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

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:

• Free Time: Lose The Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

• Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business

• Start Finishing: How to Go From Idea to Done

🔗 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

Related Podcast Episodes: 

• 045: Behind the Free Time Brand with Adam Chaloeicheep

• 069: Epic Evergreen Email Sequences with Alan Dibb

• 091: Quarterly Planning with Charlie Gilkey

• Pivot 136: Start Finishing: Pricing Projects and Momentum Planning with Charlie Gilkey

• Chill and Prosper: Why I love Batching Content Creation

💻 Access Free Time episode transcripts on Podscribe »

❤️ Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review. Consider becoming a podcast BFF and you’ll get access to a monthly Q&A call with Jenny, a private feed, and access to a community forum with fellow Heart-Based Business Owners.

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter: http://itsfreetime.com/join

🛠 Get instant access to the Free Time Toolkit: http://itsfreetime.com/tools

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

🗣 Submit a voice question or comment for future episodes: http://itsfreetime.com/ask

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts

📝 Check out full show notes and links from this episode and share it with a friend! https://itsfreetime.com/episodes/098