14. If It’s Everyone’s Job, It’s No One’s Job: Build an Org Chart That Actually Works | Systems

Over the years, one truth has shown up again and again:
If something is everyone’s responsibility, it becomes no one’s responsibility.

In this episode, we dive into how a simple but intentional org chart can completely transform your business.

Whether you're just starting out or scaling your team, structure is what creates clarity, ownership, and momentum.

What You’ll Learn:

•  Why most “people problems” are actually structure problems 
•  How to create an org chart (even if you’re a team of one) 
•  The difference between owning a seat and doing the tasks 
•  How to stop being the bottleneck in your business 
•  How to use your org chart as a roadmap for hiring and delegation 
•  The connection between org charts and profit sharing 
•  How to create a leadership pathway for your team 

🧠 Key Takeaways

•  Ownership creates execution 
•  Structure creates freedom 
•  Delegation is about tasks—not accountability 
•  Your org chart should grow with your business 

🛠️ Action Steps

1.  Create your org chart this week (even if your name is in every box) 
2.  Do a brain dump for at least 2–3 roles 
3.  Clearly assign ownership to one “fuzzy” area in your business

Thanks for listening to The Outcome Academy Podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode and want to keep learning how to work ON your business with systems, strategy, and practical tools, here are a few ways to stay connected:

Website: https://www.outcomeacademy.com/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ginny.outcomeacademy 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ginny.outcomeacademy/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@outcomeacademy 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/outcome-academy

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Your outcome isn't a wish. It's a decision.

Transcript

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Over the years, I've served on countless committees, PTAs, sports, band and theater organizations, church councils, nonprofit boards, and of course, we've owned several businesses. And through all that, there's something that has been abundantly clear. If something's everyone's responsibility, then it's no one's responsibility. But the moment you give something a name and a seat, everything changes. And that's what today's episode is about. Welcome to the Outcome Academy Podcast. I'm Ginny Seeley. I'm a business strategist and longtime process improvement expert. And I also co-own an appliance service business and a co-working space with my husband Joe. So I understand what it looks like to juggle growth, leadership, family, and big dreams all at once. If you're a service-based entrepreneur or executive who wants to stop putting out fires and work on your business and build momentum with systems, smart marketing, and practical tech, you are in exactly the right place. Something didn't get done. Something slipped through the cracks again. Maybe it was a follow-up that didn't happen, or an invoice that didn't go out, or a customer didn't get called back, or a refund check didn't get written. And when you ask who is supposed to handle it, everyone kind of looks around. And the answer is essentially nobody. Or maybe everybody thought that somebody else had it. Sound familiar? Now let me ask you something. What if that problem didn't exist because of bad people or bad intentions? Because let's be honest, most of us have a great team with great intentions. We hired them on purpose because they're great. What if it's simply because nobody had a clear understanding of their seat and their responsibility that went along with it? Today I want to talk about something that might sound a little bit corporate and a little bit boring at first, but I promise by the time we're done, you're going to see it completely differently. We're talking org charts today. And I'm going to show you how a simple organizational structure, even if your name is in every single box, can transform how your business runs, how your team shows up, and how you show up as the owner. I hear the same thing over and over again from business owners, whether I'm meeting somebody one-on-one or inside our mastermind or at a conference where I'm speaking. And that is, I don't know how to get my team to do things without me telling them. I feel like I'm the only one who cares when things get done right, or I'm just simply exhausted and I don't even know how to explain what everyone is supposed to be doing. And we talk about policies and procedures, and those things are important, but the root of that is knowing who those policies and procedures belong to and giving them clear instructions on exactly what they're responsible for. When I dig into those kinds of conversations, what I usually find is that it's not a people problem, it's a structure problem. There are no clear seats, there's no clear owner for something, and there's no real map for who is responsible for what. And this connects to something I talk about back in episode 10, about altitude and business phases. In that episode, I made the case that overwhelm is usually not about the volume of work you're doing, it's about solving the wrong problems at the wrong altitude. Today I kind of want to extend that idea a little bit because one of the biggest reasons we end up solving the wrong problems is that we don't have that structure in place to know who should be solving what things in the first place. The org chart is that structure. And I know you might be thinking, Ginny, I'm not a Fortune 500 company. I don't have 12 departments and a VP of everything. And more importantly, we all realize we can't really afford that, at least most of the time that we're in our business, which is the starting, the growing, and the scaling phases. I know, we don't either have all of those things in place. But here's what I've learned from building our team at Cavalry Appliance and from working with all of the business owners I've worked with inside Outcome Academy. The structure matters even more when you're small. Because in a small business, when things fall through the cracks, there's no cushion, it lands on you. And when you're a small business, you really, really, really count on your reputation. So it's so important that you do what you say you're gonna do when it comes to your customers and clients. And the only way you can do that is if you have a map laid out that ensures that everything is getting done on time and the right way. So let me dive into the framework that I use and that I teach. I call it the ultimate org chart. And the concept is pretty simple. Think of every single role in your business, not as a job title, but as a department. Every department that exists in a large corporation exists in your small business too. You've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got finance, you've got HR, you've got operations, you've got customer service, supply, vendors, all of it. The difference is that in your small business, one person, probably you for a long time, is sitting in several of those seats at once. Totally fine. It doesn't mean your business is broken. It means that your business is young or it's still growing, or you haven't hired into all of those roles, but the seat still exists. The accountability still exists. And when you draw it out and put a name on it, even your own name, in each one, something shifts. Once the seat has an owner, the work inside that seat has an owner. And when work has an owner, it actually gets done. This is what Geno Wickman talks about in his book Traction. He calls it an accountability chart. And it's not just about who reports to who, it's about who owns each core business function and what their responsibility is and what the measurable outcomes are for that role. We actually bold those outcomes in our org chart template so that they really stand out. I love that framework and it aligns beautifully with how we approach structure inside Outcome Academy. And Michael Gerber, who wrote the emyth, talks about something really similar when he says you should build your business as if it were a franchise. List every single role needed for the business to run without you. And at first, your name's going to be in every single box, like we talked about. But the list is your roadmap for delegation, for growth, and for eventually stepping back. So putting both of those concepts together, the ultimate org chart is a little bit more. It takes both Gina Wickman's concept and Michael Gerber's concept, and then it adds some other things to it. It adds a leadership roadmap. It adds a way for people to climb in your organization and to visualize where they want to be in the future. And in a little while, we're going to talk about how we use it for our profit sharing program. Now, here's where I want to bring in the mountain because this connects deeply to what we talked about in episode 10. In episode 10, I introduced the four camps: camp one, starting, camp two, growing, camp three, scaling, camp four, exit. The org chart looks different at every camp. And I want you to hear this because it really matters. If you're at camp one, you're probably wearing every single hat in your business. You're the technician, the owner, the marketer, the bookkeeper. Your org chart might literally just have your name in every single box. That is totally not failure. That means you're starting. The point of drawing this chart at this phase is to see all the hats you're wearing so you can start thinking about intentional decisions about which ones you want to hand off first when you're ready. If you're at camp two, the growing phase, you're starting to hire people into those spots. Maybe one person, maybe a couple of people. The org chart becomes how you clarify their role, hand off real ownership, and you stop being the answer to every single question. This is where structure starts to create leverage for you. This is also where a lot of business owners get stuck because they hire someone, but then they never let go of that seat. They keep answering all the questions, they keep making all the decisions, and then they wonder why they're still exhausted. The ultimate org chart, when you use it right, is how you let go. And the cool thing about the ultimate org chart that we use at Outcome Academy that sets it apart from the other org charts that I've mentioned and the other styles is that we have different levels of organizational altitude built right into our org chart. So you're probably going to hire positions in the very bottom rung of your org chart first. And that is going to be the frontline facing people. Somebody to answer your phone, a technician to start delivering some of the services you deliver, things like that. At camp three, when you're scaling, you're starting to build your leadership team. That org chart is no longer just a list of who does what. It starts to become a foundation for your culture. You're going to start hiring people into your management roles, into your director roles at some point. And when you have a leadership team and a clear structure, you're going to stop being the bottleneck in your business. And that is when business really starts to run. At Camp Four, when you're thinking about selling or your exit strategy, your org chart is one of the most valuable assets you have. A buyer, a partner, an investor, these people want to see that this business is not entirely dependent on you. The structure is the evidence that it isn't. So let me tell you how this played out in our real life at Cavalry Appliance. When Joe and I first started the business, he was doing everything pretty much technical. And I mean everything. He was obviously the technician, but he was also answering the phone, writing up the invoices, getting all the parts. I was doing the marketing and we were both kind of fumbling through bookkeeping, as I've shared on this podcast before. That did not go that well. We were really, really frustrated with each other and exhausted. There was not any great structure. Things fell through the cracks constantly, not because we didn't care, but because there were not clear seats. Nobody owned anything and everything was kind of floating out there. And it was frustrating because every time I thought he was taking care of something, he thought I was taking care of it. And when we finally sat down and we created our actual org chart with real seats, real owners of everything, things really started to shift. And we even incorporated Geno Wickman's concept of the visionary and the integrator. I definitely hold more of the visionary seat, and he definitely holds more of the integrator seat. However, we have him on our org chart as the technical visionary, and then me as the corporate visionary. And that's because I just don't have the experience and knowledge that he has when it comes to things like actually delivering appliance service in somebody's home. So what it did was it helped stop some of the frustration about what he's responsible for, what I'm responsible for. Then I could say, hey, I own this piece. I get to make this decision. Of course, we listen to each other. And now that we have grown our team, we listen to them too. We want to hear what they think also, but the buck has to start with somebody and the buck stops with the person's name in that seat on the org chart. Here's something you want to highlight because I think it's really important and sometimes it gets missed. Owning a seat does not mean that you have to do every single task that falls under that seat. Let me say that again. Owning a seat means you're responsible for making sure the key responsibilities of that seat get done. It doesn't mean that you have to do all of them yourself. For example, if you own the marketing manager seat in your org chart, you might hire a VA to write your blog posts. You're still accountable for the outcome. You're just not the one doing every single piece of the work. That distinction is really important for business owners who feel like they can't delegate because then it won't get done. You're not delegating the accountability, you're delegating specific tasks. I hope that makes sense. Now I want to talk about something that gets people really lit up because I know the minute I say it, half of you are going to lean in a little closer and half of you aren't. I want to talk about profit sharing. One of the most powerful things you can do with your org chart once you have it is tie your profit sharing structure directly to it. Because here's what happens when your team has skin in the game. They stop thinking like employees and they start thinking like owners. They look for ways to become more efficient, they care about the customer experience, and they actually pay attention to whether the business is running well and making money because it directly affects them. At Calvary Appliance, we use what we call a tiered sharing system, and it maps directly to the levels on our org chart. We have the different levels that I mentioned briefly earlier: frontline team members, then we have managers, then we have directors, and then we have owners and executives at the very top. Once our taxes are finalized for the prior year, any team member who is with us for that full calendar year is eligible for profit share. Here's our formula. We take total profit and we divide it four ways. 25% of that profit goes to the profit share pool, 25% of that profit goes toward debt reduction, 25% goes into savings, kind of our rainy day fund, and 25% goes towards growth and reinvestment. So the profit share pool is really 25% of the total profit from the year. Think of it this way: if your profit is $10,000 for the whole year, that means that $2,500 is the pot of money that you're going to divide up for your profit share. From there, we divide the pool by level. Owners and executives get a higher portion of the pool because they carry a higher portion of the responsibility for the organization. And that gets divided equally among those seats. In our masterminds, we share the down and dirty, nitty-gritty of exactly how we divide it up. But for here, for these intents and purposes, I just want you to get an idea, and then you can think how you want to divide it up for your own business and then run with it. Managers, they get a little bit of a smaller percentage of each one, and then our frontline team members receive a little bit of a smaller percentage. But here's the cool thing: some people on our team fill more than one seat on the org chart. If you own two seats, you own the profit share for both of them. And that creates a real tangible incentive to step up and take on some more responsibility in the company. It's not just a pat on the back, it literally shows up in that profit share. So for example, Maggie now holds the seat of office manager and our parts manager. So she would get both of those pieces, plus, she also gets the seat for answering the telephone. So she gets like three seats of profit share. This becomes motivating in a way that a flat hourly structure can't really replicate. And of course, we have other incentives built into our regular paychecks. We use a performance pay model for our technicians. Maggie gets incentivized when she sells Cavalry Crest Club memberships. And that really puts the onus on everybody that they have real control over the money that they make in the business. And that also really most importantly translates to the way that they're treating our precious clients and customers because they care. They want our business to win, but ultimately, we all want our customers to win. We really care about our customers at a very deep level, and it's reflected in the whole entire structure of our business. So I'm going to share my five-step process for building the org chart that actually works for your business. First, you're going to start with a full framework. I don't want you to start by just listing all of your employees and drawing boxes around them. Instead, I want you to think about all of the things that have to happen in your business and how they exist in big corporations. So think of something like Target and think of all of the different operational structure that they have in their company. Which of those things exist in your company in some form? Do you have something like marketing? Of course. Sales? Of course. And if you think about in Outcome Academy, all of the different pieces of our businesses that we focus on in our mastermind, like team growth, team development, team engagement, your office space, market, marketing, sales, HR, finance, all of the things that we measure. Every single one of those could be its own department if it was a huge corporation. So I want you to think about that in your business. Just kind of do a brain dump of all the things that have to happen and where they fall in that regard. And go ahead and look online and look at different positions that are offered on Indeed for some of these big companies. Get all of those things down on paper. That's your step one. Step two, I want you to do a brain dump for each position, each seat. Set a timer for two minutes for each of those roles. Write down every task and responsibility you can think of that would fall on that person. Don't filter it, don't try to organize it, just get all out of your head. This is one of my favorite exercises to do with business owners and strategy sessions because what comes out is always almost a surprise. Things you totally forget about, things that have been floating around in your brain, things that you've been doing yourself for years without realizing it, they're actually specific seats for a job. Step three, I want you to sort all those tasks. You can use a color coding system, yellow for the things that you love and you're really good at. You can put pink for things you don't really enjoy. If it's orange, those are things that you might like, but you don't really have the skills for. Someone on your team is already doing it better than you. Draw a line for the things that are not moving the needle right now. You don't have to do that forever, but just move them to a future list because they're not a priority right now. And that's something I want to just quickly say before we go to step four. Your ultimate org chart is a fluid document. It can change. You may notice that you need a seat in there that you don't have right now, and that is totally fine. Step four, populate your org chart strategically. Put your name in the seats where you have the yellow highlighted tasks, the most of them, your zone of genius work. Assign team members to roles where they naturally shine. Delegate the pink and orange things wherever you can. And remember, owning a seat doesn't mean that you have to do every single task in that seat. You can absolutely delegate out the pink and orange things in that task. But if it's mostly yellow, go ahead and put your name on it. For Joe and I, this part was pretty easy. But then there's always things that neither of us really love, especially when it comes to the bookkeeping piece. So that was one of the first things that we hired out and delegated to somebody else. Step five, I want you to make this a living document. Your org chart should never just go in a drawer, it should evolve with your business. Literally, every time we hire somebody new or somebody separates from Cavalry Appliance, we revise our org chart. We also review it at least once a year, but even more like once a quarter. And we want to make sure that we tie our profit sharing structure to it. Share it with your team so they understand that it's not just about the role, but it's also the bigger picture, how their role connects with the outcome for the client, how it connects with their profit share, and more importantly, how it connects with where they see themselves in the next five to 10 years at the business. At Cavalry, we actually literally put a note at the top of our org chart that says, this is your leadership pathway, because we really feel like it should be. Every person on your team should be able to look at that chart and see a future for themselves in your organization. Here's the identity shift I want to leave you with today. An org chart is not a corporate artifact. It's not about bureaucracy, it's not about hierarchy for the sake of hierarchy. An org chart is a massive. Of stewardship. It answers the question: who cares for that piece of your business? And when everything has somebody caring for it, things stop falling through the cracks. People don't burn out because they're responsible for every single thing. The owner doesn't wake up at 3 a.m. wondering if something got handled because somebody owns it. Somebody's name is on it. When your structure is clear, your business becomes teachable. You can hand things off. It becomes repeatable because things get done the same way every single time, not just when you're watching, and it becomes truly valuable because a business that runs without you being in every single moment is worth so much more than one that has you doing every single thing. Your camp four, where you're exiting into your summit, that's your lifestyle freedom. Whatever that looks like for you, you start building that right now when you start building your org chart the right way. The decision you're making today, including whether the seat you're sitting in has a name on it, is important. Three things to walk away with today from today's episode. Number one, create your org chart this week. Even if you're a team of one, even if every single box in there has your name on it, start with the seats, not the people, and think departments, think big corporations scaled down to your reality, get it on paper. And I'm going to give you a link in the show notes to a blog post that we have about this same topic. And it has a really cool template in there to help you start. Number two, do your brain dunk. For at least two or three of those seats, set a timer, write down every single task you can think of, go through and highlight, find the things that are yellow that you want to do the most, that you're the best at and you love doing. Find the pinks, the things you hate you shouldn't be doing, things that you should delegate first, right? That's your roadmap. And number three, think about who owns what things. Pick a seat in your business where ownership is kind of fuzzy, where things tend to fall through the cracks, and get really clear on who that seat belongs to. Have a conversation, assign it to somebody, give it real meaning, and then see what changes in your business. You know, every time we've added structure to Cavalry Appliance, every single time we've clarified a seat, written down the responsibilities, given someone real ownership of something, it felt like a small thing in the moment. Like, really, we're making an org chart right now. But the effect compounds over time. Those structures become the skeleton of your business, and that business can stand up without you holding it. And that's what we're trying to build, right? We're not just trying to build a business that survives, we're trying to build a business that thrives, a business that has a summit worth climbing towards. The sooner you build that structure, the less you'll have to tear apart and rebuild later. I'm so excited for you, and I can't wait to hear how your ultimate org chart turns out. If you loved this episode and it was a huge help to you and it kind of clicked something into place for you, do me a solid and then go ahead and share it with a friend. Share it with your business bestie, share it with somebody in your BI group, share it with somebody that can help because that's why we're here. We're here to help each other. A rising tide lifts all boats. Thanks for being here. Thanks for your time. I know it's precious, and I appreciate that you spend it with me every week. As you think about this week, notice where this shows up in your own business. If you want to go deeper into this work, including the mastermind and other ways we support service based business owners, you can explore everything at outcomeacademy.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.