Creating An Organizational Chart

Yesterday, I asked you to sit down and think about your responsibilities as a business owner.  We do more things for our businesses than we ever thought possible.  Today, let’s create an organizational chart, or an “org chart”.  If you’ve been in the corporate world, you’re familiar with these.  They look like a family tree, or something like this:

We are going to make one of these today!

Creating your organizational chart

I’d like for you to think about your business on a larger scale.  What does your business look like in it’s complete structure?  What does your business look like if you were to break down all of the responsibilities into separate positions with different people?  What does your business look like if you were operating with various people in charge of separate roles?

In yesterday’s post I described some areas of responsibility for a stationery business.  If I were to break down the areas of Design, Sales, and Marketing… it might look like this:

VP of Design

oversees:

• Collection Designer
• Custom Orders Designer

VP of Sales

oversees:

• Sales Manager for weddings
• Sales Manager for babies
• Sales Manager for other events

VP of Marketing

oversees:

• Brand Manager
• Pricing Analyst
• Marketing Researcher
• Advertising/Promotional Manager

That’s just the start.

Sure – your org chart will be comprised mostly of you in each position. That’s OK.

Why is this important?

The org chart will help you…

• see responsibilities/jobs for which you can outsource or hire.
• develop a vision of what your business will look like as it grows.  (This is always exciting to me!)
• separate responsibilities and “areas of management” if you do have employees.  (No more duplication of work or confusion as to who does what.)
• keep yourself accountable to run your business with each of these responsibilities in mind.  We tend to focus on our strengths, and neglect what we cannot do well.  But, by assigning the job of “VP of Finance” to yourself it ensures that you know this is your job and it has to get done by you (or, by hiring an accountant.)  Someone’s name has to be in this role.

There is no formula for this.  There are some great org charts out there (just google).  Make this yours.  Make it easy for you to work from and build from.

Have you created an org chart before?  Was it helpful?