As leaders, we know how quickly things change as a company grows. One day, you’re a scrappy start-up where everyone pitches in on everything. Next, you’re trying to figure out who should be in charge of what and how to keep people from stepping on each other’s toes.
Let’s walk through how organizational structure typically evolves — and how you can navigate it.
From start-up to something bigger
In the early days, one person, often the founder, does it all — spotting opportunities, selling the work, managing the job and handling the finances. That works for a while, but it’s exhausting and doesn’t scale.
The first smart step? Delegate administrative and financial tasks. These are easier to outsource or hire part-time support for, which frees up leadership to focus on what truly drives company growth — selling and production.
Next comes production. Many leaders love being out in the field, but staying there forever will limit growth. By delegating production, the business can take on more projects and grow. Eventually, a production manager will be needed to keep crews on track.
Once there are multiple crews and a manager, a beast is created that needs to be fed. It eats work, and you’ll need more sales help at some point.
The shift toward specialization
As soon as multiple crews and managers are in place, the company enters a new phase. Now, roles need to be clearly defined.
Specialization matters because if everyone tries to do everything, accountability gets fuzzy, and team members become confused about who to follow. Employees need a single, clear boss, and customers need one go-to point of contact. A “team approach” sounds nice, but from a customer’s perspective, knowing exactly who to call builds trust.
This is where lanes — such as sales, production and administration — are essential.
As the company grows, functions like HR, finance and technical specialties also come into play. This is where financial literacy becomes crucial. Understanding budgets and financial reports enables you to make informed staffing decisions with confidence. You can have some peace of mind knowing the financial impact, and you can bake the potential benefits into your strategy, as reflected in your budgets.
Learning from the big players
Eventually, you may grow to a point where you begin to ask how to scale your business indefinitely.
Think about giants like Starbucks or Home Depot. Their growth model is based on repeatable “units” — each store runs as a self-contained business with its own profit-and-loss responsibility. This approach works because each store has the proper structure in place: They know the space, the roles and the resources required to succeed.
For our industry, creating branches as small businesses paves the way to scaling indefinitely.
Multi-branch operations: Staying close to the action
When an organization expands into multiple branches, the structure gets more complex. A branch manager might oversee:
⦁ Two to four account managers
⦁ Two to four production managers
⦁ A salesperson
⦁ An administrative lead
⦁ Possibly an enhancement manager
This setup keeps the decision-makers close to both customers and workers.
As branches grow, there’s a temptation to add more layers — senior account managers, senior production managers and so on. While hierarchy can facilitate coordination, it can also slow down decision-making and put the branch manager in a position where they need to make critical decisions. The person who makes financial decisions on behalf of customers and laborers needs to be removed enough to be objective, but close enough to be impactful.
Not everything needs to live at the branch level, though. Corporate functions — such as IT, HR, finance, fleet management and estimating — can be centralized to reduce duplication. However, when it comes to sales and production, accountability works best at the branch level. Centralized “shared services” can get lost without clear accountability.
Where are you?
Where are you in structure dynamics? In the early stages, what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Embrace specialization, learn to think financially and delegate strategically.
Later, standardization is essential, but complex, multi-layered hierarchies will diminish nimble decision making. Create a simple, reproducible model and grow like crazy.
