The Seat Nobody Knows Is Theirs
An owner drew five boxes on the back of a printout and filled them in. It took him about ninety seconds and he was pleased with himself.
Then he looked at it again. "That is wrong," he said. "Marcus is in two of them."
Marcus was in three. The third one took another twenty minutes to find, because it was the box nobody in that company had ever said out loud.
Five seats. That is the whole idea.
Five jobs that have to get done in any company big enough that one person can no longer do all of them. For most owners that threshold arrives somewhere between six and twelve million and goes unnoticed for about three years after it does. Titles and departments are a separate conversation.
The trouble starts because the jobs and the people stop lining up, and nothing in the calendar ever forces anybody to check.
The five, and the question each one answers
Direction. Where is this company going, and who is allowed to change that answer? In most companies the honest answer is the owner, alone, usually in the car.
Operations. Can the work get done at twice the volume without heroics? The person in this seat is the one whose absence you notice inside a week.
Revenue. Where does the next dollar come from, and does the answer still work at the next size? This is the seat owners hold longest and release worst.
Money. What can the company afford, and what is it actually spending on? The quietest seat and the one most likely to be filled by a bookkeeper wearing a bigger title.
Judgment. When the other four disagree and all four are right about their own side, who closes it? This is the seat that has no job description anywhere and it is the one that decides whether the company is fast or slow.
The seats are always filled. The question is by whom, and whether they know it.
Filled, and still uncovered
Every owner who gets this far can put a name in all five boxes in about ninety seconds, and it feels good for roughly a minute after that.
Then check three things. Whether the same name appears twice. Whether one of the names is yours in a seat you thought you left years ago. And whether the person in the judgment seat has ever been told that is their job.
Doubled names are the most common finding. Direction and revenue sitting on the same person is the classic version, and it is why a company can grow for eight years and change strategy zero times.
What happens when a seat is empty
An empty seat does not announce itself. The work still gets done, because somebody absorbs it, usually the person nearest to it and usually at night.
What you see instead is a symptom that looks like something else. Decisions that take six weeks. A plan that gets rewritten every quarter. A margin that erodes for reasons nobody can name. A strong hire who gets quieter.
Every one of those has a seat problem underneath it.
Write the five jobs down the page, and beside each one the person who actually does it, often not the person whose title says so.
Circle every name that appears more than once, and circle your own name wherever it appears.
Ask whether the person in the judgment seat knows the seat is theirs. If you have to think about it, the answer is no.
This week
Show the five names to one person on the team and ask what you got wrong.
Take the most doubled name and decide which of the two jobs moves.
Tell the person in the judgment seat that it is theirs, out loud, in front of the others.
A company can have five excellent people and still be configured badly, and configuration is the thing buyers price and owners never audit.
Which seat just went empty? Direction, operations, revenue, money, or judgment.
Win or Win is out today. It is the deeper, full-length exploration of these ideas, and how to put them to work.
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SCALE helps companies and investors remove the structural constraints that limit execution and enterprise value.