Our Chief Financial Officer is also occupying our Head of Human Resources seat, and as we approach our exit transaction, both areas are suffering from a lack of focus. How do we use our Accountability Chart to address this dual-seat bottleneck?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Having one person occupy multiple seats is a common reality in growing companies, but as you prepare for an exit, it becomes a dangerous bottleneck. When a leader splits their focus between two critical functions like Finance and Human Resources, they are constantly forced to choose which department gets their best energy. During due diligence, both your financial records and your employee compliance structures will be heavily scrutinized. You cannot afford to have either seat run at half-capacity.

To resolve this, you must first list both seats as separate functions on your Accountability Chart. Do not combine them into a single, confusing CFO and HR Director seat. Keep the functions distinct to show the true operational needs of the business.

Next, run your CFO through the GWC tool for both seats. While he may get and want both, he almost certainly lacks the capacity to run both effectively during an exit prep phase. This clear visual on your Accountability Chart makes the resource gap obvious to everyone.

You must then use your Level 10 Meeting to IDS how to offload the HR seat. This could mean hiring a fractional HR director, elevating a high-potential manager within the department, or outsourcing employee compliance. Once you assign a new name to the HR seat, your CFO can dedicate one hundred percent of his capacity to maximizing your valuation and managing the financial due diligence process.