As your business grows, so does the need for new people to come on board to aid in its development.

Chances are, it’ll be you trying your hand at everything, as needs must, and wearing as many hats as you can.

Of course, you won’t be the right person for all roles.

At this point, you should hire people better than yourself or your business will generally only ever achieve the level of skills, knowledge and experience of the you (I mean this in the nicest sense – but we’re only human!).

The adage that you should be the stupidest person in the room is absolutely right in scaling a business!

A key challenge most of us make is to not have single ownership of a key function of a business.

It’s our experience that your business only needs three day-to-day functions:

• Selling your promise – getting customers
• Delivering your promise – keeping customers, delivering the service/product
• Enabling your promise – enabling these two functions to carry out their roles

The one question that needs to be asked to see if you have full understanding of who is accountable is…

“Who gets fired for X failure?”

This is not an exercise to fire anyone per se – it’s to help you identify the person in your team that will take this area.

If you cannot answer this one question, then your business is exposed, vulnerable and duplicated effort could be happening, which isn’t efficient.

You can have one name for two functions, but not two names for one function.

Your mantra should be: if two people are accountable then nobody is accountable.

The key here is if nobody is account-able, then crucial elements can fall through the cracks.

Our challenge to you this week is to allocate those three roles out, and we’ll elaborate more next week.