We are designing our three-year Accountability Chart to attract private equity buyers, but our leadership team keeps designing seats around the specific, quirky skillsets of our original founding employees. How do we break this habit and design the structure purely for the business needs?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To build a business that is attractive to buyers, you must build a machine, not a collection of artisans. When your leadership team designs seats around people, they are building a fragile structure that will collapse the moment a key employee leaves. This is a massive red flag for private equity.

You must enforce the EOS® principle of structure before people. During your next quarterly meeting, physically remove your team names from the discussion. Take every name off the board and focus entirely on the functional seats required to hit your three-year V/TO® goals.

Ask this diagnostic question: If we were starting this business from scratch today with zero employees, what is the ideal structure we would need to scale?

Define the five core roles for each seat based purely on accountability. If a seat requires both creative marketing and deep database administration because your current marketing director happens to do both, split those into two distinct seats.

Once the ideal structure is complete, then and only then do you look at your people. Place your team members into the seats. You will inevitably find that some legacy employees do not fit the new seats, or that one person is sitting in three different seats. That is completely normal.

The goal is to identify these gaps so you can build a hiring and training roadmap. If your leadership team resists, remind them that buyers are purchasing your systems and structure, not your people's quirks. A clean exit requires a clean, scalable Accountability Chart.