BUILD LESS. MEAN MORE.
A business introduction to building less, better.
Most companies, weather aware or not, over-build. There is implementation of more processes, more tools, more brand guidelines. When problems arise, we tend to add more meetings. For some reason or another, we naturally layer on complexity because it feels professional, or because we think it will solve for revenue, not always because it serves the problem we’re actually trying to solve.
This series explores another way to bring an idea to life and scale it.
Rooted in the principle of “less, but better”, from innovators like Dieter Rams and John Pawson, and informed by years of building and scaling companies, this is a framework for building businesses that are easier to run and easier to understand. The goal is for operations and brand to flow from the same clear foundation.
Week 1: Build Less. Mean More.
Week 2: The Framework
Week 3: What This Looks Like
Week 4: Starting Now
The 20-page healthcare policy deck sits in a folder somewhere, untouched since the day our COO presented it to our five-person team.
I remember the presentation. Comprehensive coverage details. Comparison charts. Enrollment procedures spelled out in careful detail. It was thorough. Professional. Exactly the kind of thing a “real company” would have.
It was also completely unnecessary.
We could have made those decisions in a single conversation, the kind that happens naturally when five people work closely together and trust each other. Instead, too much time was spent building a document that would collect digital dust while we continued making healthcare decisions the way we always had: by talking.
I’ve done this everywhere. Elaborate roadmaps that lived in a deck but never in our actual planning conversations. Brand guidelines so comprehensive that nobody could remember what they said. Systems designed to help us work better that somehow made everything take longer.
For years, I fell into a trap of what others wanted, what others expected. Thorough. Documented. Comprehensive.
I was wrong.
A DIFFERENT DESIGNED APPROACH TO GROWTH
I’ve always been drawn to certain kinds of spaces. The ones where you walk in and immediately feel like you can breathe. Dieter Rams’ radios, stripped down to pure function. John Pawson’s interiors, where every element earns its place. Objects and rooms that feel effortless precisely because everything unnecessary has been removed.
“Less, but better,” Rams called it.
I could see this in design, the discipline required to subtract rather than add, the clarity that emerges when you strip away until only essence remains. But it took me years to recognize the same principle in how I was running businesses.
What if we designed how we work the way great designers create spaces? What if the goal wasn’t comprehensive systems but essential ones?
Remove everything until you can’t remove anything else without losing function.
THE MISSING PIECE
For a long time, I thought about operations and brand as separate things and teams reflected this.
Operations was looked at how the business runs and brand as how the business looks and sounds. But they’re connected. If your brand says you’re thoughtful and your operations are chaotic, people feel it. If your positioning is unclear, your operations will be too, because you won’t know what to optimize for.
When I started seeing them as one system, everything shifted. The question wasn’t just “what operations do we need?” It was “what’s the minimum infrastructure, operations and brand together, needed to deliver on our promise?”
It is what I keep coming back to in design and now business, less, but better.It’s not a checklist anymore or a methodology. It’s a way of thinking about how to build a business that’s easier to run and easier to understand.
WHY THIS MATTERS AT ANY SIZE
You don’t have to be a 50-person company to over-build. I’ve done it solo. As a small team. At scale.
The tendency is the same: we look at what established companies do and try to replicate their systems. We build for an imagined future instead of today’s reality. We add layers of operations and brand that feel “professional” but create friction.
Minimal Growth Architecture works whether you’re:
A solo founder just getting started
A small team finding your rhythm
A growing company that’s outpaced its clarity
Over the next three weeks, I’ll walk through thoughts around applying less but better to building a business.
Reach out, as always,
Ashley
Ashley Etling builds companies and help companies grow, at any stage, through BAMPT.
Reach out: hello@bampt.co