We have a brilliant, high-performing lead engineer who also insists on managing our key enterprise sales accounts because he has deep technical knowledge. We are trying to build our Accountability Chart, but his roles are scattered across two completely different departments. How do we enforce the principle of structure before people when a single key player is blocking us from designing clean, scalable seats?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Building your Accountability Chart around a single person, no matter how brilliant or valuable they are, is a major mistake. It creates key-person risk that sophisticated buyers will discount heavily during an exit. You must design your structure before you look at your people.

To break this logjam, take your lead engineer out of the equation for a moment. Design the ideal Accountability Chart for your business to reach its three-year target. In a healthy, scalable structure, engineering and sales are separate departments with distinct accountabilities. One focuses on building the product, while the other focuses on closing deals and managing accounts.

Once the clean structure is defined, look at your people. Your lead engineer cannot sit in both the Head of Engineering seat and the Key Account Manager seat long-term if your goal is scaling. He simply will not have the capacity to do both at a high level.

Present this clean structure to him. Explain that for the company to grow and eventually exit, we must build a scalable machine, not a business dependent on individual heroes. Give him a choice based on GWC™. Does he want to sit in the technical seat, or does he want to transition fully to the sales seat.

Once he chooses, put his name in that single seat and begin recruiting to fill the other vacant seat. This is how you build a business that is ready for a clean, high-value exit.