How Big Should a Troop Be

Life has been trumping blog lately, but I am finally back on it.
A few weeks ago we had a meeting with the Charter Organization and one of the questions that came up was, "How long do you think it will take you to build up to a full troop?" I really didn't know how to answer that.
We have five boys starting this new troop, thats the 'full' troop. I told them we were hoping to grow by five to ten boys a year, but you never can tell. We also have the fact that we may have some boys join then decide they don't like scouting, or how our troop runs. The numbers could be fluid for awhile. They seemed satisfied with that answer but it got us to thinking.
How big do we really want to grow, and how fast do we want to get there?
As of right now, five is perfect for us. We are all new to Boy Scouts, the boys and the leaders. None of us have any experience past Cubs, and Cub Scouts is nothing like Boy Scouts. Five is a good workable number to learn with.... for now. We discussed this for hours and never really came up with a number that we wanted to shoot for, 20?, 30?, 130? Right now we're comfortable with five !
I think the bigger concern for now is how 'fast' we grow. Three years ago our Cub Pack had 13 boys returning, our open house goal was to recruit ten new boys. With the size of our town that seemed pretty optimistic, I was just hoping to get new boys. When open house was over I had 52 new applications. While this might seem awesome, it was anything but. Not only were we not prepared to take on this many new kids, the church basement where we met was not even close to being big enough to hold everyone in separate dens without disturbing the others. The Bear den now had twenty two boys in it, which we were going to have to split into two different dens. That led to the biggest problem, parent involvement. Where we used to have parents hanging around watching and trying to help when ever they could, now we had a pack of parents that never even got out of there cars. We did eventually get things straightened out with the pack, but it took us a better part of the year, and we lost a few Cubs just from the confusion and lack of organization.
This will not happen with the troop!!!!
If we gain 5,6 10 kids a year we'll be happy, if we don't we'll still be happy.... but wondering why. If by some chance we get 52 new boys next year, we'll be ready for that too. I hope the troop will grow slowly and steadily, but I think the troop will grow at whatever rate is comfortable for the troop.

Either way.... the Troop should be as big as it is !!