When Tridea was first started, we made an agreement that for a least a while, we would keep Tridea small. Of course down the road, if business grows tremendously, an we start expanding our horizons with the work we do, we will need to address expanding the team. But so far, staying small has worked out great, and there are tons of advantages to keeping a small team.

The biggest advantage that we’ve had in being a small team is communication. With a 3-man team, we can easily communicate with each other. Our weekly meetings stay very focused, and we can easily talk out design/development issues very quickly. It has worked well, and we want to keep the ball rolling with that.

Since we like to keep things simple, we can’t get more simple than our 3-man team. We are able to keep our processes lean, and straight forward. Things go a lot smoother when you don’t have to educate tons of people on work processes.

Another advantage with a small team is the ability to change on a whim. If a new technology comes out that the team needs to learn, we can easily adjust with only 3 people, rather than 15. We can pick up new ways of designing and developing, and have the whole team educated in a matter of hours. In the web industry, things change very fast, and having a team that can change with it keeps us on top of our game.

We feel very close to the clients that we work with. We don’t have to deal with any middlemen (like account execs) that get in the way of us communicating with our clients. Without any middle business people, we want our clients to feel that if they have a question or issue, they can speak directly with us and we can respond quickly. When a client knows they can speak directly with the people that matter on a project, the relationship is a little stronger. That happens by staying small, and we like that.

There are many more advantages to having a small team, and the ones listed above are the ones that we value the most. So, if you can avoid it, keep your team bloat-free. Things work a whole lot smoother with a small team.