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Inc. 5000 honorees know more than most people about working hard and knowing when thinking bigger is the right course for a company to take. In a discussion at the 2025 Inc. 5000 conference in Phoenix, Adam Fischer, co-founder of Sun Home Saunas, and Arizona Land Consulting CEO Anita Verma-Lallian shared their own lessons for expanding a small business and making it a leader in its field. Sun Home Saunas is four years old, and Arizona Land Consulting is six years old. While they’re very different types of businesses, their founders took similar paths starting and scaling their companies. Both got initial investments from friends and family, both started as side hustles, their founders poured every bit of energy into learning about their customers while also struggling with how to give up some control as they scaled and grew. Fischer quickly let slip the one constant truth about growing a company, even when there’s no one-size-fits-all playbook. “There really is no magic wand for just how to scale efficiently. It comes down to working your ass off,” he told the audience. Featured Video An Inc.com Featured Presentation So far, so good. Sun Home Saunas was number 20 on the Inc. 5000, and Arizona Land Consulting’s real estate deal flows put it at 3,212 on this year’s list. Sun Home generated a little more than $25 million in 2024 revenue, and Arizona Land now manages a $1.5 billion investment portfolio. The two leaders shared their companies’ origin stories, describing how their side hustles took up most of their free time — and money — until they could commit to their startups and leave their day jobs. For Fischer, that meant a relentless focus on their high-end customers, who tuned into a surge of enthusiasm about infrared home saunas as the latest luxury wellness item on the market. “We were in Park City on a ski trip, we’d finally got some time away from our desks and we were at the top of the chairlift at the top of the mountain, getting a sales call for someone that wants to buy one of our bigger units,” Fisher said of his and co-founder Tyler Fish’s first vacation in the early days of the company. “We said, ‘Guys, we gotta stop,’ and our friends waited for us at the top of the mountain while we closed the sale at the end of the chairlift.” Verma-Lallian brought her family’s real estate background to her land development investment venture. Her deep Phoenix roots helped the business gain momentum and informed her decisions to pivot to new subsectors of commercial real estate, until the data center development boom put serious wind in the volume and value of the company’s deal flow. From taking small investors’ money and putting it into development funds, the company hit its stride with a better than 300 percent return on one transaction. “Our investor base really grew and one of the bigger deals that we did a couple of years ago was a data center deal where we bought a property for $40 million in 2022 and sold it for a $136 million two years later,” she said. “So that’s when kind of the AI aspect of our business really started.” Verma-Lallian said the multiple pivots Arizona Land went through, from residential land development to industrial and multifamily project to data center deals built up her knowledge of the market for various property submarkets, and made her closely attuned to her investors’ needs and input. That knowledge expanded the circle of backers from friends and family to eventually include private equity funds, venture capital investors and family offices. Growing those partnership allowed the company to grow, too. “I think it’s just a matter of being agile and then also just staying ahead of what the trends are and getting there before anyone else does,” she said. Research is a solid foundation, but the right kind of luck can turbocharge the pace of scaling a small company. Social media was that vehicle for Sun Home. “We had no idea that saunas were going to be just blowing up, especially infrared saunas, when we started this company,” Fischer said. “I remember when we founded Sun Home or we decided, hey, we’re going to launch this website and start selling some saunas and infrared saunas, and we signed our dealer agreement. A friend hit me up and said, ‘You said something about infrared saunas. I just saw someone one on a reality TV show I watched where I saw the Kardashians talking about infrared saunas or something like that.’ And the next week all I heard about is infrared saunas all over social media.” A mention on podcast megastar Joe Rogan’s Instagram didn’t hurt either. But as these companies grew, they each faced a key moment when they needed outside help to go from small to fast. When should that happen? “A key point to scaling is do it yourself as long as you absolutely can, but no longer,” Fisher said. That means giving up some control and trusting others with your vision, which can be hard for an entrepreneur to do, but is vital to paving the way for substantial growth. Verma-Lallian, who described herself as “a total control freak,” after founding Arizona Land. waited a year before hiring her first employee. The company now has 20 full-timers and a host of subcontractors. Sun Home now has 17 employees, whom Fischer describes as dedicated and enthusiastic about its culture and mission. Ironically, he told the audience that he initially found delegating tasks very difficult. “It’s a really weird ask to ask people to do stuff for you.” But that leads to real leadership and company growth, because your employees have bought in to the mission, and giving them enough autonomy to deepen their dedication then lets these people ask things of founders, and tell them where things could improve. “Managing up,” said Fischer, means a founder has created a culture that creates a virtuous circle for scaling a business. “I want the people below me, and the people below them to tell me what we could be doing better,” he said. “I’m all ears.”
