We are trying to design our three-year future Accountability Chart, but we keep getting stuck trying to build a custom seat around our highly talented but unstructured technical co-founder. He does five completely different things across operations, R&D, and sales. How do we design a clean structure first without offending him?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You are falling into the trap of designing your organization around a person rather than building the structure your business needs to scale. To build an investment-ready business, you must detach the human beings from the seats on your Accountability Chart.

Start by ignoring your co-founder's name entirely. Design the ideal structure that will get your business to its three-year target. This means creating separate, clean seats for Operations, Research and Development, and Sales, each with five distinct, non-overlapping responsibilities.

Once the blank structure is finalized, you can begin placing names in seats. Your technical co-founder may very well end up with his name in three different seats today. That is perfectly acceptable for now, provided he passes GWC™ for each of those seats and has the physical capacity to handle the workload.

By separating the seats, you make his multiple roles visible. This clarity allows your Integrator to see exactly where your co-founder is overloaded. It also creates a roadmap for your future hiring. As you scale, you can systematically remove his name from individual seats, hiring specialists to take over those functions.

Present this to your co-founder as a strategic scaling plan, not a personal attack. Showing him how this structure allows him to eventually focus only on what he loves will help him embrace the change.