A guide to the FACe chart, a tool that assigns clear ownership of core functions like marketing, sales, operations, and HR to specific people. Growing companies often have many helpers but unclear who actually owns each area, which overloads founders. The chart fixes that by letting leaders focus on strategy instead of everything.
Chapters
Well, we're talking about growth all the time. And in particular, when you're trying to grow, it's a lot easier if everybody's pulling together, right? But that's not how it is. Most of the time. You feel like you're carrying too much of the weights or some team members are carrying a lot of the weight. But not everyone is pulling together. And there's a few simple tools that can address that. I want to talk to you about one of them today, and that is our face tool, our functional accountability chart exercise. That's a mouthful, right? But look, if everybody was really clear about what they were doing, what they were meant to do, and there was no ambiguity, there was an overlap, people didn't drop the ball, life would be easier. You'd have more time to focus on what's important, to get strategic, to get growing, because things were getting done. But that's not the way that it is. There's a lot of common problems that get addressed along the way using this particular tool. And even if you don't have the tool, hopefully this conversation will help you. So, first of all, what there is to get around this is there's a lot of confusion in companies about who has what, who really owns what is the first thing. So if I were to ask your team and I were to ask you who's got marketing, who's got sales, who's got operations, probably be somewhat clear. But even those basic kinds of questions, there's some ambiguity. And then there are things that you haven't even thought of to cover, but are regular kinds of things that go on and are needed to run a growing company. I'll come back to that. So the first thing is ambiguity, really getting clear about who owns what. The second thing is having people actually own things, be accountable for them versus being helpers. And this is really common in the beginning because as you're growing the company, you. You like, have sign off on all kinds of things, but people don't actually own things. You haven't passed the baton, you haven't empowered them, you haven't made it clear you own marketing, you own sales, you own service, whatever it is, and they own it, they track it, they know their metrics, they know their targets, they sit and speak for it, versus having a lot of people that work on things as great helpers. But you ultimately are the decision maker. So to get that, we really just want to be clear about what are the roles. We're giving away who's got what and letting them know and the team Collectively know that they in fact own that. So here's what you've got. Hey everybody, they've got marketing. They're the leader. I'm looking to them to drive it. I really want them to own it. I'm here to help you like that kind of thing. So first of all, no ambiguity. The second thing is getting clear, like fully passing the baton, empowering it both to them, the individual taking it on and to the other people. The next big thing to do is to address the confusion. And this goes back to the first point about ambiguity, the confusion over having multiple owners for things. So like, well, we all work a little bit on sales or well, a lot of people contribute to that operations. No, you want to have maybe lots of contributors, but who's the ultimate owner? So if I've got two people driving different parts of sales, could I make one of them the overall leader of that sales operations? So having an actual clear owner of something who's actually accountable for it. And then you may want to add specific roles that are unique to your company. But let's get some of the basics covered right. The last thing is unburdening you and maybe, I don't know, one other key person on your team who are holding way too much. And this is again about passing the baton, making clear you own things. So you want to think about what, what is the role in a couple of years that I want to be left with? If we go through these things as I'm about to, you will see that you actually own way too many things and you should probably start to give some of them away. But then at the end of it, are you going to be have no role or are you going to have. Or what's the one role that you're going to be left with? So very commonly you'll be going to be left with head of company or you'll want to be left with head of research and development or maybe sales. Every now and then somebody wants to be left with finance and sometimes, and this is actually kind of cool, be left with nothing. Just be the owner of the business, having fully given it away, but still owning it. So here are the key roles to consider. 1. Who's the head of the company? Every now and then I work with a company where there's a co CEO or no clear CEO that is truly a mess and creates real issues as we try to scale the business. So have a clear head of the company and typically that title is CEO. But it's not critical with what you call it. The Next one is head of marketing who's responsible for the marketing in the organization. Right. This would include the brand identity and the messaging. And this would include, often include strategy around your go to market strategy could include or not include product and what goes on there. For sure includes promotion and lead generation and that kind of thing. Press, pr, the world of that. The next. So that's all marketing. Right. The broad concept of marketing. The next one is R and D and innovation. Who's got R and D and innovation in your business? And this is really important because somebody, whether it's internal R and D around business process or it's actually a product or whatever you want, you want to have somebody who's building what's next. And in my business that's definitely me right now and I love that. And that'll probably be the last thing that I give up is the development of new materials, new programs, new content like that. Next up is sales. Who owns the revenue? Who's going to drive revenue for the company? Owning sales. And you could have things under it like inside sales, outside sales, inbound, outbound. You can, you could have levels of sales, you could have regions of sales. But could we have an overall head of sales, a sales lead that can speak for sales broadly for the company? Next up, operations. And this will look like different things in many companies, but we want to have one operational head who's looking at lots of how things go. And some of these next roles may or may not report to operations. I'm not concerned at this point with our face tool about who is reporting to whom, but really that we're covering the right functions. All right. Under operations and I've got a couple finance roles. First up is we call treasury, but it's really about money in and out. Accounts receivable, accounts payable, taking money in and out. You could even over time separate, have different people working on different parts of those is very common. But touching the money, moving the money is one role, the other one is reporting. So somebody around the reporting. So financial statements and that kind of things balancing the books. Right. That's the world of that accounting and reporting side of things. And we call that controller. And none of these though is cfo. So it could be your CFO has the controller function under them and they're thinking about the finance. But that is a particular title and role within a company and not always necessary. Like at early stages you don't really need a cfo. You might have somebody consulting around the financing of the business or you might do some of that about how we're going to fund the growth, but it doesn't necessarily need to be a key function early on. Next up is it all the. And you could even think about the broader technology infrastructure. How do we keep the computers, phones, things like that lit up and going, the website on and open web stores up and open connected, all the various software services that help you run your business, all of those working together and in that world of it, really critical. And then there's human resources. So we think in human resources, I'm thinking about hiring and the administration, benefits, payroll, that kind of thing. So the hiring, recruiting, and all of the administrative things around pay and benefits for people, the legal and that kind of thing. And then there's talent development and learning. And this one's almost universally ignored in too many companies. So we want to deal with talent development, learning, and finally customer ad advocacy. So this is customer service, but thinking about and advocating for the customer to the leadership team. All right, so functional accountability. Get clear, get unambiguous, start to give things away. Think about the one role that you want to be left with, if any, and start to get clear, unambiguous, and let people be accountable and really own things. Hope that's been helpful. We'll talk about.
