Is Your Team Your Biggest Cost — or Your Biggest Asset?
For most business owners, the salary bill is the largest single line on the P&L. Yet how much deliberate thought has gone into designing that team for profit? According to business coach Helen Pethybridge, the answer for most SMEs is: not nearly enough.
In this practical webinar, Helen draws on her background as HR Director at PepsiCo — where she led organisation design across Europe — to show business owners how to stop letting their teams evolve by accident and start designing them with intention.
🎥 Watch the full webinar here:
How Most Teams Are Built (and Why It Goes Wrong)
Most small businesses grow organically. You start out alone or in a small group, get busier, add people, then add a manager — usually whoever has been around longest, rather than whoever is best suited to the role. The result is a structure that wasn't designed; it just happened. And Helen hears one phrase from business owners in this situation more than any other: "I made more money when it was just me."
That's the clearest signal that inefficiency has crept in. Good organisation design, Helen argues, is about doing more revenue with less cost — leveraging your team so that profit goes up, not down, as headcount grows.
The Six-Spoke Model
Helen's framework moves logically through six interconnected areas:
Strategy comes first. You can't design an organisation without knowing where the business is going, what your competitive edge is, and what capabilities you need to deliver it.
Process follows. How does work actually flow through your business — sales, customer experience, production, finance, people management? Map it before you think about roles.
Systems come next. Aim to automate or systematise as much as 80% of your processes. Only what's left — the work that genuinely needs a human touch — should become a job.
Structure is where the org chart comes in. Helen's standout insight here is role design: rather than hiring two people with identical, overlapping skill sets, restructure so that your highest-level (and most expensive) skills are concentrated in fewer, more specialist roles. This alone can dramatically improve return on investment per head.
She also covers DICE — a tool for clarifying who is the Decision-maker, who is Informed, who is Consulted, and who Executes — and the importance of managing spans and layers to avoid the twin traps of part-time managers and bloated hierarchies.
People — Every role should earn its keep. Revenue generators should cover roughly three times their fully loaded cost. Support roles earn their keep by saving money, freeing up time, or enabling others to perform at their best. Clear KPIs make this measurable.
Culture — The most powerful lever of all. Research from Watson Wyatt shows that an engaged employee is worth 2.2 times an unengaged one. Focused engagement programmes can deliver 30%+ improvements in engagement scores — with a direct and measurable impact on the bottom line. Incentive schemes, recognition, shared values and working environment all play their part.
The Bottom Line
Every hour of inefficiency in your organisation structure is profit you're leaving on the table. Helen challenges every business owner to identify which spoke needs the most attention — and to put a number on what fixing it would be worth
