The accountability chart: how an owner stops wearing every hat.

When you start a business, you wear every hat. That's normal for a while. Somewhere around seven figures it stops being normal, and you start drowning. Your customers feel it first, and your team isn't far behind.

The way out starts with a picture of every seat in the company. We call it the accountability chart.

Draw the seats, not the people

At the top sit two seats. The visionary comes up with where the company is going. The integrator turns those ideas into a plan and makes sure it gets done. Under the integrator sit the department heads, the key players: marketing, sales, operations and finance. Under them sit everyone else.

Now write your name in every seat you're actually doing. If you're running a business between $100,000 and $500,000, it's probably most of them.

When you're a solopreneur, you're wearing six hats in your business and you don't even know it.

Doug Mitchell, Building Great Sales Teams

A roofing company at $1 million

On the show, Doug walks through a hypothetical roofing company doing $1 million a year with seven people. The owner has a lead gen agency on marketing, an admin handling the CRM and contracts, a commercial rep, three residential reps, a virtual assistant and an outside bookkeeper.

It looks like a team. Then you count his seats. He's the visionary. He's the integrator. He's the head of marketing and the head of sales. He's also the residential sales manager who recruits, trains and manages the reps, and he still closes deals himself. That's seven seats for one person.

Seeing it on one page is usually the moment an owner decides something has to change.

Replace yourself in the right order

Sales is the easiest place to start because a good salesperson pays for themselves. Hire the rep first, then work toward replacing yourself as the sales manager. Marketing and operations come next. Finance is almost always the last seat an owner hands off.

Watch for anyone sitting in two seats. In the roofing example, the admin is doing CRM work for marketing and contracts, phones and the front desk for operations. She's likely an integrator in training. Show her the chart and the seat she could grow into, and you've given her a reason to stay that has nothing to do with a raise.

That's the hidden benefit of the chart. Telling an entry level employee that the company will need five more leaders in two years is hard to picture. Showing them the boxes makes it real.

Set quarterly priorities from the rep's goals

Each person gets one or two priorities for the quarter. For a salesperson, tie it to something they want. One rep wants an investment property. Another wants to pay a year of his kids' college in one quarter. Work backward from that to the number of sales it takes.

It is our job to have enough salespeople to hit our company goals. Not our salespeople's job to have enough sales to hit our company goals.

Doug Mitchell, Building Great Sales Teams

Sales managers are different. Their goals should be big enough to line up with the company target. Individual reps should only be thinking about their own.

Put controllable actions on the scorecard

A scorecard that only tracks sales tells you what happened and nothing about why. The top of the scorecard should be the controllable action that produces the result: calls, doors, appointments set.

Then the conversion rates show you where to coach. If a rep makes 100 calls a week and gets 10 appointments, that's 10%. If they close two of those 10, that's 20%. When one rep is doing the activity and not converting, you work on their script. When another isn't doing the activity at all, that's a different conversation. Pair your weak appointment setter with your strong one for a day. That's sales management.

Targets should trend up through the quarter, too. If you need 1,300 sales in 13 weeks but hiring and the busy season don't land until week four, set a weekly target that climbs instead of a flat number your team will miss for a month. Morale holds when the numbers can go green.

Run one weekly meeting per team

Each team gets a weekly meeting with the same agenda.

1. Good news. Business or personal. It sets the tone.
2. Scorecard. About five minutes. Anything off target becomes an issue.
3. Quarterly priorities. On track or off track.
4. Headlines. Things the team needs to know, not discuss.
5. To dos. Last week's commitments, done or not done.
6. Issues. The main event. Keep it on solutions, and don't close an issue until someone owns a to do that fixes it.
7. Rate the meeting. One to ten, on how well the team ran it.

When every department runs this way, the owner gets a summary from each meeting and walks into the leadership meeting already knowing which issues are still open. That's what a real pulse on the business feels like.

If you've read about EOS, a lot of this will look familiar. You don't need a franchise or an expensive tool to run it. You need the chart, a scorecard people trust and the discipline to hold the meeting every week, even when it's busy.

How we do it at Ballast

Our Fractional Systems Director and Integrator seats build exactly this inside your company and run it with your team until the weekly meeting sticks without us. All of it lives in BOS, which every Ballast client gets at no cost.

Adapted from Building Great Sales Teams, Building Blocks parts 1 and 2. Quotes are lightly edited for reading.