The 4 Powerful Habits to Build A Big Business With A Tiny Team
Your habits as a founder don’t just influence your business - they define it.
The wrong habits create a cycle of constant firefighting rather than strategic thinking. This quickly leads to feeling overwhelmed and stuck. Not only does this affect your ability to lead, but creates a ripple effect on your team and culture, risking your business’s success.
The right habits will transform how you lead while accelerating your growth.
If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know I’m a big proponent of simplicity. This is my north star for nearly everything I do.
Here’s why: Complexity kills great companies.
It’s a silent killer. It drains team morale. It demands unnecessary effort. It steals profits.
And since growth naturally creates complexity within your business, it’s crucial to instill habits that simplify.
Today I’m sharing my favorite habits for building a big business with a small team. There isn’t much fairy dust here. Just four simple boring habits that I’ve found to make dramatic progress within any business.
These habits will transform your business and how you work.
Let’s dive in.
Habit 1: Communicate More Than You Think You Need To
Everyone in the company should be rowing towards the same goal. Unfortunately, most companies fail miserably at communicating the right information to their team.
A lot of useless information leads to frustration and wasted time. Too little information causes confusion, leading to poor decisions.
When you communicate with your team you should have one simple goal: to align the team with the business model.
Invest heavily here. This isn’t a “nice to have” - it’s vital to building trust, alignment, and a culture of accountability within your team. You want to ensure everyone understands how their actions contribute to the company’s culture and success.
For example, I’m offline a lot. So for my specific businesses, I like to look for small simple ways to keep communication flowing without my presence. This could look like having leads start meetings with a 2-minute review of our company KPIs, or setting up Slack to share our mission and values. This keeps it manageable, and consistent.
Two Tactical Ideas To Start:
Daily Mission & Values Slack Post: This is a simple, low-effort way to support your communication efforts. Every morning at 9a, my team receives an automated Slack post from me with our mission and values. It’s randomized with a few different messages to keep it from being stale.
Weekly Team Memo: Every week, I send a team memo that outlines exactly what we need to move the company forward, with or without me. By reading this memo, my team knows what to work on, what's a priority, and why. It helps them make big decisions without my input.
Habit 2: Document Workflows = Processes
I prefer my team to solve new problems rather than remember how to execute an old one already solved. A simple habit we’ve implemented is documenting anything we do more than two times. We don’t need to write a novel on it, just an outline or a recorded Loom video will save everyone brain space and energy.
You’d be surprised how transformative this simple habit is for a business. The business becomes more efficient, scalable, and resilient by this simple act. Your team is onboarded and trained quicker with less effort. And you'll deliver a higher quality service or product, increasing customer satisfaction.
Processes are the foundation for turning your business into a well-oiled machine.
Two Tactical Ideas To Start:
Loom Workflow Recordings: By far the easiest way to document workflows is with a simple Loom recording. We use this religiously across all of my businesses. You simply turn it on, and it records your screen while you talk through what you’re doing. My favorite part about using Loom is that along with watching exactly how I do something, you’ll also hear me narrate why.
Start With Small Repetitive Tasks: People get overwhelmed when thinking of creating processes. Start your team by documenting the small repetitive tasks first to gain momentum. Look for things that take less than an hour to get done. Then work your way up to the bigger workflows.
Habit 3: Instill Friday Reviews
Every Friday, I spend 20 minutes thoughtfully reviewing where I’ve spent my time throughout the week. This small ritual has helped me align my actions with my priorities.
After seeing how powerful Friday Reviews were for me, I instilled this across my team. I’m still surprised by how much one tiny habit can change. Each team member meticulously analyzes where their efforts are most effective, trimming away anything unnecessary.
This small, but simple habit has transformed us into a more focused, efficient, and aligned team.
The Friday Review:
What went well?
What didn’t go well?
What could be eliminated?
What could be delegated?
What meetings can be replaced with an email?
Does my calendar reflect my priorities?
Habit 4: Mastering Delegation Will Completely Change Your Life
Not just your business. It will change your life.
You have no idea how much time and energy you’ll save, simply by delegating. To find out, you need to embrace a “let go to grow” mindset.
“What would I even have someone do?” becomes “What else can I have someone do?”
Despite its simplicity, delegation is the hardest mindset shift on this list to embrace. But once you’ve mastered it you’ll never look back.
You'll have more time to think creatively, strategize, and grow. You'll build a capable, empowered team.
It took a concussion for me to master delegation - not an ideal way of embracing it. But once I did, I began to work on my business, instead of in it.
Two Tactical Ideas To Start:
The Ankle-Biters: Start small by looking for tasks that take less than 15 minutes. You’ll tell yourself you can do it: faster, easier, better… than someone else. I won’t argue with you there. You absolutely can. But these small tasks compound over time, taking time and energy from you.
The Shadow Meetings: These are meetings you don’t really need to be in, but for some reason you keep showing up, telling yourself the meeting can’t run without you. Delegate the meeting to someone on the team you can trust to a) run the meeting, and b) give you a summary of decisions made.
Putting It All Together
These four powerful habits have become an invaluable playbook in my journey as an entrepreneur. If you’re looking to try this out at your company, here are the biggest take-aways to remember:
Start with one, then slowly add on a new habit.
Focus on simplicity. As you notice chaos and complexity creeping back in, go back to trim and prune again.
The habits that help transform work and life for you as CEO, will usually 10x your team’s life and work too.
Looking For More In-Depth Help?
Here's a few ways I can help:
⚫️ The 20 Hour CEO: Five-week live cohort where you'll learn how to scale yourself and your business, with 1:1 coaching from me. I share my exact methods, playbooks, and actionable strategies for building 3 businesses to $200M. Join the waitlist to learn when the course opens back up.
⚫️ The 20 Hour CEO Video Replay Course: Created for greater accessibility, this is the exact same course without the 1:1 coaching or community. You'll get instant access to all the templates, frameworks, and playbooks included in the live cohort.
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