Key takeaways
- Draw the chart for the company you will be in eighteen months, then write today's names into the seats, including your own name in several.
- Every seat needs one owner and three to five measurable outcomes, or it is a title and not a job.
- The owner should hold fewer seats each year and the chart is how you plan that exit.
- Fractional and outsourced seats are legitimate boxes on the chart as long as accountability is named.
Between $1M and $5M in revenue a company stops being a group of people who all do everything and starts needing a structure. The trouble is that the structure usually grows by accident. Someone good at spreadsheets becomes the finance person, the longest-serving technician becomes the manager, and the owner holds whatever is left, which is most of it.
An org chart is not a status document. It is the tool that tells you which seats are empty, which are overloaded, and which you personally need to vacate next. Here is how we build one with owners across British Columbia.
Start with functions, not people
Draw the seats the business needs regardless of who works there today. For almost every company in this range the top row is the same. Leadership, sales and marketing, operations or delivery, finance and administration, and technology. Under each, two or three seats that do the daily work.
Write the outcomes each seat is accountable for before any name goes in. Three to five per seat, measurable where possible. Sales owns pipeline, conversion and price. Operations owns on-time delivery, quality and cost of delivery. Finance owns cash, collections and the monthly numbers. If you cannot write outcomes for a seat, it is not a seat.
Keep the first version to one page. A chart that needs a plotter is a chart nobody will update. At this size the whole company fits on a single sheet with room to write the outcomes beside each box.
Now write in the names, including yours
Put today's names into the seats. Most owners discover that their own name appears in five or six boxes and that two or three people are listed in seats they never agreed to hold. Both are useful to see. The chart is now a picture of your key person risk and your own calendar at the same time.
Mark each seat one of three ways. Filled and working, filled but overloaded, or empty and covered by you. The empty and overloaded seats become the hiring plan, and the ones with your name are the delegation plan.
Deciding which seats to fill first
Fill the seat that unblocks revenue. In most companies that is operations, because the owner is doing dispatch and quality when they should be selling. In others it is a salesperson, because the owner is the only one who can close. Finance is often the second hire, usually part-time or outsourced, because late invoices and unknown margins hurt quietly.
Each seat can be filled three ways. Hire an employee, bring in a fractional executive for a few days a month, or outsource the whole department to a team like ours. All three are legitimate boxes on the chart. What matters is that one named person is accountable for the outcomes and attends the weekly meeting.
Price each option honestly before choosing. A full-time hire costs salary, benefits, equipment and months of ramp. A fractional seat costs more per day and less per month and starts next week.
- Employee when the work is daily and present, like a coordinator or a lead technician.
- Fractional when the work is senior and lumpy, like a CMO, CTO or COO at this size.
- Outsourced department when you need a whole function running tomorrow and do not want to build it yet.
The eighteen-month version
Draw the chart again for the company you expect to be in eighteen months. More seats, some split, some new. Then compare the two. The gap is your hiring, training and delegation plan, with dates against each move. Reviewing the two charts is a standing item in the quarterly planning meeting.
The owner's name should appear in fewer boxes on the second chart. If it does not, the plan is to work harder rather than to build a company, and that is worth noticing early.
Common mistakes
Giving titles instead of outcomes, so that two people both think they own the customer. Promoting the most loyal person into a seat they are not suited for because the chart had a gap. Drawing the chart once and never looking at it again. And leaving the owner's seats off entirely, which hides the real problem.
We build these charts as part of our team structure and organisation design work and we are happy to start from a photograph of the whiteboard. Bring the real one, not the one you wish you had.