098: How to Build Your Minimum Viable Team (MVT)

Jun 3, 2022

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There is a Goldilocks quality to designing a Delightfully Tiny Team, a horseshoe of team happiness. Too small, and you are taxingly tiny: in many cases when you have fewer than three people, and certainly if you are entirely solo, the burden of moving the business forward falls entirely on you. It is hard to get the rest and recharging you need to do strategic work. On the other end of the horseshoe, if your team is too big, you may feel burdened by pressure and complexity.

If you’re a business owner oriented toward High Net Freedom, you might be interested in today’s topic: creating Minimum Viable Teams (MVTs). Minimum Viable Teams are as small as possible, while reducing owner-as-bottleneck and enabling each person to work with ease and joy. MVTs enable your best work, a personal sweet spot of efficiency and freedom as the owner.

The perfect team size for you feels, on the whole (even if not every day), delightful. You delegate the details and have automated and systematized enough of them that even your team is not overwhelmed by minutiae. Processes are clearly defined, and team members are clear on their role and responsibilities, freeing them to take on more creative projects in the business.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways:

What makes a team delightful tiny is up to you, the leader, to decide based on the intersection of 3 things: your strengths and energy, your current strategic projects, and desired outcomes for your team and business.
If your team is too big or too small for your personality and preferences, you may feel the Downer D’s: dread, despair, depressed, drained, or distracted.
7 Key Ingredients that enable an MVT: Clarity, focus, metrics, software, communication cadence, process (and Manager Manual), regular time audits.

📝 Permission: Build the smallest viable team, with no intention or desire to expand, that still frees you from being the bottleneck in your business.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next: Conduct a time audit. What is taking disproportionate time for diminishing return on results? How can you take a cookie dough approach instead, where you let good enough be good enough, without something being fully baked?

📘 Books Mentioned:

🔗 Resources Mentioned:

Free Time Resources: Toolkit, Operations Dashboard
Tools: Notion, Zapier, Podscribe
Podcast Production: One Stone Creative
Social Media Scheduling: Meet Edgar, Buffer
Article on Flow: Increasing the ‘Meaning Quotient’ of Work

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