Most people build a business's structure from the names: I need an office manager, I need an operations lead. The source proposes the reverse order. First settle what leaves the business, then what has to be done for that to happen, and only at the end who does it.
If you take one idea from I Work Harder Than Anyone I Know, the booklet itself says to take this one.
The names come last
The source lays out a whole method of twelve steps. It is shorter than that number suggests, because the first four steps settle all the rest.
Step one is to establish the final product. Step two is to work backwards from it, finding the earlier products each next product needs, until all of them in a row add up to the final one. The source closes that list with a single line:
“This is what is called 'organizing.'”
The names of the posts come last, which is the exact opposite of what most people do.
Suppose a clinic owner defines her final product as a patient who finished treatment and is glad they did. Working backwards, she finds five products on the way: booking, assessment, plan, course and discharge.
Or an installer who defines his product as an installation that passes inspection and never gets a callback. Working backwards shows him that one earlier product was missing the whole time: a measurement approved before the parts are ordered.
That gives the earlier products their standing. The source says a product that leads to the final one gets equal billing with it, because without it the final one cannot happen. What each post produces sums to the total product of the business.
Now the other side: an owner who starts from the names, I need an operations lead, and never manages to say what that person is supposed to turn out.
Build it backwards
Here is the core of the method, which the source states in a single sentence. You build an org board, the layout of which posts exist and what each one does, backwards. First establish the product. Then find out what has to be done to achieve it. Only after those two can you accurately discover what someone has to be to get it done.
That produces three questions in an order you should not reverse: what goes out of the business, what gets done to make it go out, and who does that. Most people open with the last one.
Suppose an owner starts from the sentence I need an office manager. He cannot explain what product that person should produce, and six months later the post is gone.
The second time he starts from the other end. The product is a quote that leaves the door within twenty-four hours. The doing follows from that product, and the post follows from the doing.
A product that others also want
The source puts the same idea as a series of questions, and it aims them squarely at a business. The first question anyone organizing an activity asks is:
“What is the desired product that will also be desired by others?”
The source insists this be answered before you arrange finance or any org board. Only then do you ask what has to be done to produce it, and the question of who does it comes at the very end.
Look at the extra clause in that first question: that will also be desired by others. If you want to make something and nobody wants to buy it, it is not yet a product.
Suppose an installer wants to move up to larger projects. He asks whether his market wants that from him only after a year of losses. By contrast, a studio owner asks five clients what they are most short of. Four of them give the same answer, and that answer becomes her product.
Mr. A's truck
The source offers a small example that fits half the small businesses around. Mr. A owns a truck. He tries to work out what to do with it, and he keeps it moving in the hope of making money. He would usually go broke.
He takes it that he already has a product, the truck, and that the product he needs is money. So he rarely goes back to ask what he has to be.
Plenty of small businesses start exactly this way, from the asset that happens to be on hand, a truck or a machine. The question asked is what can be done with it. Start there, and the product never gets defined. Neither does the structure.
Suppose an owner buys a $38,000 lathe and only then goes looking for something to make on it. For two years it runs at a third of its capacity. The same owner could first identify a steady demand for one particular part, and then buy the machine that makes it.
What the booklet does with this
In I Work Harder Than Anyone I Know, this chapter closes with two short exercises, one to define and one to break down. Both start from your own product.
Before you look for the next person for the business, know what that person is supposed to turn out.