What is the minimum viable company, and how do you find it?
The minimum viable company is the smallest version of the organisation that can still deliver its single most important product or service to its most critical customers during a disruption, and nothing more. The test: for each function, ask whether losing it for the maximum tolerable period would stop that one delivery. If the answer is no, the function is important, but it is not minimum viable, and it does not belong in the recovery plan for the worst case.
Published
Maximilian Bazzi, Founder and CEOWhy executives respond to this framing when a documentation review does not
Asking an executive to review business continuity documentation invites a compliance conversation: is the coverage complete, are the plans current, has the annual review happened. Asking what the organisation could still be if it lost everything except what mattered most invites a strategic one. The minimum viable company reframes the same underlying work, a business impact analysis and the recovery decisions built on it, as a question about priority rather than about paperwork, which is why it moves a conversation that had stalled in a documentation review.
The test itself
For each function, service or dependency, ask whether losing it for the organisation's maximum tolerable period of disruption would stop delivery of the single most important product or service to the most critical customers. A function that fails this test is important to the organisation in normal times, and it is not part of the minimum viable company. Repeating this test across every function produces a short list, usually far shorter than most organisations expect before they run it, and that gap between the expectation and the result is itself the useful output of the exercise.
The objection that has to be conceded, not dismissed
The framing can sound like it is asking leadership to accept degraded service as an ambition, or to treat everything not on the short list as disposable. Neither is the intent, and the objection is fair against a loose version of the exercise that does not state its own boundary. The minimum viable company is a description of what has to survive a severe but plausible disruption, for exactly as long as that disruption lasts. It says nothing about how the organisation should run on an ordinary day, in the same way that a fire escape route says nothing about the layout anyone would choose for a building that is not on fire.
Where it fits against the rest of the framework
The minimum viable company is not a separate methodology sitting beside the risk taxonomy, the business impact analysis and the continuity plans an organisation already has. It is a way of reading the output of that existing work, one designed to be understood in a single conversation with a board or an executive committee that does not have the time or the inclination to read the underlying documents themselves.
How Bazzi Consulting helps
We use this framing to move the business impact analysis conversation from documentation coverage to strategic priority, so the board sees what actually has to survive rather than a list of everything that would be nice to keep. See risk and resilience advisory.