When the cash registers are ringing, how do 99 out of 100 business owners react? Rejoice, hire, sell more, work day and night to keep things kind of under control, and pray that overheated growth won’t blow up the company before a deep-pocketed buyer takes over.

Not so for famed landscape photographer Clyde Butcher, the founder of Big Cypress Gallery in the Everglades and The Venice Gallery in South Sarasota.

Working nonstop hours to grow a business is “been-there-done-that” for Butcher, 65. Back in the ‘70s, he and his wife, Niki, built a California-based company of 200 employees, which manufactured and sold picture clocks featuring Clyde Butcher color photos. The business, with manufacturing operations in California and Ohio, had their lives in its iron grip.

Hell-bent on keeping control over their lives when they opened their Florida galleries seven years ago, the Butchers took a different approach.

Says Clyde: “We don’t want to be bigger. We want to be better.”

So the Butchers raised prices, committed to keeping all their employees, and put their daughter, Jackie Obendorf, in charge of operations. Obendorf streamlined production and added an Internet component to marketing. She extended the product lineup, adding cheaper open-edition prints to the more expensive limited-edition and big prints (which cost up to $5,000). But she also kept raising prices every year.

The result: Revenues of the Butchers’ corporation, Window of the Eye Inc., have been flat over the past seven years, but profits are up. And the owners are happy about it. Says Obendorf: “We sell less and make more.”

Window of the Eye is unusual in another way, too. Butcher describes his photography, supposedly the company’s main product, as “bait.” What he really wants to sell people on is care for the natural environment in general, and the Everglades in particular.

The Butchers’ stay-small strategy looks oddball amid Florida’s transactional economy, where growth is a fetish. Given what most business schools in this country teach, the Butchers’ business plan amounts to an act of rebellion against established thinking. But it is part of a larger rebellion popping up at thousands of spots throughout the U.S. economy, if you believe Bo Burlingham.

“There’s no law that says you must get big,” says the Massachusetts-based editor-at-large of Inc. magazine. “You can have other goals. [Butcher] is obviously one of those people aware of the fact that he has a choice. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a big or fast-growing company. But that’s a choice, and he does what all businesspeople should do: think first about what kind of business they want.”

A rising number of business owners have already decided they don’t want to go the corporate way. The San Francisco-based Business Alliance of Local Living Economies (BALLE), for instance, made up of entrepreneurs seeking new ways of doing business, has seen its membership triple over the past couple of years.

Using his bully pulpit at Inc. magazine—not exactly a rebel-rousing publication—Burlingham not only defends no-growth as a legitimate way, he actually dedicated a book to the phenomenon. In Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big, he portrays 13 small businesses, ranging from Zingerman’s deli in Ann Arbor to singer Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe record label, and a Boise, Idaho, company that makes signaling equipment for trucks and buses.

Problem is, small companies are overlooked, Burlingham says. Although they only constitute a tiny percentage of the total number of companies, most media and academic attention is focused on multinational corporations.

“Grow or die—that may be true for large, publicly traded companies,” he says. “But there are plenty of businesses out there that aren’t growing, and they aren’t dying. They constitute a larger percentage of the economy, and they are responsible for most of the job generation.”

"People say you should never fall in love with your business,” he says about passion. “I think that’s a lot of hogwash.” These small giants have what Burlinghan describes as “mojo.” It’s not just about cranking out widgets to boost dollar figures. “There was excitement, anticipation, a feeling of movement, a sense of purpose,” he writes in the intro of his book. “That happens, I think, when people find themselves totally in synch with their market, with the world and with each other.”

Butcher’s passion for nature is evident to anyone who has ever met the white-bearded, voluminous, always-on-message artist-activist-entrepreneur, and his company fits that description. And that passion makes him a natural salesman.

His gallery open houses and Everglades swamp walks are really teaching sessions on nature and state energy-savings programs. One of the visitors Clyde subjected to a waste-deep “Muck-About” two years ago was former president Jimmy Carter. “His Secret Service guys were really worried” about the ex-president getting too deep into murky swamp water, Butcher says. “He wasn’t.”