“Today, we’re going to work on the organizational charts of your businesses,” Professor Hunt said as she opened the first class of the new semester. “I’ll need a volunteer. Thanks for offering, Owen,”—she didn’t even glance at him—“but I want someone with neater handwriting. Jenna, come up to the board.”
Owen groaned, but Hunt ignored it as she handed Jenna a whiteboard marker.
“At the head of your organization, of course, is the CEO. Go ahead and write that at the top of the board.”
Jenna stepped forward, her ponytail swinging, and wrote CEO in a crisp, narrow script. She really did have perfect handwriting.
“Jenna, who is the CEO in your business?” Hunt asked.
Jenna blinked. “Uh… I am?”
“Great, then write your name below CEO and draw a box around it.”
Jenna did as she was told.
“Now, different companies have different C-suite configurations,” Hunt continued. “Feel free to adjust this later to fit your actual needs. For now, I’ll go with four executives under the CEO. Map it out like a family tree.”
Jenna sketched the branches before Hunt finished the sentence. Had I used a ruler, I don’t think I could’ve matched her precision.
“On the far left, write COO. That’s your Chief Operations Officer,” Hunt explained. “The COO handles hiring, firing, and most of the daily operations. Jenna, who’s the COO in your business?”
Jenna’s freckled cheeks flushed a bright pink. “Me, I guess?”
A ripple of giggles spread through the class. I had a sneaking suspicion Hunt hadn’t passed on Owen because of his handwriting. He would’ve fought her the whole way.
“Write your name below COO,” Hunt said, poker-faced.
“Now we move on to CFO—Chief Financial Officer. Jenna, who is the CFO of your company?”
She shrugged. “Me?”
“Good. Write it down.”
“She’s a one-woman company,” Owen called out from the back. “She does everything.”
“I’ll open the floor for questions after we’re done. Until then, Owen, you have two choices. You can hold your tongue. Or, if you’re certain I’m wasting your time and there’s nothing to learn from this exercise, you may excuse yourself from the rest of class.”
A low “oooooh” reverberated through the room. Owen didn’t budge. If there was one thing Professor Hunt didn’t do, it was waste time.
“Next,” Hunt continued, unfazed, “is CMO, Chief Marketing Officer. Who’s in charge of marketing, Jenna?”
Jenna gave a small, resigned laugh. “Me.”
“Perfect. Write it down. And last, CTO—Chief Technology Officer. Who manages your tech?”
Jenna raised a finger to her temple and gave an exaggerated thinking face. “I think, perhaps… me?”
“Excellent. Write it down.” Hunt clapped her hands once. “Well done, Jenna, you have the beginnings of a strong organizational chart. Ideally, I’d like to go at least one more level down. For instance, in a mid-size business, under the CFO, we might have our accountant, our bookkeeper, and our tax attorney. But you can create the next level for homework if you choose. For now, take your seat.”
She scanned the room. “So how many of you will choose to do this exercise for homework?”
“Will it be graded?” Owen asked, arms crossed.
“That’s not how this seminar works, Owen. I’m evaluating you based on the work you do in your actual business, not on essays or assignments.”
He leaned back. “Then I’d guess none of us will do it.”
“I’d guess you’re right,” Hunt said dryly. “Which is a shame. Because this is one of the most powerful tools you’ll ever use to grow.”
“How?” Andrew asked, sounding genuinely curious.
“It goes back to what we discussed at the end of last semester: building robust systems. Right now, except for Ty, all of you are solo operators. And even Ty wears a dozen hats. That’s normal at this stage. But it creates one enormous obstacle to growth. Can anyone name it?”
Meg, naturally, raised her hand first. “If all your tasks are jumbled together, it’s hard to hire and direct people when you’re ready to expand.”
“Precisely. As much as I say each of you is wearing numerous hats, you really don’t think of yourselves that way. You carry your tasks as one big jumble.” Next to the neat chart with its tiny boxes, she drew one big box and made chaotic scribbles inside. “If you’re running it all yourself now, when you get big enough to take on an employee, you might make the classic rookie mistake.”
“Which is what?” Owen asked.
“You figure that since you do a bit of everything, the new employee should also be able to handle a bit of everything. So you dump twenty different tasks on their plate at once. They feel overwhelmed and mess up at least half of them. Then you get frustrated and conclude they’re incompetent, because if you can do it, it can’t be that hard. In no time, either you fire them or they quit, and you’re back to square one.”
Yikes.
She capped the marker. “To build a system, you need to break down each of your roles. Once you realize that you’re wearing the bookkeeper hat and you document everything you do as the company’s bookkeeper, then it becomes easy to hire a bookkeeper when you need one. You can find a freelancer to take on a few hours of the work or hire someone full-time. But you’re only assigning one clear, distinct role at a time, ideally one with specific instructions and measurable outcomes, so the new hire knows exactly what’s expected, and you know if they’re succeeding.”
I thought about all the tasks I had to take over now that Carrie was gone. “So we can’t ask one person to do two things?”
“Of course you can. But the fact that one person fills three roles doesn’t make it one gigantic role. Keeping it separate helps you scale. It means when the business gets bigger, each team member’s workload expands, and when you need more staff, you can transfer a role from one employee to another with ease.”
She looked around the room. “Remember the story of the two brothers and their hardware stores? The brother who only ran one store was used to doing most tasks himself. He didn’t have a business blueprint capable of handling a 25-store operation with hundreds of employees. But the brother with 25 stores would have no problem running an operation of one.”
She pointed again at Jenna’s org chart. “Build your business as if it were already much bigger than it is. Create a structure capable of supporting ten, twenty, or a hundred employees. Do that, and pretty soon you might find your business expanding to match your systems.”
Now that school was back in session, business at the pizzeria snapped right back to life. The rush was good. The timing was not. I felt Carrie’s absence more than ever. Every task she used to handle now sat squarely on my plate, and there wasn’t a single person who could cover for me if I dropped the ball.
The closest was Dedrick.
“Tell me,” I said while we wiped down tables after close, “if I had a family emergency and left you in charge of this place for a week, how would you feel?”
“Abandoned.”
“I mean, would you be flipping out?”
“No, you’d be flipping out.” He pointed his rag at me. “Because I’d quit on the spot.”
“This isn’t particularly helpful.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’ve been hired to make pizzas, not run this joint.”
I leaned over the table he was wiping. “Hypothetically speaking, if you didn’t quit, what would stress you out the most?”
“Just the stress of having it all on my shoulders. I see what it’s done to you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
His eyebrows shot up. “You’ve basically been a basket case since taking this place over.”
“That’s what I’m trying to fix.”
“By dumping it on me?”
“By building systems.”
He stopped wiping. “What kind of systems?”
“That’s what I’m trying to work out. If you were in charge, would it be less stressful if I left you detailed instructions for everything you needed to do?”
“Heck yeah.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.” I pulled my phone out to take notes. “What would you want instructions on?”
“I thought you said I was getting them on everything?”
I held back a scowl. “Say I didn’t get around to writing everything. What’s the bare minimum you’d need to take this place over?”
“Ah, I see what you’re asking.” He ticked off his fingers. “First, how do I open this place up? I’ve never even turned on the ovens. Do they need to be pre-heated? How much of each ingredient do I need to prep? What else needs to be done? Do I need to flip on the bathroom lights? Replace the toilet paper?”
I took notes as fast as my thumbs could type. “OK, that makes sense. You know what? The ovens are a little complicated. What if I took a video?”
Dedrick nodded slowly. “That would be a huge relief.”
I stood taller. “In fact, I can make videos for all of our prep work. Here’s how big you need to cut the onions, here’s how you slice the pepperoni.”
“Great.” Dedrick smacked crumbs off the table with his rag. “I’ve got a tripod at my place. What if I bring it in tomorrow, and we can film everything during prep?”
“That sounds great. So what’s next?”
“I’d want a list of everything, even if you think it’s stupid, like flipping over the sign from Closed to Open. I don’t need a video on that, but I’d be nervous I’d forget the sign.”
I chewed on his words. “So you want a checklist.”
Dedrick snapped his fingers. “Yes! A checklist of everything I need to do, with links to instructions or videos on anything complicated. Probably won’t watch ‘em after the first few times, but I’d check that list every shift.”
“If you had all that—checklist, instructions, videos—would you feel okay running the place if I had to skip town?”
“Well, I’ve got to say, if I’m going to be in charge, I’d want to get paid like it.”
I stared at him. “Dedrick, are you trying to be a pain in the ass?”
“Can’t blame a man for wanting a bit of entertainment.” He winked at me. “Especially when it comes at his boss’s expense.”
Dedrick had called me “boss” or “bossman” from the time I bought the place, but I’d always thought he was joking around. Now I was starting to wonder. “Is that how you look at me? As the boss?”
“Whose name is on my paychecks, Boss?”
I shook my head. “I guess you’re right.”
“You gotta stop guessing, Ty. You’re the bossman, and it’s time you start acting like it.”
My stomach twisted like it was full of earthworms. “What does that mean?”
He laughed—a deep, throaty cackle. “Means stop scrubbing your own toilets. You got us peons for the dirty work.”
“Being the boss means I’m too good to scrub a toilet?”
“It’s not about being too good.” He grabbed a spray bottle and headed to the windows. “If your toilet scrubber doesn’t show for work one day, then you better believe you’ve got to get in there and do it yourself, because the buck always stops at the bossman. But you’ve also got to start seeing your time for what it is.”
“Which is what?”
“A hell of a lot more valuable than employee time.”
I started flipping chairs onto tables. “Actually, I make a lot less for my time than any of my staff.”
“The hell you do.”
“No, it’s true. I don’t even pay myself minimum wage.”
“It’s not about what you pay yourself, Ty.” Dedrick wiped the windows faster as he built up steam. “You’ve made this business more valuable. And if tomorrow you choose to sell, all that value would go right back to you. And the truth is, if you spent less time scrubbing toilets and more time figuring out how to grow this business, you’d make it more valuable still.”
Considering I was now behind on payments to three of my vendors, I wasn’t sure how much more valuable the business was, but I wasn’t about to argue. “You were the one who came up with the crowdfunding idea. That might have saved us.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy using my creative faculties in the service of a worthy cause. But as an employee, I wouldn’t have known the pizzeria was in trouble if you hadn’t mentioned it. My job is to come in, make pizzas, collect my wages, and live my life. No one else is going to agonize night and day about how to make this place better.”
I placed the last chair on its table. “Can’t I agonize while scrubbing toilets?”
“You can. But do you really expect to find your answers in the toilet?” Dedrick wiped the last of the windows and returned the rag, spray bottle, and apron to their places behind the counter. “I’m clocking out, bossman.”
Which left me scrubbing the toilet. After the rugby team had held their after-party in there, no less. The stink made me retch.
Dedrick’s point finally clicked. There was no way I was going to figure out how to make the pizzeria profitable in this stinkhole.
I had to think outside the pizza box I’d wedged myself into.
I stepped out of the bathroom and picked up my phone. The call I’d been dreading for weeks suddenly felt urgent. I needed to face it.
It was answered on the third ring. “To what do I owe the honor?” Meg asked.
Meg was the last person I expected to turn to for help. But while she was harsh, she wasn’t intentionally cruel. She was just honest, and sometimes, the truth hurt. To make this work, I needed to seek out hard truths, not hide from them in the toilet. “Can you teach me how to make great pizza?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” I could practically hear her snarky grin over the phone. “I can meet on Sunday.”
“Great.” My heart kicked up a gear. “Let’s do it early, before the lunch rush. Who knows, maybe I can use what you show me for the pies that day.”
“You don’t understand.” Her voice sharpened. “We can start early if you want, but you’re mine all day.”
“Look, if you want to work with me in the kitchen all day, that’s great.”
“Nope. No going into the shop at all.”
“I can’t take the whole day off.” I rubbed my temple. “Especially not a Sunday. We’ll be busy all day.”
“Ty, you’re the boss. You can’t build a business that only runs if you’re chained to it. You’ll burn out.”
She sounded like Dedrick. “I know I need to delegate. Eventually.” That’s exactly why I was working on systems. “Once I’m making enough profit.”
“Sunday.” Her tone left no room for discussion. “I’ll pick you up at 8 a.m. Where should I get you?”
“In front of the pizzeria.”
“Going to get there early to prep?”
Meg didn’t know I was living there. “You know it.”
“Fine. Eight sharp.”
I hung up and immediately called Dedrick. “Tell me everything you think you’d need to know to run this place on your own. Let’s get this system built. I need you to run the show on Sunday. And I’ll pay you an extra two bucks an hour while you’re in charge.”
