The ten departments in every business

In one paragraph

Whatever its size, a business splits into ten functions. Draw them and mark which ones you personally are doing — that picture usually explains why there is no time.

Above the line is strategic: shareholders, then directors. Deciding what the business is for and holding it to account.

Below the line is operational: leadership — the chief executive or general manager — and then seven departments doing the work. Product and service development, operations and delivery, sales, marketing, finance, administration and technology, and human resources.

The hats question

The exercise is not the chart, it is the audit. Which of those ten are you leading? Which hats are you wearing right now, today?

Owners of small businesses routinely find they are wearing seven or eight. That is normal at the start and it is exactly why growth stalls later: every one of those hats is a job somebody is doing badly because it is their eighth priority.

The follow-up question is the useful one: which of these should you get rid of first, to free up capacity for the ones only you can do?

How to actually use it

• List the ten and put a name against each. Where the name is yours more than three times, you have found your constraint.
• Take the one that costs least to hand over — usually administration or bookkeeping — and hand it over properly, with the decisions as well as the tasks.

Where it breaks down

• Ten departments in a three-person business is a way of thinking, not an org chart. Do not create the boxes; just work out who is carrying each function.

If you are being examined on it

Links directly to organisational structure and to span of control — useful for explaining why a growing business needs to formalise.

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