Ep. 433 — Mike Frommelt & Rick Rittmaster: Designing the Org Chart Your Future Business Actually Needs

6 min read

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Episode Summary

You’re staring at your VTO. Revenue goals are crisp. The mission is beautiful. And then somebody asks the question nobody wants to answer: who is actually going to do this work? Most owner-operators have spent 35 minutes thinking about what the market needs and about 35 seconds thinking about what the company needs to deliver it. Your CPA does taxes. Your banker manages the line. Nobody is sitting at the chart with you mapping the leadership team five years out. I brought Mike Frommelt back, this time with his partner Rick Rittmaster from Strategic Talent Partners, because they’ve built a process that flips the script. Growth trajectory first. Future org chart second. Then, and only then, you look at the people in the seats today. We got into why most owners hire for the past instead of the future, why “develop or hire” is the only real fork in the road, how a $10M CEO running a $30M company is the most common silent failure in the owner-operator trap, and why the strongest leadership teams aren’t built overnight. Real story from a flooring manufacturer who thought they had an ops problem and turned out to have a sales-maturity problem. Tied directly to Module 7 — Leadership Team and Milestone 19 — Functional Leaders.

Top 10 Takeaways

  1. You don’t hire your way to the team you need. You design the org chart of the future first, then back into the people.
  2. Your VTO probably has 40 minutes of thought on the market and 40 seconds on who’s doing the work.
  3. If you hire from where you’ve been instead of where you’re going, you’re staffing yesterday’s company.
  4. A $10M CEO running a $30M company is the most common silent failure on a leadership team.
  5. Your growth trajectory has three inputs: amount of growth, pace of growth, and whether your culture can scale with it.
  6. When there’s a gap between today’s team and tomorrow’s company, you have two choices: hire or develop. Pretending there’s a third is how owners get trapped.
  7. A sales leader who manages five reps is a different role than one who manages sales managers. Don’t promote and hope.
  8. Fractional leaders work when you know the problem you’re solving. They fail when the owner doesn’t know what good looks like.
  9. Succession planning isn’t an icky word. It’s forcing every executive to push work down so they can grow into the next role.
  10. The team that wins isn’t the one with the superstar. It’s the one that learned to play without the superstar in the lineup.

Sound Bites

“If you could make all the money in the world, you wouldn’t hire employees in the first place. You’d just do it yourself. But you can’t. You’ve got to have employees. So you’ve got to know what the right kind of help is.” (@TBD) — Mike Frommelt

“We’re always hiring for what we’ve already done. We’re not looking forward on where we’re going and looking at our people as providing an ROI. We’re just hiring people to get the stuff done that we’ve already sold.” (@TBD) — Mike Frommelt

“Often you’ll ask the question, who’s going to do this work? And they’re like, well, I don’t know, we’ll figure that part out. So much time and attention around what the market needs. Then you flip it: what does your company need? A lot less thought and energy has gone into that part.” (@TBD) — Rick Rittmaster

“If there’s a gap, there’s only two choices. It’s either hire or develop. There’s only two ways to get there.” (@TBD) — Mike Frommelt

“The teams that did the best, the superstar was injured for a certain period of time. The remaining players had to figure out how to step up. When the superstar came back, everyone was more equipped and the team took off.” (@TBD) — Rick Rittmaster

About This Episode

Mike Frommelt is the co-founder of Strategic Talent Partners, an executive search and talent strategy firm focused on helping owner-led companies build leadership teams that scale. Rick Rittmaster is his partner, with a career spent inside large private and global public enterprises running leadership development, succession planning, employee engagement, and talent management. Together they built the growth leadership organizational assessment, a three-step process (growth trajectory, future org chart, leadership team gaps) that gives owners a pragmatic, outside-in view of what their company actually needs in the seats. This is Mike’s third appearance on the show and Rick’s first. Their work plugs directly into Module 7 — Leadership Team in the iBD framework.

Resources Mentioned

  • Strategic Talent Partners — Mike and Rick’s firm. — strategictalentpartners.com
  • Atomic Habits by James Clear — Referenced for compounding small daily disciplines into long-term outcomes
  • Drive by Daniel Pink — Referenced for autonomy, mastery, and purpose as drivers of engagement
  • NBA superstar injury research — Referenced for how teams build depth when the star sits out
  • Bill Mills — Referenced for his leadership and culture process work
  • Joel Trammell — Referenced for the CEO operating system concept (CEO has outcomes, not tasks)

Connections

Phase + Module:

Milestones inside Leadership Team:

Concepts referenced:

Related episodes:

  • Previous Mike Frommelt appearances on the iBD podcast — Recruiting, integration, and the people side of value creation

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