Controlling SWF inside a SWF

programming flash
1

I have a SWF that is 300x250 and needed to be resized to 336x280. There were a lot of elements to work with and the resulting SWF needed to be less than 40 kb (my starting SWF was 35 kb). To make things as easy as possible I created a stage and background of 336x280 then imported the SWF into the library and centered it. The result fits the correct dimensions without having to resize every element in the original SWF and I was able to come in under 40 kb.
The problem is that I need to control the number of times the movie loops. I tried to do this using the following code on the centered movieclip (instance name smallOne):

onClipEvent(load) {
 if (!loopCount) {
   var loopCount:Number = 0;
 }
 loopCount++;
 if (loopCount >= 3) {
    smallOne.stop();
 }
}

Unfortunately this does not seem to be the fix, as the smallOne movieclip continues to loop without stopping. Any suggestions?