Focus Area / Company

Building & running the company

The purpose of an organization is to support the customer-facing work of selling and fulfillment. There are many parts to the company, and as it grows those parts subdivide into more sub-parts. But never forget that they are in service to finding and serving customers. 

  • People. Getting the right people in the right seats on the bus (as the saying goes) requires hiring them, complying with all the rules and regulations of how you do that, then managing and leading them. 
  • Money. Accounting just makes sure transactions are recorded correctly and reports are useful. Financial analysis is needed to help you make better decisions based on what your numbers tell you. And of course you want to pay as little in taxes as possible but on time and without penalties. 
  • Organization Design. Somebody needs to build the bus so people have the seats to sit in. Workflows, communications protocols, good decision making, and other aspects of OD provide the infrastructure for people to do their best work. 
  • Protection. Disasters happen. You want to be able to prevent them when possible and recover from them when you can’t prevent them. 
  • Advisors. There will be outside experts you need. This area covers how you should utilize them.

Articles for Company

84

May 16, 2026

Do You Have Employees but no Team Leads?

Here’s How to Take The Next Step. How Do I Get Out From Under the Day-to-Day and Work On My Business? That’s the most common question I hear from owner/operators. You’ve got people to sell or make what customers pay…
March 28, 2026

Tasks Projects & Roles

Management is getting work done through others. Here's How. Care about the output not the work. This is a subtle but powerful distinction. Here’s what I mean. When you get in your car for a trip to the grocery store,…
February 15, 2026

Compensation Ideas – But Only If …

Incentives are powerful - but hard to get right. “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome” - Charlie Munger. If only business were that simple. The problem is we rarely want just one outcome. We need a…
February 7, 2026

Visionary? Integrator? Here's a better idea

Different Outputs from a Single Person. When I read about the distinction between a Visionary and an Integrator in the EOS literature my first thought was “Those are just different names for CEO and COO - concepts that have been…
January 3, 2026

Why You Can't Work ON Your Business

Even though you think you can. I know it’s not a great idea to tell your audience that they’re wrong. But in my experience of working with hundreds of SMB owners it’s true. We aren’t really working on our companies…
May 4, 2025

All the Company Systems in One Diagram

I'm Obsessed with systems - as if you couldn't tell. The colored blocks represent the major systems and with subsystems listed within them. Each system produces a number of outputs (results). Any successful company is producing relevant outputs in all…
April 6, 2025

Management is not Leadership

Plus a Special Announcement you won't want to miss. People confuse management and Leadership. They're not the same. This post is about why you need both but if you confuse them you might end up with neither. But first a…
March 8, 2025

What Happens When People Fail?

Your Maturity as a Manager is Shown in the Answer. Often when people hire me it's because they're frustrated with the repeated failure of an employee. They complain (or vent to say it more gently). That's rarely useful unless it…
January 25, 2025

Why I Hate the NPS Score for Employee Surveys

You Need Actionable Insights not a Number. TL; DR You absolutely should survey your employees because an anonymous survey will tell you things that you won't learn otherwise. The goal of course, is happy, engaged employees, who do good work…
January 12, 2025

The Problem with Good Judgement

Here's How to Fix it. Humans are great at making quick judgements. Discernment may be one of our superpowers as a species. We immediately come to conclusions about what's going on and what needs to happen next. We say people…
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