Strength in (Small) Numbers:
Building a Great Team

I’ve been in business for more than 21 years now, and I still absolutely love talking shop with other small business owners. I have plenty of my own ideas and some strong opinions about what I’ve learned along the way, but I’m just as interested in hearing how other people do things. There are a thousand different ways to build a business, and I’m still learning all the time.

One subject I come back to often is team building. CMD has always been a very small operation, and over the years I’ve learned that having the right few people around you can be far more powerful than simply having more people. Small teams ask a lot of each person, but when the mix is right, everyone’s individual strengths become part of something much bigger.

Small Team, Shared Values

When I think about why our team works, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t skill set. It’s values. We share a strong work ethic and similar ideas about creativity, quality, authenticity, connection and taking pride in what we put into the world. We care about doing excellent work, but we also genuinely want one another to succeed.

That matters more than I understood when I first became a business owner. Skills can be taught and responsibilities can evolve, but it is much harder to manufacture curiosity, integrity, initiative or the desire to contribute to something beyond your own job description.

We’re also very different people, which is equally important. A great team shouldn’t be made up of copies of the founder. The best things happen when people bring perspectives, talents and ways of thinking that you don’t have yourself.

Learning to Let People Be Good at What They’re Good At

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a leader is that hiring someone talented and then trying to control exactly how they do everything defeats the purpose. I had to learn how to give people room to work independently, make decisions, solve problems and develop ownership over their part of the business.

That didn’t always come naturally. When you build a company from the ground up, you become accustomed to touching every single part of it. For a long time, if something needed to happen, I simply figured it out myself. Eventually that stops being sustainable, and more importantly, it prevents other people from bringing their own strengths to the table.

When I see someone on my team light up around something or demonstrate a particular talent, I try to pay attention. Some of the best systems, processes and creative ideas inside CMD exist because someone else saw a better way to do something and had enough room to run with it.

The People Behind CMD

I’m incredibly proud that CMD remains a very small, women-led team. Today, Sam, Aryana, Kelsey and I each bring something different to the business, and the overlap between those strengths is where a lot of the magic happens. You can always meet our current team and learn more about who does what on our Team page.

Sam has been part of CMD since she was 19. I originally hired her without jewelry-making experience because I could see how capable she was with her hands and how willing she was to learn. Over the years, she has become an integral part of how our jewelry develops and gets made, and watching someone's abilities expand that dramatically has taught me a lot about the value of recognizing potential before it arrives fully formed.

Aryana is a powerhouse of ideas, fabrication knowledge and problem solving. She has an incredible ability to stay composed when production gets complicated, and she has played a huge role in improving how our studio operates. She’s also part of the reason our production eventually found its home in Upstate New York.

Kelsey lives in a very different corner of CMD, translating what we make and why we make it into the website, marketing and digital experience that connects us with all of you. Having people on the team whose brains work differently from mine has been one of the greatest advantages of keeping CMD collaborative rather than trying to force everything through one point of view.

And then there’s me. I’m still the designer, visionary, people person and perpetual community builder. I love seeing the big picture, dreaming up what could come next and then working with the team to figure out how to make it real. CMD carries my name, but at this point in the business, there is very little I accomplish entirely by myself.

Leadership Has Required Me to Grow, Too

I sometimes think entrepreneurship gets romanticized as independence, but building a healthy business has required me to become increasingly comfortable with interdependence. I may have started CMD with money I saved waiting tables in San Francisco, but growing it into what it is today has required trust, collaboration and a willingness to admit that someone else may be much better at something than I am.

That has been part of my own personal development as much as my professional development. I try to practice genuine gratitude, communicate clearly, give credit freely and remember that the people working beside me have lives, ambitions and ideas of their own. A business can ask a lot of people, especially when the team is small, so creating an environment where everyone feels respected and trusted matters enormously to me.

I certainly haven’t done all of this perfectly. I’ve made hiring mistakes, leadership mistakes and plenty of ordinary human mistakes. But after more than two decades, I understand much more clearly that being a good leader is less about having all the answers and more about creating the conditions for good people to do their best work.

What Small Teams Can Do

There are limits to being small. Every person wears multiple hats, there isn’t always someone waiting in the wings to take over, and busy seasons require everyone to rally. But there’s also something incredibly powerful about knowing how directly each person’s work matters.

In a small business, you can often trace an idea all the way from a conversation to a sketch, through production, onto the website and finally into the hands of the person who wears it. Everyone has visibility into more of that process, and when the team works well together, there’s a tremendous sense of shared ownership.

More than anything, I’ve learned to surround myself with people who make me want to be better at what I do. Hire with intention. Look for people who care, who want to keep learning and who take pride in their work. Give them space to surprise you. Be generous with gratitude. Keep growing yourself, too.

When the right people rally together, even in small numbers, we really can move mountains.

Dream big and take deep breaths along the way,
Colleen

 

© Colleen Mauer Designs. All rights reserved.
Published: February 28, 2023
Updated: August 25, 2026