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I agree with the premise of this blog post. But there are downsides to having a small team. We're a bootstrapped startup with 15 employees. When we lose an empl
by rsweeney21 5y ago
I agree with the premise of this blog post. But there are downsides to having a small team. We're a bootstrapped startup with 15 employees. When we lose an employee (sickness, termination, voluntary) it really hurts us. We have a 3 person sales team. One sales person down means a 33% loss in our pipeline. When our accountant is out, that's the entire department.
50-100 seems like the sweet spot for having enough coverage in responsibilities and spreading risk. But maybe we'll get there and it will still feel like we don't have enough people.
- nbstme 5y agoThanks for sharing! I also suffered from this when we were less than 20 people. From my experience, once you reach roughly 50 people, you have enough redundancies among functions to not be hurt by a departure.
- r00fus 5y agoHow do you manage a 50-100 person team? Honestly that sounds as bad as a skeleton crew of 1-3 people. The reality is that oft-hated word bureaucracy is what's needed. A hierarchy. Using a military analogy: "teams" of 2-3 ppl, 2 teams in a squad, 3-4 squads in a platoon, 3-4 platoons in a company, etc, etc. Each of those entities in the organization should have a lead. Someone who's responsible for their group's performance. Now you can stretch this, and minimize paperwork to expand say, a squad to 10-12 people (instead of the 7) but that either requires a talented squad lead, or some stuff gets ignored (ok for short term, not good long term). If you have large loose teams without a hierarchy it's madness
- lstamour 5y agoI think the suggestion was 50-100 people in the _company_, not that each team should be that large. Right now they only have 15 people total.