Re: the assistant, I did a poll on here a while back and it seems most visionaries have their assistant reporting directly to them. If a visionary can have an assistant as a direct report, I figure it's cool for other people too.

Re: the deputy managers and your other reporting structure, your reports are people you are LMA'ing. And it's also important to remember that there is free flow of communication. So just because someone is not your direct report doesn't mean they can't be reporting information to you, having regular meetings, or providing some kind of regular numbers,... (More)

Hi Andrew,

We too are self implementing, have about 35 team members and do engineering, sales, installation, manufacture, software, etc. Very tricky when you are highly vertically integrated and have a lot of complexity for a small organisation.

We have people filling multiple roles in the accountability chart. Today I am the CTO, Marketing Manager, CEO and shared services manager (HR, legal, insurances). My COO is also the Sales Manager, Production Manager and Procurement Manager. We are hiring a full time CTO at the moment, but don't expect the accountability chart to change, just some of the names in it.... (More)

Hey, @Andrew McCutchen78 congrats on starting this journey. It's a game changer.

Your starting point for the A/C is that you have three major functions: sales/mktg, ops, and finance/admin.

It's very common for some of these functions to be split into multiple boxes -- sales/mktg can turn into a sales seat and a marketing seat, finance/admin is often split into several, and in cases like yours where you have distinct lines of business the ops seat can be split (into engineering services, contract manufacturing, and staffing).

So splitting seats is very common, but combining the distinct functions into a single... (More)