This book was written for the executives and owners of small to medium sized companies that are expanding, as well as anyone who makes decisions regarding the company’s structure and improvements to facilitate business growth and development. It is for those who love what they do and dream of creating a well-organized business.
When I was creating my first business, I was going through one textbook after another on the subject of management in an attempt to find the answer to this question: what is the optimum structure for my company? Without any exaggeration, I spent lots of hours researching but, in the end, was disappointed. In management textbooks I found only very general recommendations, most of which did not go beyond classifying types: the company structure can be of this type, or it can be of that type… I did not find any specific concepts regarding which structure I should choose and what criteria I should use to make that choice. Also, while reading these books, I got the impression that they are written as if one wanted to manage some global corporation from aboard a spacecraft. It was impossible to understand how to apply all these clever ideas to actual operations in a relatively small manufacturing, trading or service company.
I also knew that I would not be able to build a well-managed company if I, the founder and the CEO, didn’t have an initial "blueprint", basically – no idea of the necessary divisions and levels of employee responsibility. At that time, my manufacturing company was not very big. It had about 150 full-time employees and several independent contractors. My technical education, logic, and experience told me that without a sound organizational structure I would not be able to properly organize and expand the work, just as it would be impossible to build a beautiful building by attaching additional floors, attics, balconies, and garages to a small house. Only with a comprehensive initial plan of the entire building could it be built floor by floor.
As it turned out, this problem had a beautiful and logical solution. It is possible to develop a structure that will provide a solid foundation for organizational expansion and development, while will not changing significantly in the process of growth. As I write this, seven years of consulting and working experience with more than two hundred companies of various specializations confirm that this is not just an elegant theory. It is a real opportunity to create an optimum structure of the company, regardless of its size and stage of business development.
