Scaling a Professional Services Firm is Like Traveling to the Moon — It Isn’t Rocket Science: Part 2 – The Small Team Engine

Launching a rocket to the Moon and scaling a professional services firm to the top of its industry share similarities – both endeavors require immense effort, strategic planning, and overcoming significant challenges like gravity, drag, and heat generation. Traveling to the Moon parallels the stages of scaling a firm to the top:

Moon travel involves a launch stage overcoming Earth’s gravity, an Earth orbit stage preparing for a lunar trajectory, a trans-lunar stage setting a course for the Moon, and a lunar orbit stage positioning for final approach.

Scaling a professional services firm also involves distinct stages: a startup stage establishing the core business, a growth stage expanding its customer and services portfolios, a scaling phase replicating successes across multiple markets, and an industry leadership stage cementing a top position. Both need powerful engines to overcome the forces confronting them throughout their journey.

In a professional services organization, small teams act as engines of growth. Their team members are talented individuals who generate the power needed to drive the firm upward – delivering services, recruiting customers and candidates, and operating the infrastructure supporting both.

These individuals are the essential components that ensure each team functions efficiently and effectively. Each person is like a thrust vector. Their collective contributions and decisions help steer and stabilize their team’s efforts. Each person’s unique role and influence affect the direction and success of the team’s desired outcome.

There is an important distinction to be made when scaling a professional services firm. They do not scale one person at a time. They scale one small team at a time.

The small team is the basic building block or Lego of scaling a professional services organization. Without a small team, a firm cannot scale beyond the startup stage. Without strategically leveraging the fractal, iterative power of multiple small teams, most firms become trapped at each successive stage, requiring them to refactor their organizational design to travel upward.

The smoothest, most effective Moon mission is to begin with that end in mind and launch with an intention to iteratively replicate small teams. (This topic is explored in Part 3).

Before striving for these higher altitudes, we need to understand the meaning and power of small teams as the engine of scaling.

A small team is a group of people working together toward a shared purpose that is compact enough to maintain close communication, collaboration, and alignment on goals.

Small teams have several important scaling advantages over larger groups:

• Speed and agility for rapid decisions and implementation without the internal friction of larger groups. Small teams can pivot, or experiment with new approaches, without delay. (Reducing heat generation)
• Deeper, more personalized relationships with stakeholders. Small teams can provide the bespoke service and attention customers expect, fostering loyalty that leads to repeat business and referrals. As a professional services firm scales, maintaining high-quality relationships is vital, especially with customers. (Reducing drag)
• A stronger sense of ownership over their work, leading to higher engagement and accountability. As an organization scales, empowered teams are more likely to take initiative, drive projects to completion, and ensure the successful outcomes essential for service excellence at scale. (Overcoming gravity)

For rocket engines, larger is not necessarily better. A larger engine increases a rocket’s mass, requiring even more thrust for the same acceleration. Simply scaling up engine size doesn’t linearly reduce the effort needed to reach space. Team sizes have similar dynamics. Technically, a small team can range from 3 to 15 people. However, the zone of maximum team effectiveness and output is from 5 to 9 people. This derives from the evolutionary limits on group recognition and trust known as Dunbar’s number. (R. Dunbar, “Neocortex Size as the Constraint on Group Size in Primates,” Journal of Human Evolution, 22 6, 1992.) From those, only around five people can be known and trusted closely (D. Snowden, “The Rule of 5, 15 & 150,” Cognitive Edge (blog) 2006-12-10).

Allowing teams to grow beyond 7-to-9 members imperils the visibility of the (internal or external) service being delivered by that team, as trust begins to break down and unsuitable decisions might ensue. When delivering changes rapidly, it is important to ensure high trust is explicitly valued and designed for. High trust enables a team to innovate and experiment. If trust is missing or reduced due to a larger number of people, speed and quality of delivery suffers.

Dunbar also found the rule of 150. Starting around 150, and ending around 250, people, even an organization of small teams starts to breakdown and underperform. Drag and heat generation overcome the most powerful small team engines and prevent them from achieving escape velocity. Leveraging the fractal power of small teams is covered in Part 3.