Next stop, Dallas.That's me and Courtney in the photo, and I couldn't be prouder. On M...
09/11/2026

Just boarded a flight to Chicago. Next stop, Dallas.

That's me and Courtney in the photo, and I couldn't be prouder. On Monday she graduates from the Small Giants Leadership Academy.

But graduation is just the start.

From Dallas, we kick off a journey across America. Over the next three weeks we'll visit 8 to 10 companies that have chosen to be great instead of big.

We'll sit down with the founders. We'll sit down with the people who work there. And we'll ask one simple question:

What makes this place great?

I've known these companies for years. I've walked some of their floors. Their stories have been told at Summits and in books. But we want to amplify them.

Because these companies are beacons. Proof that business can be a force for good. And by sharing their stories, we hope to create more ripples of impact in the world.

First stop after graduation: Text-em-All in Dallas.

Follow along. This is going to be special.

What's one company you'd call a Small Giant? A business that's chosen to be great, not big. I'd love to hear who inspires you.

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