Hey, hey, and welcome back to the podcast. Whether you're the only person in your business, you have one or more contractors, or you've hired a team of people who are all in, you need an org chart. Here's why. I've got three reasons for you.

One, creating an org chart provides tremendous clarity around how your business is structured and therefore how your work projects, files, and more should be organized.
Two, an org chart assigns clear accountability in your business. It lets you know who's responsible for each and every result, project, task, and ultimately the management of all of the people along the way.
Three, an org chart points out inefficiencies.

When one team member is split between various roles or departments, or has multiple supervisors, or when one team member or department is managing projects for results that another department is responsible for, or when the type of work isn't aligned by goal. For example, when a team member responsible for quality control reports to someone who prioritizes speed and growth.

So you need an org chart to point out these inefficiencies, to get organized, and to ensure accountability in your business. Now, if you don't have a clear org chart yet, that's okay. I want to help you create one today. We're going to keep this simple using a common structure that I implement with my clients.

Your org chart will start with a visionary at the top. Now, this is typically the founder and CEO, and below the visionary is the integrator or COO who manages the day-to-day and reports directly to the visionary.

Under the integrator, I recommend starting with three departments, all of which have a director role that serves as strategist and manager for the department. The three departments are growth for marketing and sales, operations, which includes all necessary functions for running the day-to-day of the business, whether that be technology, HR, finance, legal, analytics, project management, and more. And third, fulfillment, which is responsible for delivering or fulfilling on the promise made to your customers.

If you have a service-based business, I often refer to this department as client or customer success versus fulfillment of products, if you will. So you have some flexibility to name these whatever you want, but at a high level these are growth, operations, and fulfillment.

Now, under fulfillment is where all of your programs, services, courses, or products are managed and fulfilled. At a high level, growth is responsible for growth in both reach of your prospective clients and revenue. Operations is responsible for efficiency and quality control.

Fulfillment is responsible for your customer experience and retention. And it's important to note that operations supports both growth and fulfillment initiatives.

Next, under each department, you'll list the specific roles for the tacticians in your business. These are the people who work in that department. For example, writers, designers, social media managers, virtual assistants, coaches, customer service, bookkeepers, podcast editors—any team member who handles a specific task or role in your business under a department.

It's important to map out this org chart without names. So if you have team members already, don't list their names quite yet and try to remove those names from your brain while you do this exercise so that you map out the org chart purely based on role.

You don't want to structure your business around your team. You want to hire or align your current team members to the structure that your business needs. And that may mean you have the same name in multiple spots, or you have gaps with no names.

Even if you're a solopreneur with no team members at all, I still want you to map out your ideal org chart. And you might just end up putting your name down for every role, but if you are the visionary and you're working on your marketing, it's not because you're a visionary, right? The visionary wouldn't do that role, or they wouldn't do their bookkeeping, or they wouldn't handle their graphic design.

Now, many of you are, but it's not because that's part of the job description or the function of a visionary. It's because you don't have someone to serve in that role yet. And by defining your org chart based on roles and not team members, you're able to see where these gaps are, where these team members are that you will need in the future.

And that leads to one final note here for you. I want you to map out your org chart to reflect the team that you need to get to seven figures, not the team that you have now. So dream big, imagine that seven-figure, high-performance, all-in team, map that out, and then every step of the way, you're going to reflect on this org chart. You're going to prioritize your next hire and, one team member at a time, scale your business to seven figures.