How I built the entire management system for the Outlandish music festival — easy scalable and usable by a massive team for just $10/month Over the last few years I’ve worked across different operating environments: bar businesses, agency workflows, product teams, volunteer orgs. And the deeper I go, the more I realize one thing:
Management and delegation always boil down to three fundamental principles.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re running a bar, scaling a startup, building an agency or coordinating a music festival with hundreds of volunteers.
When I helped the organizers of the Outlandish Festival build their internal management system from scratch, the goal was simple but tricky:
make the whole thing efficient keep it super cheap make it work at scale and make it usable by people with zero technical background
And to do all of it without paying $20 per seat for Notion’s team permissions - considering the size of the festival workforce would have cost hundreds of dollars per month.
That’s where the three principles became extremely clear.
Principle №1: Management = Information Management isn’t meetings. It’s not task lists. It’s not “oversight.”
Management is simply the flow of information.
Who knows what → Who should know what → At what moment → And in which format.
Principle №2: Information must be structured How information is stored, distributed, updated and accessed — that’s the skeleton of any management system.
For Outlandish, I split everything into departments and turned each into an independent Notion workspace:
Article content Each department as an independent Notion workspace Notion essentially became a free internal website — a live CMS where updates appear instantly and everyone sees the latest version.
But Notion is just the structure.
The actual data live inside Google Drive.
And Google Drive fully mirrors the Notion architecture:
one department = one main folder inside: subfolders (Festival Direction, Finance, Accounts & Payments, Artists Management & Booking, Token/Cash System, etc.)
Article content Ensure the Google Drive department folder structure follows its Notion workspace structure Files are stored in Drive. Notion holds the links.
Article content Ensure the Google Drive department folder structure follows its Notion workspace structure This gives us two things:
the structure stays clean and transparent private documents remain protected because permissions are handled on Drive level
Principle №3: Delegation = Access Control Delegation isn’t about giving tasks. Delegation is giving the right level of access to the right information.
So I built a single Master Spreadsheet — the nervous system of the entire setup:
Article content each row = team member or volunteer each column = department, subfolder or system area structure of columns = structure in Notion and in Google Drive = structure of departments & sub-departments each cell = type of access (View / Comment / Edit)
When someone joins:
They give their email → System manager updates the Master Sheet → Permissions sync through Drive → Done.
One important thing: Access must be controlled by ONE person (or two at most).
If everyone starts editing permissions, the system collapses. It’s the same principle as SKU management or inventory — one responsible person keeps the structure clean.
The Economic Advantage: A Fully Scalable System for $10/Month Here’s the part most people miss:
Using Notion for a large team usually requires $20 per seat to unlock proper access and workflow controls.
For a festival workforce — volunteers, staff, F&B operators, logistics teams — that could easily be dozens or even hundreds of seats.
But using this structure, we avoided all of that.
The entire system runs on:
One Notion Plus subscription: $10/month Google Drive’s built-in permission layers: free Unlimited read-access via public Notion pages: free One gatekeeper controlling access through the Master Spreadsheet: one team member
Meaning:
The whole operational backbone, for an unlimited team, costs just $10/month.
Not $300/month. Not $600/month. Not $1,000/month.
Just ten dollars.
That’s the power of building your operations around information, structure and access.
How it all connects One paid Notion account powers unlimited projects Each project = one department Google Drive duplicates the full hierarchy Notion acts as a public-facing internal “site” Drive stores all sensitive documents Master Spreadsheet controls who sees what Unlimited people can access the Notion pages Only specific people get access to private files Total system cost = $10/month
The whole setup is cheap, scalable, stable and idiot-proof (in the best possible way).
Why these principles matter Any business process is a system. And every system runs on three things:
Information Information structure Access levels
If you build these three layers, you can manage absolutely anything:
A festival. A bar. A marketing agency. A SaaS team. Or a fully volunteer-driven organization with zero budget.