Mini guideline or full guideline: choose based on growth speed.

Mini guideline and full guideline with Notion portal (an internal lookup portal built on the Notion platform) are two tiers in Sinh Vũ's service offerings. Not every tier is suitable for every business, and the boundary between the two tiers is not defined by budget or the level of complexity you desire. The boundary is the growth speed of the team and the number of people interacting with the brand each day.

Where are the two different levels located?

When to choose which direction

Choose a mini guideline when you are in one of the following situations:

• Once the logo and basic identity are finalized, guidelines are needed for immediate application.
• The internal team is stable, with few people interacting with the brand and not changing much.
• It is mainly important to have external collaborators who understand the identity system correctly, without needing a complex reference source.

Choose the full guideline along with the Notion portal when:

• The team is hiring rapidly; many new members continuously need to learn how to use the brand.
• There are many partners, agencies (outsourced execution units), or suppliers producing brand materials together.
• A brand appears across various touchpoints and needs ready-made templates for the team to apply quickly.
• You need a place to continuously update the rules without having to resend the file each time there is a change.

The scale of guidelines must align with the size of the team using them. Purchasing more than the team needs is wasteful, while buying less than needed will lead to shortages in the coming months.

Practical experience of Sinh Vũ

Start with a mini version and upgrade later.

If you are unsure about the growth rate of your team in the next one to two years, a reasonable approach is to start with a mini guideline and then expand as the number of users actually increases. The condition is that the mini structure must be built correctly from the start, because if the structure is wrong, upgrading later will require starting over, which is more costly than doing it right the first time.

This is the direction Sinh Vũ often suggests for businesses in a transitional phase: not too small to overlook standards, but not large enough to invest in a Notion portal just yet.

Common errors

• Buy the full package when the team is still small: Most of the portal's features go unused, the portal becomes abandoned, and the content quickly becomes outdated. This wastes both money and implementation time.
• Select mini when the team is growing rapidly: a few months later, there are no rules for new touchpoints, the team interprets things differently, and the brand starts to become inconsistent.
• Viewing the Notion portal as mere decoration: The portal needs someone to maintain it. If no one is responsible for updates, the content will become outdated, and the team will stop referencing it, turning the portal into a costly tool that adds no value.

The viewpoint of Sinh Vũ

Sinh Vũ does not push a full guideline for a small team to sell more. The question Sinh Vũ asks before proposing a level is: how many people are currently making decisions about the brand each week, and how will that number increase in the next six months? If the answer is few and stable, a mini version is sufficient. If the answer is rapidly increasing and unpredictable, a full version with a new portal is necessary to keep up.

The Notion portal is not an additional advantage to the guidelines. It is a living management tool, only valuable when the team truly uses it and has someone to maintain it. You should consider this before making a decision.