When my firm was about ten people, I decided to actually delegate and add a management layer. Best decision I ever made.
But whether or not management was viable? That was a total guess. I had no idea if we had enough billable staff to support a less-billable management team. Then, as we grew, so did our monthly break-even number, which made the financial stakes even higher.
Shortly thereafter, I realized guesswork growth wouldn’t cut it anymore. I needed to actually plan for growth: to map our current org structure, our desired future org structure, and the in-between step. And critically, to model the costs and potential revenues tied to each role and each version of the business.
Planning this way also helped me make sure managers had the right number of direct reports: too few, and we were top-heavy with thin margins; too many, and they couldn’t properly support their teams.
So I built a janky spreadsheet to do all this, and used it for years. It looked like this:
Eventually, I handed this methodology off. Our Operations Director started using that same sheet to map out versions of the business every year as part of our growth planning. If we wanted to grow our agency to $3M revenue, what roles would we need? Who would they report to? What could we afford to pay them? What were the margins at $XXX/hr versus $YYY/hr? What about the margins in version A versus version B?
I started using that same spreadsheet with some of my clients, and realized it was the perfect opportunity to build a small web app based on it. So I built TeamLedger, a free organizational structure chart maker and financial modelling tool.
At the time of this writing, it’s a basic MVP built around hourly fees/rates and salaries. You can:
- Create an org chart with role-based financial data.
- See how your model plays out financially – profits, margins, revenues, average utilization, and salary load.
- Run a custom AI analysis on the model to find strengths, risks, and opportunities.
- Export or share your structure with your leadership team.
- Save your work locally (in the browser).
Over time, if usage warrants it, I’ll keep adding features – things like true user management, database storage, support for other models (sprint-based billing, for example), and the ability to compare multiple org-chart versions.
Anyway, the point is: planning your firm’s growth through structure and financial modelling is the smartest way to grow. You have to design your business – you’re not just going to start hiring randomly, are you?
So give TeamLedger a try. It’s a far better tool for the same methodology I used to take my firm from 10 to 30+ people — and from under $1M to $4M in revenue. Similar growth is attainable for you, too.