The Profit Builder Unscripted

Construction org charts that actually work

• Vicki Suiter

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When my client Steve’s business jumped from $2M to $5M, what should’ve felt like success quickly turned into overwhelm.

Too many jobs, too many people needing him, and not enough clarity on how to get out of the weeds.

At first, he thought he just needed more help. But what we uncovered was something deeper—and surprisingly easy to fix.

In this episode of The Profit Builder Unscripted, I share the simple but powerful shift that helped Steve reclaim control, clarify roles, and start leading like the CEO his business needed. It all started when we stopped thinking about the day-to-day and started thinking like builders again: Where are you now? Where are you going? And how do you get there?

If you’re stuck in the chaos of growth, this conversation might be just the blueprint you need.

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If you and your team are struggling to get clear about who's responsible for what, and you've grown a lot in the last couple of years and it feels a little chaotic, make sure to listen to this episode. Hi, I'm Vicki Suiter, your host. Welcome back to the Profit Builder Unscripted.

As I started my conversation with my client Steve this morning, I could just tell when I was doing a check-in with him that he, like everything about his face and his expression, I could see and I could feel his anxiety and his sense of overwhelm. And I'm like, what's going on? Like, what's happening over there?

And he just said, you know, I just feel like there's so many things that I need to fix that are broken. feel like there's so many projects that I see need my attention that while I'm trying to work in my business and I'm trying to keep projects working and moving forward, that I also have these other things that I see are really critical and important in terms of helping us be a better business and operate better go forward. And as we were talking and he was describing what the, you know, what kind of the challenges, right, of that nobody, like he said, you know, I feel like our team has grown a lot and people are not clear about who's doing what part of a project. 

Like there's one person, you know, who's doing a project and they're doing, you know, the client contract in the, in the client meetings, but somebody else is doing the job costing and looking at the job cost for that job and somebody else is, you know, talking with the foreman about the production side of the job and he just said, it feels really chaotic that we're just not really clear about what each of us is responsible for and that I'm struggling with how to actually affect a change.

And I'm recording this for you because I thought this, you know, I've seen this before. This is not the first time that I have experienced people having the struggle in their business. And I think that that happens a lot. Like you maybe can relate to this too, like Steve, like here's Steve and his business grew from like 2 million last year to doing 5 million this year. And, and there's just, there's more pieces, there's more things going on and he's got more people.

And as he grew his team, he didn't necessarily stop and define like who's everybody's like get really clear about what are the deliverables of every person's position. And, you know, more importantly than that, I said, you know, let's just like, let me, let's talk with you for a minute about how to think about what it is that you have going on in your business. And if you really looked at it, like imagine that your business is like a project.

Right? And when you do a project, the first thing you do is, you know, you meet with a client and you go look at the space and you identify what's the current condition of things. Like how are things now? And then the second thing that you do is that you go up and you look at, all right, how would I ideally like them to be? What is the, and that's where the second stage of any project is doing a design or a blueprint or a schematic you identify what ideally you would like the end result to look like. And you always do that before you actually start to try to figure out how to get from, you know, how to change how it is now. The next step is always, where do I want to go? And then the third step is how to figure out how you want to get there. So I said, let's begin with how would you ideally like it to be?

What would the, what would the structure of your organization look like if you knew everybody's role? And I said, let's just look at your organizational chart and let's look at, all right, what are the roles within the business that I need for a business that's $5 million? Like I need marketing and business development. need somebody to direct operations. need somebody in accounting. There needs to be somebody doing estimating. So.

We looked at all the functions and it was interesting because when we started this conversation, Steve was like, I'm trying to figure out what role to put everybody in. And I said, well, let's do it a little bit differently. Let's take a different approach. Let's look at it from the perspective of what are the roles that you need and then let's see where people fit into those roles because then you're building your organizational structure based on what your company needs as opposed to what I've got all these bodies and what should these bodies be doing. And I think it's an important distinction here because I think a lot of times when our businesses are growing and we have these people on our team and then we go, okay, where can they fit or what can they do or how can I give them more? 

And what ends up happening is, which was the case with Steve, we end up having these people who are all helping but nobody's taking ownership of a particular role. And that really is what kind of messes us up when we're trying to grow our businesses, is that if we're not clear about what is the structure I need, what are the roles that I need to support how I'm growing my business and what my business needs now and in the soon future, right? It could change two years from now, but even for the next year, what are the roles that he needs, right?

And so that was the first thing that we worked on is looking at what's the, let's take names out of the equation altogether, but let's look at what is the organizational chart that you need to have in place and what are all those roles and functions. And so it's a general contractor. so they need, you know, they need project managers, they need form and running jobs, you know, on site, they need carpenters and laborers. And then.

They need somebody to do estimating done. They need to do sales and marketing in order to keep the phone ringing. And they need somebody to do accounting. So we started to draw out that organizational chart. And by the way, down below, I'm also giving you a sample of an organizational chart. And I'm gonna give you a link to a course that I have called Build Your Dream Team that can really help you dig into how to do this in your business and how to figure out what are the roles that you need and then what are the responsibilities of each of those roles. So first it's defining, all right, what are those positions? So we did that. And then secondly, I said, all right, let's talk about what are the three most important deliverables for each of those positions? What do I mean by deliverables?

So I mean, a project manager job is on time, on budget, as promised with a high quality of outcome, a good quality of product. And so on time, on budget, on time means you're managing a schedule, on budget means you're managing costs. So three key thing and then managing the promise means also managing the clients. So we said those are the three key things for a project manager, the schedule, making sure to do cost to complete and looking at job cost. And then thirdly, making sure to manage the client relationship and keeping the client informed about where are they on their project, right? Where are they schedule-wise? Where are they dollar-wise? 

And so we kind of did that with each of the positions. And the position agreement then gets defined around or that job description for that role gets defined around what are those key deliverables. And when we got finished identifying all those positions, then we went through and I said, now let's put the names in there. Let's put the names if like who's doing this job. And even if somebody is doing three or four jobs, we're gonna put their names on all those boxes. And as we did that, what Steve started to see was, okay.

First of all, he was in too many, his name was in too many boxes, right? We got to notice that. Secondly, is that the people who were in some of those boxes under the title of, in this example, project manager, weren't really doing project management. They were kind of helping in production. They were doing part of the job. And I was like, okay, how can we get them clearly in that position of a project manager?

So the first thing that he had to think about was, all right, what is my organizational need? So sometimes instead of wanting to go solve a problem, and instead of going, I just need to get them to work harder, to work faster. I need other people to help me, which tends to be what we do, right? When we get really busy, we grow quickly like Steve did. We tend to think, I just need more people to help me.

But I'm gonna invite you to look and to stop and step back as we did with Steve today and go, all right, let me just look at my organizational structure and what do I really need in each of these positions? Because then you can start to identify, all right, what do I need people to be taking ownership of in each of those positions? How do I set that person up to really be successful and to know what are the most important key deliverables? Which as I say,

We define the positions, then we define key deliverables. Top three is really the easiest and most direct way to start doing this. And then the next step that Steve's gonna take from there is going and writing a position agreement or a job description that kind of flushes that out. And then sit down with his team and go, all right, let's talk about what is your job here and how do you be successful in it? We also shifted, looked at do they need to hire one more position that was the other thing that got revealed when we were able to see the organizational structure and probably they need to hire another project manager. So you see the whole thing of looking at it from this perspective sort of like that 30,000 foot view what it lets us do is it lets us see sort of the landscape of what is our business need and then dig a little bit deeper and go okay.

How will we know what positions, like when we put people in those positions, how do we know they're successful? What are those key deliverables for each of those positions? Doing that will help. And what was great is by the end of the conversation, Steve was like, I'm super clear now what I need to do. And I said, so here's the thing that you have to realize. Is that, and you probably already know this, like when we're doing change in our business, when we're going from like this chaotic state, or where things are not completely clear, to having more clarity about what are the roles, what are the positions, what are we asking people to do while you're looking to put that change into place. It's a little bit like going through the eye of a needle. I said, here's the thing, you're gonna experience it as being a little bit more chaotic before it's gonna get worse, before it gets better. 

And realizing that, helps us and you know, even getting back to Steve's original point, which is I'm trying to make change happen, but it's like, I don't know how I find the time. Well, first of all, you don't try to do it on your own, right? But I said, when you have that clarity, right? You looked at 30,000 feet about what you really need. Just like on a project, you start with the end in mind before you start trying to build it. I said, when you're clear about that, having that clarity, will help you be able to communicate about it better with your team. And when you're able to communicate it better with your team, then they are going to be able to get up to speed with you more quickly. But you first gotta define the landscape, right? You have to define what's the map of what we're up to together before you can actually define, all right, what's the route we're gonna take, right? 

So define the map, just like on a project, you define the end result with a blueprint. If you're struggling, as Steve was, with, right, like I've grown a lot and now I've got all these people who work for me and they're helpers, but nobody's owning the result with me, so now he was in the middle of all these things. Do an organizational chart for yourself. If you find yourself in that place. And as I said, you know, the Build your dream team course that I have and I'm gonna drop a link below will really help you in this area And it will help you define in position agreements There's over two dozen pre-written position agreements specifically for the construction industry So it'll help you and it gives you samples of organizational charts with key deliverables. It will give you Position agreements that are predefined that you can just edit it'll save you hundreds of hours
 and that there are other tools in there about how to manage with your team once you've gotten position agreements in place. there's a lot of great tools in there. I highly encourage you to check it out. It also includes some coaching time with me. So I'm happy to spend a couple hours with you too once you get it to help you really implement it for your company and your business specifically based on where you're at right now. All right.

Again, just a reminder, organizational chart, really helpful to get you clear about what it is that your structure in your business needs in order to be most successful in helping you and your team be able to grow with the business and be able to be successful in each of the positions within your business. All right, thank you for being here. Thanks for being part of this community. If you have comment, feel free to drop a note below.

Please make sure to subscribe. If you're finding these videos to be helpful, make sure to subscribe to my channel. And if you want to share it, I would love that. All right, thanks for being part of this community. And I look forward to seeing you next time on the Profit Builder Unscripted.


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Vicki Suiter

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