Do your eyes start to glaze over when somebody starts to talk to you about having an organizational chart for your business? Or, do you just sort say to yourself – “that would be nice… but since right now, my name would be in every single square, what would be the point?” Before you stop reading, I want you to pay attention.

Your solo business organizational chart is not a personnel management document — it is a road map for the future of your business.

Creating your organizational chart helps you to visualize the different parts of your business and start to create accountability systems for each of those areas. Here’s why that is helpful:

• It allows you to define your business (and your mission) more clearly.
• It gives you clarity — you’ll know exactly what needs to get done in your business (even the stuff that you don’t like doing yourself).
• You will have a roadmap for future growth. When it does come time to hire your expand your team, you’ll know exactly what the team member needs to do.

Here’s how to get started creating your organizational chart:

• Buy a package of index cards and keep them by your desk while you work on your business.
• As you do your work, write each task that you do on an index card. Examples: “write blog post”, “edit blog post”, promote via social media”. At the end of the week, you will likely have huge pile of cards (as business owners we wear many hats!).
• Take the cards and sort them into 4 or 5 general piles. For most businesses those piles would be something like, mission (your core service), marketing/sales, operations, financial.
• Create subcategories from each of the main areas. Further sort the tasks into the subcategories.
• Create an org chart or outline on your computer.

As you create new systems for your business, you can put them under the appropriate sub category in your new organizational chart. That way, when you hire someone you’ll have a training plan ready to go.

Even if you never plan to hire anyone, you can use the org chart as a punch list for a quarterly review. Go through each of the different functions on the chart and ask yourself what is working? What could use improvement. By using your org chart as a review guide, you’ll be sure to review the whole business and not miss out on tweaks that could make you additional profit.