Re-size... It's Time to Think Small!

Tim Ferris wrote the following blog post in an article about one of my favorite companies, 37Signals (http://bit.ly/csdOai).

Why grow? People ask, “How big is your company?” It’s small talk, but they’re not looking for a small answer. The bigger the number, the more impressive, professional, and powerful you sound. “Wow, nice!” they’ll say if you have a hundred-plus employees. If you’re small, you’ll get an “Oh . . . that’s nice.” The former is meant as a compliment; the latter is said just to be polite. Why is that? What is it about growth and business? Why is expansion always the goal? What’s the attraction of big besides ego? (You’ll need a better answer than “economies of scale.”) What’s wrong with finding the right size and staying there? Do we look at Harvard or Oxford and say, “If they’d only expand and branch out and hire thousands more professors and go global and open other campuses all over the world . . . then they’d be great schools.” Of course not. That’s not how we measure the value of these institutions. So why is it the way we measure businesses? Maybe the right size for your company is five people. Maybe it’s forty. Maybe it’s two hundred. Or maybe it’s just you and a laptop. Don’t make assumptions about how big you should be ahead of time. Grow slow and see what feels right—premature hiring is the death of many companies. And avoid huge growth spurts too—they can cause you to skip right over your appropriate size.

Tim makes a very interesting point about size. Why are we so obsessed with huge organizations? Why are we so enamored with huge companies? I challenge the notion that bigger is better. If you can accomplish the same amount of work with a smaller organization, then you are far ahead of your competition. This bleeds over into the ecclesial world as well. In a time where everybody is obsessed with building huge churches, it is likely that the most effective model for making disciples is one that does so using a more decentralized approach. Churches have optimum sizes. Rather than trying to outgrow your ability, give birth to another work to handle the load.