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

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I find it really fascinating to talk to business owners and founders who at one point stretch and balloon their business to 10 full time team members, 50 full time, 100 full time and then end up paring it back down to get it to be as delightfully tiny as they can. That minimum viable team needed to keep the business running smoothly, keep the business owner feeling high net freedom, but that it's not any bigger than it needs to be. That's how I define an mvt. It's no bigger than it needs to be and it's as small as possible through elimination, automation and delegation.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

How can you build the minimum viable team needed to help you get your work done joyfully and easily? If you're somebody who doesn't want to become a manager of a large team, some businesses, some products, some services require a large team and the entrepreneur, the business owner, has ambitions to grow that team that they might want to create a business that grows to meet as big of a demand as they can generate out there in the world, make as big of a splash as they possibly can. This episode is for those of you who want to build the minimum viable and might I say delightfully tiny team. You don't have ambitions to grow your actual organization big even as you scale the impact that you're having. And you don't even really want to manage a lot of people. You want to quietly do your deep work and have just enough people helping out so that you can do what you do best and leave the rest to your team. Before we get into the details of how to build your minimum viable team or mvt, a phrase borrowed from the idea of a minimum viable product or mvp as Eric Reese talked about in his book the Lean Startup. I wanted to thank two reviews that recently came in. The first one is from Stacy who said yes, Jenny, you are a gift. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and expertise with joy and love. Thank you so much Kelly. I really appreciate the review. And the second one came from in 0909 09. Maybe that's their lucky number repeated many times. Who said Permission to do things differently? Jenny has totally flipped my framing when it comes to work. I no longer feel pressured to constantly be grinding and hustling. She's guided me to a place where I can find joy and flow both from a mindset and a system's viewpoint. I've learned so much already and continue to learn more with each new episode. I aspire to reach Jennie's level of elegance in organizing systems and processes. Thank you so much for these kind words. Who ever would have thought that we'd all be having this much fun organizing, systematizing and creating processes. That's my whole mission here, to make this stuff fun and to show you the really tangible results of freeing up your time and even, as I say in the book, your mind, Time and team. If you are an introverted entrepreneur, a new business owner, somebody who is a little hesitant to hire people, even contractors, even part timers, maybe you think you can do the work yourself or you can do it faster, you can do it with less headache. I do say in the book, and I believe this, it's hard to feel truly free if you're the only one in your business. That just leads to bottlenecking and burnout because you have to do everything, even the things you're not good at. There's nobody to step in when you need a day off or a week or a month or six months, and you end up feeling the pressure that you always have to be on. You are the one on the front lines of every single thing in your business. Again, often doing things that you don't even like. So I don't think I need to convince you to have at least one or two people who are on your core team. My team members work five, maximum 10 hours a week, so nobody here is working full time. But you got to have some people who can help you out to do things in the business like customer support or community management or client onboarding that you don't want to do that enable you to do your more creative, strategic, original thinking. Take a minute and reflect on your career and the different team sizes that you've managed. If you've ever managed People, when were you the happiest? Most Business literature and research examines the ideal team size in terms of output. What produces the highest volume, what's most efficient. And this is certainly what I found when I was reading all kinds of different business books to write free time. All the research about ideal team size was so focused on productivity, effectiveness, output, how do we create the most efficient, amazing, productive teams. Nobody was talking about team size based on leader preference, business culture and cohesion. So my question to you is what size is most joyful for you and your team? We know that if a business owner doesn't like managing people, whether you have a team of five or team of 500 or 5,000 or 500,000, one option is that the business owner, the founder, steps aside and and bring someone else in as CEO. The Google co founders did this when they said that they, quote, were bringing in the adult. Eric Schmidt. You see a lot of public companies who have boards. At some point kind of ask the founder to step aside and say, from this point forward, we think it's better if we put in someone who knows how to CEO. In his book Rocket Fuel, Gino Wickman talks about smaller businesses, probably, I'm guessing, like the ones many of you are running, where the CEO, the visionary, sometimes installs an integrator, a coo, someone who handles all the operations and even where any team members or contractors report into the integrator or COO to free the CEO up for their visionary thinking, strategizing, et cetera. As I say in the book free time for creative entrepreneurs, ones for whom high net freedom is equally important to revenue growth, there is a Goldilocks quality to designing your own delightfully tiny team. I call it a horseshoe of team happiness. If your team is too big or too small for your personality and your preferences, you might feel dread, despair, depressed, drained or distracted. I coined the burdensome bees. Bottlenecked, bored, burnt out or buried by bureaucracy. And now we need like the downer D's Dread, despair, depressed, drained or distracted. Woo. Five whole D's in a row. Okay, so let's look at both ends of this horseshoe in more detail. If your team is too small, you are taxingly tiny. In many cases. If you have fewer than three core people in your team rotation, definitely. If you're entirely solo, the burden constantly falls on you. As we talked about, it's hard to get the rest and recharging that you need to do more strategic work. You risk exhaustion and burnout from overworking and from processing the minutiae you dread not to mention the cognitive cost of being the one in charge, the only one who has all the details of the business in your own head. So it's even more stressful when you do bring on specialists and outside contractors, because you have that burden of transferring all of those instructions about how to run your business or help out in the business to somebody else. And if you're not doing that on a regular basis, there's even attacks when you do start delegating for the first time. On the other end of the horseshoe, if your team is too big, at least for your personality preference and your joy, you might feel burdened by pressure and complexity. Unless building a large business is your ambition. As I was saying at the start, and you love managing people and you love onboarding them and training them and helping them grow and evolve and learn the ropes. Then recurring meetings start to overwhelm your calendar. There's a delegation curve where when you bring people on, there's a lot of ramp up. It takes a lot of work upfront to again transfer things from your mind into other people. You'll spend a lot more time responding to questions, switching between team members projects to help where they're stuck, and it all adds up. Meanwhile, you're still on the hook for that higher overhead. So profit margins might be thinner despite or because of your growing team. I find it really fascinating to talk to business owners and founders who at one point stretch and balloon their business to 10 full time team members, 50 full time, 100 full time, and then end up paring it back down to get it to be as delightfully tiny as they can. That minimum viable team needed to keep the business running smoothly, keep the business owner feeling high net freedom, but that it's not any bigger than it needs to be. That's how I define an mvt. It's no bigger than it needs to be and it's as small as possible through elimination, automation and delegation. And we're going to get into that in the second half of this with the how. First, let's talk about that Goldilocks sweet spot. So we talked about too small and you're taxingly tiny. Too big and you might feel burdened. Delightfully tiny teams help you reach a personal sweet spot of efficiency and freedom as the owner that enables you to focus on your best work. The perfect team size for you feels on the whole, even if not every day, delightful. You delegate the details. You have automated and systematized enough of them so that even your team is not overwhelmed by minutia. You have processes that are clearly defined and your team members are clear on their role and responsibilities, freeing them to take on more creative projects in the business. Delightfully tiny teams and minimum viable teams are big enough to share strategic work according to each person's strengths, but they're not so large that they create drag and friction for the manager or the team. High functioning, delightfully tiny teams are resourceful. They know how to leverage technology, automation and systems for their benefit. From a systems perspective, every person matters because they bring unique perspectives and strengths that can improve processes with fresh eyes. In an mvt, you don't have extra people you actually have. I like to assign one person per project or one person per business area and no more. Honestly, if I can, if I can swing it. And I've changed my business model many times to try to keep my team at an MBT size. So if I feel that my business and what I'm offering is going to require more team members, that inspires me to get more creative about how to redesign the work. I love collecting stories of what people are doing in their business after reading Freetime and in fact you can see them if you scroll down. I created a little flip book on the website@itsfreetime.com book of how people are freeing their time and one thing I've heard more than once are people who say they're bringing on a second VA or a second project manager. This is so smart because consider that triads are a much more stable structure than dyads, where one absent person means halting all shared work and collaboration with a minimum of three people. Even if one person is out, at least you still have backup. So it's been really fun hearing about people who feel that their business is a little fragile. Remember Alan Dibb told us the most dangerous number in your business is one. Whether there's only one of you, only one team member. One is a possible point of failure where something can break or communication could break down. So at least with three or four people you stay really lean in terms of the lines of communication as I have that diagram in the book. You can even just google this communication nodes and team size and you'll see how complexity really accelerates once you get to more than 5, 6, 7 people on your team. One thing that I've discovered in my business is that even if I have one or two core team members who are part of jbe, I could still hire delightfully tiny teams and partner with them. Like the entire podcast production team. They have their own business and their own systems and communication. So technically each episode has at least three or four people working on it as we go through the life of an episode. But I'm not directly managing all of those people. So it is nice to partner with other delightfully tiny teams because it takes the pressure off of you to do all the work of managing and you get to outsource to them to do whatever their specialty is. So when I say minimum viable team, I really mean the minimum you need at your core of your recurring people to get the work done. Again, joyfully and easily while still realizing that you can hire your own DTT specialists to partner with.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Now let's talk about how to create your MVT or delightfully tiny team and some best practices around what actually enables you to have the most lean team possible. I'm going to take you through this through the lens of the free time framework. Stage 1 alignment align is about aligning your team and your business model with your energy and your strengths. Again, I count the owner's happiness as a key factor, not just productivity or output. So if you're running the kind of business again where your mission in life is to grow as big as possible, to serve the largest possible market, to make and produce as many things as possible, this is not for you. What I'm talking about here is aligning your business and your business model to your energy and your strengths. What is your ideal team size? Sometimes, as in the Goldilocks horseshoe that we talked about, you don't know. You know when it's too small because you feel pinched. You know when it's too big because you feel annoyed and frustrated and like you can't get any work done because you have so many people who need things from you. So really think about what gives you energy, what complements your strengths, what type of personality of team members give you energy? What skills of your team make your life easier where you cannot imagine not having them on the team. Part of being lean and agile with an MVT is that you don't have people that are dragging you down, where it creates more work for you to manage them and to manage the work than it does to not have them at all. That's why sometimes business owners get into that bad habit of saying, ugh, I'll just do this myself. Because if you don't delegate properly or create the right processes or hire the right people, you are going to be stuck and frustrated. You're going to lose trust, you're going to start taking back control, which is going to keep you feeling stuck and overworked and bottlenecked. The second stage of the Free Time framework design. This is where we can measure and automate in the business and design smarter processes. So you know, I have a mixed relationship to metrics. I talk in the book, I share examples of 37 signals, companies who don't use goals, they don't adhere to goals. And then on the other hand, I really appreciate books like Traction, also by Gina Wickman, that talk about the scorecard is everything. The weekly scorecard, the metrics that you're tracking, that without this you barely even have a business. So I really see both sides of this. I see how there are phases of my business where we don't even track metrics at all. And I know that's basically blasphemy. Again, some people would say that you don't even have a business. But when I'm completely surrendered to the flow and to what is, I still have ambitions, I still create new programs, I still grow revenue. I still try to grow the podcast and my newsletters, but they're just not attached to any numeric outcome. I know what growth looks like. I know it's exciting. I do have certain benchmarks in my mind, but I'm not obsessively tracking every lag and lead measure. So lag measures are ones that you track kind of in arrears. So you say a lag measure is how much revenue did we earn last quarter? A lead measure is a measure or tracking something that could help see if you are on track to revenue growth. So a lead measure might be how many intro calls do you have with potential clients? I don't really track that stuff in my business. However, I really appreciated the episode with Charlie Gilke. We'll put it in the show Notes where he said that if you do have team members, you got to have some metrics. They need to know what they're working toward and that that's really helpful for them to understand. How are they doing and how are they tracking to the things that are important to you and your business? I highly recommend listening to that one if you have a slight metrics and measurement allergy like I do, because that was the first time that Charli really turned me around where I could see, oh yeah, there's a ton of value here. Part of the design stage is being really thoughtful before you delegate and before you bring team members on. What can you automate? What can you get off of everybody's plate? Nobody in the business needs to be buried by busy work. It's not good for anybody. No one's really going to enjoy that. So as you look at your business and you take stock of what you've got, and especially look at the areas where you think you need the most help and say, how can I streamline this? How can I automate here? What can I eliminate altogether? Sometimes you look at the business model as this happened to me Thanksgiving prior to 2020, I wrote down everything I was doing in the business and I was spinning 10 plates. There was no way there was going to be room to create this podcast or the free time book if I didn't put some of those plates down in the third stage, Assign again. This is the whole stage of the free time framework on purpose because especially high net freedom business owners often resist assigning and are a little nervous to bring people on or you've been burned before when you think about assigning. There's a couple ways to go. I like having an ongoing core team, as I mentioned, that's delightfully tiny. The minimum possible team. Right now, as I'm recording this, I'm probably short one person. I've been getting back into the business more, fixing all kinds of things that were broken or that just atrophied over the years. We currently have. It's so hard to put a number on it because we have two specialist teams and then one person. So the one person is director of pivot programs. She works on corporate speaking and licensing and helps at every stage of a client being interested to onboarding them, to fulfilling the work and scheduling, logistics, all kinds of things. And that's really important. I feel really good in her. She's an executive project manager, so she has decades of experience and I feel really confident with corporate clients in her hands. I also have a community Director Haley for the BFF community. That's our private community for heart based business owners, and she's part of a specialist team run by Stephanie Houston, who used to work with me in my business and now is running her own business and delightfully tiny team. So Stephanie mentors Haley and helps Haley kind of get the lay of the land. And then Haley is the official community manager. But that's a good example of all of teaching and onboarding for Hailey. Doesn't have to just come through me, it actually comes through Stephanie, who's building out her own team for managing other clients, social media and communities, and marketing and PR and all kinds of good stuff. Last but not least, I'm working with One Stone Creative, as you've heard me sing their praises many times on this podcast. That's the podcast production team that I hired in Q1 of 2022. So as I mentioned, every episode has an audio editor who works on it, somebody who's drafting the show notes, somebody who's project managing, and then usually somebody double checking the work. So it's three or four people touching every episode and I might have even gotten that wrong. Maybe One Stone Creative has even more magic happening behind the scenes, but it's at least three or four people who touch every episode. The role that I'm missing at the moment that I'm actually in no hurry to fill is a more general project manager and even va. There are certain things that I love having help with in my personal life, like making a vet appointment for Ryder or a groomer appointment, or calling to troubleshoot a customer service issue. There's just certain things like that on the personal side that when things are calm I can just deal with them. But it's even better to have somebody's help. And then there's also general stuff in my email inboxes or things that come through our team inboxes in Help Scout, where yes, it's nice to have a general project manager or VA almost a utility player for the business, that they're smart, they're quick, they can jump in anywhere, and they're okay with that kind of role. I hesitate to assign all of that stuff to any of the team members I currently mentioned, because I have found it to be much more effective when people specialized and they have one business area that's their responsibility and that just keeps things clear. It keeps them clear on what they're doing. I've made the mistake in the past of just giving too much and too many random things to one person. It's really Hard to juggle all of that. And then it's also really hard to improve any one of those areas because they're so busy just trying to stay caught up. In addition to having an ongoing team like the one that I just described, all those people are involved in my business every single month, even if it's just a couple hours a week. You can also do specialist sprints. So you heard the episode with Adam Chaloia Chip, I'll put it in the show notes he and his co founder Mari, who used to be my right hand in my business for five years, they co founded Together Agency, who's the brand strategy firm that designed all of the freetime book and brand that was more of a specialist sprint where I hired them for three months first to design the overall freetime brand and even podcast assets like the COVID art. And then I worked with them for another three months to design the actual book, cover and interior template. That's a sprint because they're not going to be part of my core team on an ongoing basis, but it feels really good to hire them, get the help I need, and then we kind of dust off our hands and go, okay, we're done here for now. That I find very joyful and high net freedom. Because if you can align your business and design your business to work in sprints, you don't have to manage this big team over time. You create your mvt, your own delightfully tiny team and then when you do sprints you get a whole chunk of work done at one time. Denise Duffield Thomas, she has a great podcast called Chill and Prosper. She did an episode on her epic batching for creating social media content. I'll find it and put that in the show notes for you. This is incredible. I don't remember the exact details, but I think she takes one or two days and produces six months of social media content that her team can leverage. When you do something like that, you could hire an editor or somebody to program that into Meet Edgar or Buffer or whatever software you're using. I don't even know because I don't do social media anymore. But if you are able to align your work in sprints and do something quarterly, then you can assign to a specialist once a quarter or twice a year in DDT's case. And that's it. Again, you don't have to be managing this thing on an ongoing basis. You can kind of get it out of your hair. So that's where we get back to the align and design stages. You align with your energy and how you like to work and then you design systems to help you get things done in batches or in sprints. Speaking of sprints, if you want to access the two day Strategy Sprint template that's in the Free Time Toolkit, so just go to itsfreetime.com toolkit if you don't already have access to once you're in there, it's the second to last resource listed under the Align column in the Design section of the toolkit. There are some resources for mapping out email processes. There's even one on how to rapidly create a course in a really lean, agile way. An MVP for your course, not to be confused with the MVT that we're talking about today. And then in the Assign column of the FreeTime Toolkit, you'll find sample job descriptions. Those might be helpful if you do want to expand your team or bring on a part time contractor. At least you're not starting from scratch because I find it hard sometimes you don't know what you need until you make the wrong moves and then you realize oh yes, that's really important to me. Or the person who joins my team is going to need to be really good at this certain type of skill or task or software or even personality traits that you most enjoy and appreciate working with. All that good stuff is at itsfreetime.com toolkit. The last thing that I'll say when it comes to bringing somebody on to your mvt, the goal is freeing their time as well so that they are doing increasingly interesting work. One quality that I look for is somebody who's genuinely excited about the overall work that I'm doing. My mission, the topics subject matter that I find generates excitement and makes them feel very grateful to be part of it. And then I also really want to understand what energizes them and what drains them. What do they love doing? What would they do in their free time? What types of problems do they most enjoy solving? That helps me ensure that I connect the team member to work that they love. Work that makes their time fly. You've heard me cite this stat on the podcast before, but it's really powerful. McKinsey research shows that we're five times more productive when we're in a flow state. Think about what that means. If you put team members into the right project areas, they're going to be five times more productive. If they actually love the work, they can find a flow state. They are not bothered by pings and busy work and alerts and you're not chopping up their time and attention. So everything I say in free time to help free the business owner is also meant for team members. It actually applies. I want the whole idea of delightfully tiny teams is that everybody feels energized by the work. Everybody is enabled and empowered to focus and get their deep work done, and that if the work is draining you together, find ways to eliminate it, automate it, or delegate it. To sum this up, there are seven qualities or ingredients, or maybe I should say enablers for you to have a minimum viable team, the smallest possible team to work with ease and joy and abundant time, energy and money.

We'll be right back just after this.

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The first one Clarity. Where do you thrive and how does your business and your business model thrive? The second one Focus. Specifically, narrow your focus. Do less. If your business is ballooning out of control or bigger than you want it to be, do less. How can you restructure your business and even your business model your services? How you deliver your services, productizing those services so that you narrow your focus, you do less and it's easier to create all the systems and process behind things. The third ingredient Metrics. What's important to you? What are you tracking? Where are you heading? Even if you don't have a metrics session, even if you don't want to create a weekly scorecard, what is important to you? How are you going to measure success in your business? 4. Software how can software help be the first line of defense? As I talk about in the episode on my favorite tech Tools software, I think of it as my right hand, it's my first team member because I look to automate everything I possibly can to software and software services before I have to bring somebody on. 5. An offshoot of software is designing the communication cadence for you and your team. If you have an MVT or delightfully tiny team, a DTT that isn't run well, that you have not set a communication cadence about what channel to use when you're still going to feel stressed out and like the all seeing question answer and chief everything officer, you will have that death by a thousand cuts feeling that I describe in free time because your team members and you are probably developing bad habits like you're just slacking each other all day long with questions. Nobody can get work done like that. So be intentional about designing your preferred communication cadence for your business. What software do you use when? How do you prefer to communicate? What should people do when they have questions? What kind of turnaround time do you want to set? Whether they send you an email, a slack message? In my business we use notion, a text message. Each of those I have already defined what to use when and you can do the same. Number six it's almost impossible to have an MVT or a DTT if you don't have processes. You've got to get stuff out of your head, out of your team members heads. Write it down, capture it. When you have a process captured, I encourage you to revisit at least every six months because often with fresh eyes you will see how to improve those processes. That takes work off of everybody's plate, might take work off of the process of doing it in the first place, might take work off of your plate in terms of reviewing, approving it, not getting in the way of things moving forward. I have found so many processes that I have cleaned up since I pared down my team and I've gotten back into things, down into the details. So even though eventually I will bring somebody on to help with this stuff again, I have caught so many things. I've streamlined so many processes. I've created more automations in zapier to notion, I've created new ways of looking at data. I mean there's just so much benefit to reviewing the processes that you have captured. All those processes live in what I call the manager manual, a place that your team members can go to see what to do when. And by the way, I say this too, I'm a broken record, but every question lives three lives. You should not be onboarding a single team member or answering a single question where that information that is relayed from you, the owner, to another person does not get captured. Everything must get captured. If somebody asks you a question, it means your documentation wasn't good enough. That's okay, that's good feedback. But then it's their responsibility to take your answer and add it to your manager manual. So you're always making things easier and easier for the next person. Number seven, the final quality of an MVT is to do a time audit. Look at how you and your team members are spending your time and specifically get out your magnifying glass or your binoculars and look large and small, near and far. What are the things that are creating task bloat? What parts of running your business, whether it's how you serve clients or some feature in a product or a service or a community that is just taking a disproportionate amount of time. Like if we look at the 8020 principle, you could just see is there 20% of your business that's taking 80% of the time? And it does not not correlate to disproportionate abundance in terms of energy, money, joy. So that's something that I ask myself frequently too when I'm trying to create my mvt is what is taking too much time? What is actually leading people to spend an inordinate amount of time or way too much time on something? And could we drop it all together? So there were certain aspects of podcast production where the way we were doing show notes before included timestamps and topics covered. That doubles the amount of time it takes to produce the show notes for the episode. Because you have to be so meticulous and particular about, oh, we talked about this at that time. This at that time. I just took it out. I know some people where their show notes are two sentences. I personally have a value of utility and findability and I like to synthesize things for you. I love knowing you can find every single resource that I mentioned right there in the show notes because why? It saves you time as a listener that you don't have to go search for those links. I found them for you. And so the utility of the show notes is very important to me. That's why you don't see our freetime show notes are just three sentences long. But who knows, there may come a day where I realize nobody cares. Here's another example. I recently just signed up for podscribe AI to automatically transcribe every episode of Free Time. This came from somebody writing in and asking how to find a transcript and I had been putting off this decision. Should I hire somebody to do them manually? Manual transcription is usually a dollar a minute. Or should I do automatic? And if we do, should it go into a Google Doc or a PDF or should it just go directly into the website to help with SEO, you could see that me spinning, as I say in the book, sometimes indecision is its own decision and too much spinning about tech tools is not productive. I finally decided the 8020 of this was I will sign up for Podscribe. That means that every episode there is now a transcript and there will be moving forward. The link is in the show notes, where else? But they're not manual, they're automatic. So there are going to be mistakes. I'll just try to talk as clearly as I can. You'll forgive me for any weird words that you catch in those transcripts. And I certainly hope there aren't like totally crazy misstatements. You know, that would not be good. But for any of you who prefer to just hop over to the transcript and skim, it's now available and it just took me a couple clicks of signing up for this service. That's a great illustration of the fact that I did not have to hire a person. I hired a software company. And yes, Maybe I'm paying $15 a month, but it's far less than what I would pay to transcribe eight or 10 episodes manually and have them be perfect. So as I say in the book, look for the cookie dough. In your business, sometimes the cookie dough is just as good as the fully baked cookies. It's about not being perfect, letting something be good enough and keep moving. And so that's what we did with the transcripts as just an illustration of what I'm talking about here of doing a time audit and seeing what is taking longer than it needs to. And do you need to do it at all? Those seven principles of creating an MVT just so you have clarity, focus, metrics, software, communication, cadence, process and a time audit. I would love to hear from you. What strategies have you used to create the minimum viable team? Have you been somebody where you grew and then you pared back down? I would just love to hear from you. And if you want to share any time saving strategies with fellow free timers, I would love to air more of those on this podcast. Visit itsfreetime.com ask and you can submit your feedback on this episode. Your ideas, any time saving strategies around team building that you've discovered. I and I think I speak for many of us listeners would love to hear from you. Just go to itsfreetime.com ask thank you so much for being here listening everybody, as always, and I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day.

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