Our longest-serving executive is a Swiss Army Knife who handles HR, legal contracts, and office leasing. When drawing our Accountability Chart, we are struggling to separate these functions because she does them all so well. How do we design structure before people here?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic trap that holds back scaling businesses. Designing your Accountability Chart around a highly capable generalist creates a single point of failure that will terrify any sophisticated buyer when you prepare for an exit.

To break this habit, you must completely remove her name from the whiteboard. Imagine she wins the lottery tomorrow and leaves. Now, draw the functions your business needs to scale to your three-year target. You will quickly realize that HR, legal compliance, and facilities management are distinct seats with completely different skill sets.

Map out these seats cleanly. The HR seat requires deep cultural alignment and people management. The Legal and Contracts seat requires meticulous risk management and detail orientation.

Once the structure is built, conduct a rigorous GWC™ evaluation for your star employee against the newly defined seats. She may get, want, and have the capacity for HR, but absolutely lack the legal background to manage complex exit prep contracts. Or she may have the capacity for both but only want to focus on one as the company doubles in size.

By separating the seats first, you expose your structural gaps. You might decide to have her sit in the HR seat full-time and outsource the legal contract management to a fractional firm. This structural clarity reduces organizational risk, optimizes individual focus, and builds a clean, scalable architecture that buyers will pay a premium for.