You don't need the team.

You don’t need the team. You need the functions.

Very few people are good at everything a business requires. Someone who can sell may not understand finance. Someone who can build may not be able to manage. Someone with the idea may be completely unsuited to operating it at scale. So the usual conclusion is that we need a team. I think there is a step before that. We need the functions.

A business needs certain things to happen regardless of how many people it employs. Someone has to sell. Someone has to understand the numbers. Contracts need to be reviewed. Taxes need to be dealt with. Customers need to be served. Decisions need to be made and somebody has to be accountable for them.

But each of those requirements does not automatically require a permanent employee.

A function might initially sit with the founder, an external specialist, a professional firm, a fractional operator, a partner or someone brought in around a particular project or transaction. As the company develops, some of those functions may justify moving permanently inside.

The distinction matters because hiring somebody and building a capability are not the same thing.

A company can have twenty employees and still be missing an essential function. Another can have almost no payroll and nevertheless have access to everything it needs to operate. Neither structure is inherently better. It depends on what the business has earned the right to support.

Permanent teams bring continuity, accumulated knowledge and culture. They also create fixed costs and organisational weight. Those costs make sense when the underlying activity is sufficiently permanent to justify them.

Perhaps the organisation should therefore precede the payroll.

First define what the business must be able to do. Then decide who is accountable for doing it. Only after that comes the question of where that capability should live.

You need the team eventually.

But you need the functions from the beginning.