Understanding Organizational Structure

Recorded in person in Calgary, Josh and Lyndon walk through how to build an organizational structure that actually works as a business grows. The key distinction Lyndon hammers on throughout: org charts should report role to role, not person to person. That structural choice surfaces how many hats the owner is actually wearing — marketing manager, sales manager, ops manager, all reporting to themselves as president — and where to start hiring or delegating from.

The conversation hits the practical mechanics: document your current state, map your three-to-five-year future state, and use the gap between them to inform what role gets hired next. Lyndon references Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time as a guide for measuring where your time actually goes and where to start offloading. They get into the rule of thumb of no more than seven direct reports, the difference between leading individual contributors and leading other leaders (the typical $1-2M ceiling where many owners get stuck), and the importance of accountability for outcomes rather than activities — which is what lets you avoid micromanaging remote teams. Josh's reframe lands well: when results are off, look at the process before you blame the person.

The closing thread is that structure isn't rigidity — it's clarity. People perform better when they know what they're accountable for and what "done" looks like, and the gray-area duties-as-required can sit alongside that without eroding it.