The five seats.
Five A players, not twenty employees.

One person, one seat, one job.

1. The closer.

   Brings in the money. A senior salesperson, whatever you call it. Feed them leads and be willing to overpay the market, because a good closer makes everything else in the business easier when money is always coming in.

2. The operator.

   Delivers the work. Ops, fulfillment, service. One person who makes the thing and loves the thing, not four people each working on one part of it.

3. The numbers.

   Books, payroll, invoicing, chasing money that is already yours. Truly important at scale, because you cannot make decisions to grow if you do not know where the money is.

4. The pipeline.

   Marketing, content, partnerships, collaborations. Anyone getting in front of the closer so the money keeps coming in.

5. The GM.

   The second in command, the integrator. Manages the other four and makes sure the people who are working are working together. The seat most owners skip, and the one that compounds the most over time, especially if you are the CEO.

Most businesses have five seats and two people.

An empty seat does not look empty. It looks like the owner doing it at eleven at night. The closer's seat is empty when the owner is still on every sales conversation. The numbers seat is empty when payroll is a surprise. The pipeline seat is empty when the closer has nobody to talk to on Tuesday. The GM seat is empty when every decision comes back to the owner and nothing happens while they are away.

• Which seat are you sitting in that someone else should own?
• Which seat has two people in it, each doing half?
• Which seat has nobody, and who is quietly absorbing it?
• If you left for two weeks, which seat would stop?

Fill the seat that is bleeding, not the one that is fun.

There is no universal order. The right next hire is the seat whose absence costs the most this quarter. A business with a full pipeline and no closer hires the closer. A business with a great closer and a chaotic delivery hires the operator. A business where the owner is the bottleneck for every decision hires the GM, even though it feels like paying someone to do what the owner already does. That is the point.

Before any hire, write the seat: what it owns, the one number it is measured on, and what done looks like in ninety days. A seat without a number is a title, and titles do not compound.

Map your team.

One name per seat, or a blank. Entries stay on this page and are not sent anywhere.

Map your team onto the seats.

Paste your people and what they actually do. It finds the empty seats, the doubled seats, and the next hire.

Map my team onto the five seats: the closer (brings in the money), the operator (delivers the work), the numbers (books, payroll, invoicing, collections), the pipeline (marketing, content, partnerships, feeding the closer), and the GM (manages the other four).

For each seat:
1. Who sits in it today, based only on what they actually do (not their title). "Owner" is a valid answer. "Nobody" is a valid answer.
2. The one number that seat should be measured on in my business.
3. Empty, doubled, or filled. A seat the owner sits in that someone else should own counts as empty.

Then:
4. THE NEXT HIRE: which seat is costing the most this quarter and why, in three lines.
5. THE SEAT DESCRIPTION for that hire: what it owns, the one number, what done looks like at ninety days.
6. One sentence on what stops if the owner leaves for two weeks.

Use only what I tell you. Never invent a person or a number.

MY TEAM AND WHAT EACH PERSON ACTUALLY DOES:
[paste]

One prompt. Paste it into Claude. It builds the whole thing for your business.

The Pro pack is a build prompt with blanks for your context: your product, your medium, your team. Fill them in, answer its questions, and it produces the complete system in your words. The PDF explains the method so you can judge the output. The seat map for your actual team, five scorecards, the handoffs between seats, the hiring order, and the GM chapter.