---
title: Delegation and Org Design
summary: Design the org you want on purpose, then hire to it instead of growing your team by accident.
est_minutes: 18
sort: 3
---

Welcome to Module 3.3.

Module 3.2 documented your top processes. This module hands them off, but not just to whoever's available. To a designed org. To people in roles that fit a 12-month structure you build today.

By the end of this module you'll have a 1-page Org Map, a delegation matrix that names who owns what, a hiring plan with budgets and triggers, and a Founder Role Definition for what YOU will do once the org is built.

**The Accidental Org**

Most operator businesses have accidental orgs.

The first hire was an admin because the founder was drowning in admin. The second hire was a delivery person because revenue grew faster than capacity. The third was a generalist who absorbed whatever fell through the cracks. By year 4, the team has 5 people and the org chart is a spaghetti diagram of "whoever's free."

That accidental org has three problems:

1. **Unclear ownership.** Several humans touch every important process. No one is fully accountable.
2. **Hiring backwards.** Each new hire fills the gap the previous hire didn't cover. The team grows reactively.
3. **Founder still in every loop.** Despite 5 hires, the founder is still the central node, because the org wasn't designed to remove them.

The fix: design the org you want. THEN hire to it. Not the other way around.

**The Role Inventory vs the Role Architecture**

Two different exercises. Operators conflate them.

**Role Inventory** is current state. What roles exist today? Who's in them? What work do they actually do (vs what the title says)?

**Role Architecture** is target state. What roles SHOULD exist 12 months from now to run the business you're building?

The gap between them is the org transformation work.

Most operators do the inventory and stop. They look at what they have and try to optimize it. That's incremental. The architecture exercise asks a different question: if you were starting clean, what roles would this business have to run reliably at 2x current revenue?

The roles that emerge from a clean architecture exercise are almost always different from the roles you have today.

**The 5 Roles of an Operator Business**

For most operator businesses doing $500K to $5M, the target org has 5 functional roles. Not always 5 humans, sometimes roles double up, especially early. But 5 functions.

**Role 1 — Founder / CEO.** Strategy, big-decisions, key relationships, hiring of leaders. NOT day-to-day delivery, NOT routine sales, NOT operational firefighting.

**Role 2 — Revenue Lead.** Owns the revenue engine. Sales pipeline, marketing channels, retention. Pulls from Pillar 2 deliverables.

**Role 3 — Delivery Lead.** Owns customer success and project delivery. Onboarding, ongoing fulfillment, account expansion. Pulls from Pillar 2.6 and Pillar 3.2 SOPs.

**Role 4 — Operations / Finance.** Owns the operating cadence, meetings, dashboards, financial close, vendor mgmt. Where most operator businesses are weakest.

**Role 5 — Specialist / Production.** Whatever the actual production work is, could be coders, copywriters, fractional executives, accountants, depending on the business model.

In a 3-person business, one human covers 2 roles. In a 5-person business, often 1 human per role. In a 10-person business, multiple humans inside Roles 2, 3, and 5.

The structure is the same. The headcount varies with revenue.

**The Delegation Matrix**

A delegation matrix names, for every major work category, who is Responsible, who is Accountable, who is Consulted, and who is Informed. RACI.

The pattern that breaks operator businesses: every category has "founder" in every column.

The fix: for each work category, only ONE name in Accountable. Only that name. Responsible can be different, and often is. Consulted and Informed have multiple names.

For a work category like "Lead generation operations," your matrix names a single owner across each RACI column:

- Responsible: Marketing Coordinator
- Accountable: Revenue Lead (Role 2)
- Consulted: Founder (in early months only)
- Informed: Delivery Lead, Operations

The founder is informed, not accountable. That's the transformation.

If you can't write a delegation matrix without the founder as accountable in 4+ categories, the bottleneck from Module 3.1 is still founder. That's the work for the next 90-day cycle.

**The Hiring Plan**

A hiring plan has 4 columns:

1. **Quarter** (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4)
2. **Role being hired**
3. **Budget per month** (fully-loaded, including benefits and taxes)
4. **Trigger that fires the hire**

The trigger column is what separates a real plan from a wishlist.

Common triggers:

- "Revenue reaches $X MRR"
- "Customer count reaches Y"
- "Founder calendar audit shows Z hours/week on Category X work"
- "Specific milestone hit (e.g., 'first 3 SOPs handoff-tested clean')"

Hiring without a trigger produces premature hires (you can't afford them yet) and delayed hires (you'd waited too long).

The hiring plan is not a commitment to hire. It's a commitment to hire WHEN the trigger fires. Triggers protect cash. Plans protect roadmap.

**The Founder Role Definition**

This is the most uncomfortable artifact in Pillar 3.

The question: what is your role in 12 months?

Specifically:

- What work do you DO?
- What work do you DELEGATE?
- What decisions do you OWN?
- What decisions do you DEFER to others?
- What's your weekly time allocation across the 5 calendar buckets (from Module 3.1)?

The discomfort: most operators have built their identity around being indispensable. Defining a future role where you're MORE useful but LESS necessary requires letting go of that identity.

The exercise:

- List 10 things you do today that, in 12 months, you will NO LONGER do
- List 5 things you do little or none of today that, in 12 months, you will do MUCH MORE of (strategic work, key relationship cultivation, hiring leaders)
- List 3 decisions you still own in 12 months (and 3 you've delegated)

This document is the north star for every hire, every SOP, every delegation. Without it, you'll drift back into doing-the-work mode whenever stress rises.

**What To Do Right Now**

Five things:

1. **Section A — Role Inventory.** Map current state honestly.
2. **Section B — Role Architecture.** Design the 12-month target org.
3. **Section C — Delegation Matrix.** Name, by category, who's Accountable. Founder appears in Accountable column no more than 2 times for an operator business at $500K+.
4. **Section D — Hiring Plan.** Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. Roles, budgets, triggers.
5. **Section E — Founder Role Definition.** The most important document in Pillar 3. Write it. Sign it. Review quarterly.

Take the quiz.

I'll see you in Module 3.4 — Cash Flow & Financial Controls — where we build the financial visibility that funds the org you just designed.
