Building a Team as a Model for Cooperative Work
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Creativity, Business, Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Work

I’ve known for about a year that I’d taken my business, Ninja Writers, about as far as it could go as a mostly one-person show. Since 2015 it’s just been me and Zach J. Payne, who has always been my right hand behind the scenes.

I was at capacity for how many students I could effectively teach and how many members there could be in the Ninja Writers Club and still provide the kind of experience I wanted the community to have.

I had a decision to make. Did I keep things the way they were — which, to be honest, was a pretty incredible place to be — or did I build a team so that Ninja Writers could continue to grow.

It started with my daughter.

Adrienne was in her last year of graduate school last year. She did the thing that appeals the most to me: She came to me with ideas. That’s the way to my heart and she knows me well enough to know it.

With another person on board, I was able to expand into small group workshops for writers. We kept it small, but over the last six months the workshops have blossomed. We’ve had several students in them who have finished writing their books or found real success in blogging.

We doubled Ninja Writers as a business in the last year. The Ninja Writers Club went from two weekly Zoom co-working calls, where I teach and we all workshop each other, to four. With Adrienne’s help, Ninja Writers Club was able to double in size.

And by the winter, we found ourselves at capacity again.

We could stay here. It’s a good place. The energy in Ninja Writers is so incredible. It’s infectious. But there’s no more of us to go around. We had ideas that we just had to keep, maybe permanently, on the back burner.

Growth kept happening though, super organically.

I didn’t know this was the way it would happen. I thought that if I was going to have a Ninja Writers team, I’d have to hire people I didn’t know and try to teach them how to be Ninja Writers.

That didn’t appeal to me, so I never did it.

But what happened was that I started to notice Ninja Writers who were doing that thing I love — remember? They were bringing ideas to the table. And they were implementing them on their own, just because they were really good ideas that made Ninja Writers better.

First, Meg Stewart started teaching a core group of Ninja Writers how to do very basic tech stuff. No one else was teaching them the things they needed to know, so she just started doing it and it started to become a business. My students were so enthusiastic about what she was doing that I finally contacted her to ask if she’d like to join the team to teach within Ninja Writers officially.

This was where the idea of cooperative work really took hold for me. I didn’t want to absorb Meg’s business. I wanted to help her grow it, while bringing her into Ninja Writers so that her work could benefit our community, too. She filled a gap in my business beautifully.

Then Ashley Shannon started teaching other Ninja Writers how to be better bloggers. They ate it up. More importantly, it worked. Her students were killing it. She came to me with a plan for making the program she’d developed part of Ninja Writers. More than that, she had a plan for making our marketing better and brought an energy that was infectious.

There was another gap and another person filling it. Ashley is building her own empire, and her being part of Ninja Writers means that I get to benefit from her and be a part of her growth, too.

Finally, I started to notice that there was a group of Ninja Writers who all of a sudden were very focused. They were finishing their books. They were getting their work done in a way that was clearly obvious to me, and to other people in the community. I realized that it was Juneta Key who had made the difference. She started hosting write-ins and showing up to encourage Ninja Writers in our Slack channel and on Facebook. Making her our Accountability Guru was an easy decision.

One more gap filled. And being part of Juneta’s growth as an entrepreneur is an absolute joy.

The key to growing my business was to grow it with people who already loved it. And who I already loved.

Meg, Ashley, and Juneta aren’t just employees. They are Ninja Writers. They understand the community and they are invested in making it as awesome as it can be.

The members already know them. The shift to having them onboard has been completely organic and exciting.

More than that, though, they are talented people who have their own fantastic ideas. We’re a model of how cooperative work can be. As they help me grow Ninja Writers, they grow their own businesses as well and I get to be part of that.

They aren’t just employees. They’re family. To me, but also to the whole Ninja Writers community.

One of the new things we’re doing is a podcast.

I kind of halfway started one on my own a few months ago, but it’s one of those things that I knew would be good and I wanted to do, but I was so close to my capacity that I didn’t have the time or energy to do it really well.

But now Meg, Ashley and I are doing it together and — whoa. It’s going to be incredible. We recorded our first weekly episode, which introduces you to the whole team and talks about what it means to all three of us to be working writers.

You can check that out here.

We’re starting up a Ninja Writers publication, to showcase the talented writers in our community. We’re adding new classes. We’re doing things to make the whole experience of being a Ninja Writer better — like adding onboarding calls so that the sheer volume of what we offer isn’t overwhelming to new members.

We’re on a wild ride. I couldn’t be more excited.

Sometimes things just happen right when they’re supposed to.

The right people showed up right when I was in a position to hire them. Talk about serendipity.

I knew that I needed to pivot Ninja Writers toward supporting the community as so many people found themselves needing to earn a living with their writing thanks to Covid. Adrienne, Meg, Ashley, and Juneta are like having a bunch of freaking superheroes show up to give your slow-moving ship a shove in the right direction.

And then other things just happened. Like after five years, Teachable finally implemented a way for me to offer new Ninja Writers a way to try out the Ninja Writers Club for free. Yay for free trials!

And, halfway through the first full year of the Ninja Writers Academy (those small group workshops), a bunch of students started having real success. They finished their first drafts. They were gaining traction as bloggers. People were getting attention from agents and publishers.

Seriously. We’re on the verge of really big things. This is going to be so much fun.