Scaling a Professional Services Firm is Like Traveling to the Moon — It Isn’t Rocket Science: Part 3 – Teams of Teams of…

Multiple rocket stages are an apt metaphor for exploring the free scaling aspects of small teams. As the number of small teams expands in the first stage, it reaches a tipping point around 7 to 9 teams where a second stage forms, requiring another small team of up to 7 to 9 team members to govern and manage the other teams. The second stage allows the professional services firm to scale to around 100 employees. To scale to around 1000 employees, a third stage of another small team is necessary to govern and manage the earlier two stages of small teams of small teams. These stages can be added iteratively so long as small teams can collaborate effectively with an overarching shared purpose with minimal friction. This is the fractal nature of layering small teams in a free scaling structure.

A free scaling organizational structure allows for growth without rigid constraints or limitations, enabling an organization to scale operations, teams, and resources flexibly and dynamically. This structure embraces adaptability, decentralized decision-making, dynamic asset and resource allocation, and flat hierarchy, to respond quickly to market demands, operational changes, and internal needs.

There are essential small team design principles that interact to create an effective free scaling organizational structure for all stages:  

• Loosely coupled small teams are independent, autonomous groups that work toward a common goal but have minimal dependencies on one another. Connected by shared objectives and overarching strategies, they are free to decide how they achieve their individual goals without constant coordination or alignment with other teams. Each team operates independently, with control over its processes, tools, and decisions with

clearly defined responsibilities and deliverables. They have minimal dependencies on

other teams to work at their own pace. When coordination is required, it’s managed

through well-defined interfaces (like APIs or protocols) rather than frequent meetings

• Highly cohesive small teams are tightly knit groups whose members share strong bonds, trust, and a sense of belonging, which leads to unified efforts toward common goals and a shared accountability for successful outcomes. Team members have trust and strong relationships with one another, fostering open communication and collaboration. Members are highly dedicated to the team and its success, often going above and beyond to achieve its objectives. They help each other, creating a strong sense of reliability and interdependence. Their combined effort produces outcomes greater than the sum of individual contributions.
• Different small team types interact in a whole, scalable professional services organization: value stream-aligned teams deliver successful product or service outcomes and platform teams, from IT, HR, Finance, Marketing, etc. support value stream-aligned teams. For first stage teams, short-lived enabling teams of specialists temporarily boost the capabilities of the other two types on an as needed basis.

As professional services firms scale above 100, and toward 1000, employees, they begin forming clusters or pods of related value stream aligned teams, and more specialized platform teams (in some cases, with teams of teams). As a firm approaches 1000 employees, there is a need to segment teams into adjacencies so that loose coupling and high cohesion can be maintained. Overarching shared purpose and strategy become increasingly important as connective tissue to foster frictionless collaboration at scale.

A free scaling organizational structure of small teams (of small teams (of small teams)) is not the only element of a professional services business model needed to scale. Other essential factors, such as efficient communication channels, strong leadership, integrated culture, efficient operational processes, strategic planning and goal setting, robust customer and supplier relationships, etc., are all significant.

Throughout these additional factors, scaling through small teams either directly or indirectly enables the professional services firm to attain scalability outcomes in these other areas more frequently, with greater success, and for less effort by leveraging the greater thrust to weight ratio of small team engines and the reduced drag and heat generation of integrating them in a free scaling organizational structure.

When an organization learns how to spawn a small team into two loosely coupled, highly cohesive teams, it can iteratively repeat this process over and over again, learning all along its trajectory to the Moon, as spawning becomes progressively more challenging.