No matter your size, aim to punch above

Consider this. Instagram was bought by Facebook for US$1,000,000,000 at a time when they had just 13 employees. Yes, that’s a billion-dollar business with a team of just 13 people.

It’s a level of value and ROI that’s off the charts. However, beyond the massive payday there’s another thread to this, a story of ‘smallness’.

Kevin Systrom, a Stanford University graduate was working in his spare time developing an app called Burbn – named after his love of the brown liquor. His app enabled people to check in to places, post maps and tag photographs.

Systrom landed some venture capital funding that allowed him to quit his job and bring in a fellow Stanford graduate, Mike Kreigar. They reviewed other apps in their space and saw that Hipstamatic, an emerging photography-based app, while popular, wasn’t social media friendly.

The duo jumped on the opportunity.

They turned Burbn into solely a photo sharing app, simplifying its features to only include liking and commenting. They also changed its name to Instagram.

After eight weeks of fine tuning they let their friends Beta test it. On launch day it grew to an incredible 25,000 users. And their sticky new platform was a magnet for investors too. Instagram instantly attracted another US$7m in funding, valuing the business at US$25 million.

Now they could go and hire a big team to get to the next level. Except they didn’t. The founders deliberately wanted to keep the company small with only a dozen employees. This kept the operation nimble and focused, allowing them to iterate at speed and get Instagram to where they wanted it to be. The rest is history.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame used his ‘two pizza rule’ – if a project team can’t be fed by two pizzas the team is too big. Small teams have helped him become as big as it gets.

And there’s plenty of scientific evidence to back this ‘rule’ up. Studies have found that five to eight member teams maximise an employee’s potential. Leading to more engagement, accountability and productivity. And interestingly, workplace safety and absenteeism improve massively too. What’s more, in a Forbes magazine article by Jacob Morgan titled ‘Why smaller teams are better than larger ones’ he noted that you get less ‘social loafing’ in small teams. It references when individual contributions are thought to be less valuable, because of the number of people sharing the same task. Or put in a more Australian way you get less bludging!

It was also found you get more innovation, communication, support, autonomy and flexibility. Because tightly knit groups rely on each other more heavily and have each other’s back.

Small countries can punch above their weight too. Australia has consistently over delivered. Whether it’s economically, as a military ally or in the sporting world.

I still remember arriving on these shores in 1994 when Australia was Rugby World Cup Champions. Then discovering that rugby was only really played in a couple of suburbs in Sydney and Brisbane and that cricket is actually the national sport. It’s unsurprising that the England rugby team’s head coach is now an Aussie.

Just recently, Australia won its 1,000th Commonwealth Games medal in athletics at the event in Birmingham. Not to mention our successes at the last few Olympic Games. Yes, sport is a national obsession here, but our proportionally small population compared to our competitors over delivers time and again. It’s no doubt the underdog spirit focusses our passion and galvanises us to consistently win big.

The saying that it takes a whole village to raise a child is certainly true, but it’s the opposite when it comes to raising a creative idea. A meeting room padded out with people who have no role in a project, or layers of agency staffers whose only purpose is to pump up client retainer hours adds no value at all.

As Kevin Systrom and others have proven (and I see it in our agency every day with our clients) staying small and nimble brings big advantages.

Of course, wherever your brand sits in the fame hierarchy, there’s always more to do as bigger competitors outspend you and new entrants out-innovate you. Whether you’re a supermarket in the highly competitive retail category, a big insurance company (or a small creative agency) it always comes down to who is in the team, not the size of it.

So, if you want to think big, think small.