Maintenance
Part of Making sense of organization plans: who does the work, who decides, what the team cannot do
6 parts of organization plans review, explained
An organization plans review checks six things: payroll, who does the work, hours and authority, missing gaps, actionable feedback, and review pitfalls.
During an organization plans review, ask whether the described business can be staffed and afforded, not whether the people sound impressive. Impressive is easy to write and tells a reader nothing.
Read it in the order below with the payroll schedule beside you. Record findings as questions, because a question sends the author to a record and a correction only sends them back to the keyboard.
What to take away
- Start with arithmetic. A well-written section describing an unaffordable team is still wrong.
- The best single question is who does the revenue-generating work on an ordinary Tuesday.
- A section with no admitted gap has been edited, not written.
- Feedback that names the evidence you want is the only kind that gets acted on.
1. First pass: the chart against the payroll
Put the chart and the payroll schedule side by side and check three things.
Chart vs payroll: three checks
- Every box has a cost in start month
- Every future box marked future with date
- End head count equals model head count
- Wages carry employment costs on top
- Founder paid or deferral has end date
Every box has a cost, in the month the person starts. Every future box is marked as future and has a date. And the total head count at the end of the plan period is the head count the model pays for.
Where a rate looks unlikely for the role and area, name a source rather than relying on opinion. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program publishes wage estimates by occupation and metropolitan area. Compare the role and metro area with the plan, using the data as a benchmark rather than a verdict.
Check that wages carry employment costs on top, and that the founder is paid something or the deferral is shown with an end date. A model without either is overstating the margin in the projections by the value of somebody's full-time work.
2. Second pass: who actually does the work
Ask the Tuesday question. Follow the person cutting, driving, coding, serving or selling, and see whether the section names them.
The Tuesday question
Does the section name the person doing the work?
role is grounded in real work
section describes an organization, not a business
If every box is a manager, the section describes an organization rather than a business. If the founder appears in four boxes, that is honest, and the follow-up is what happens to the other three when one of them takes a whole day.
Then check the roles against the work described in the operations plan. Hours have to cover the shape of demand there, including the peak and the absence.
3. Third pass: status, hours and authority
- Are hours stated for everybody, including anyone holding another job?
- Is any role classified as a contractor, and has that classification been reviewed under the applicable federal and state rules rather than merely asserted in the plan?
- Does the section say who decides what, separately from who owns what?
- Is there a tie-break where ownership is evenly split, or an honest statement that there is none?
- Do the ownership percentages match the company description exactly?
- Are licensed roles named with the holder, and is there cover when that person is away? Verify a required state license through the issuing state's official license lookup, where available.
Any of these left blank is a finding. For federal tax purposes, the IRS applies its common-law test for employee status. A business or worker can ask the IRS for a determination by filing Form SS-8, Determination of Worker Status for Purposes of Federal Employment Taxes and Income Tax Withholding. State unemployment agencies may apply different state tests, so record the applicable authority and the adviser who reviewed the classification rather than treating the plan's label as an answer.
Status, hours and authority checks
- Hours stated for everybody, including second jobs
- Contractor classification reviewed by qualified adviser
- Who decides separated from who owns
- Tie-break stated where ownership is split
- Ownership percentages match company description
- Licensed roles named with cover for absence
4. Fourth pass: what is missing
Weak team sections are recognized by absences rather than errors.
Absences that signal a weak section
- No gap named
- No vacancy dated
- No mention of who covers absence
- No key-person paragraph where one person carries it
- No support functionsaccountant, lawyer, insurance broker, bookkeeper
Each absence is worth one line of feedback in the form: this is missing, here is what a reader will assume instead. Readers do not leave a blank blank; they fill it with the least flattering reading available.
5. Writing the feedback
Three columns: the claim, the evidence that would confirm it, and who can supply it. "The section says two installers from month one; the payroll schedule shows one until month four" is actionable. "The team feels thin" is not.
Rank findings by what a reader tests first: payroll against the chart, then hours, then authority. Everything below that is improvement rather than repair.
If you are reviewing your own draft, give it to somebody who has employed people in a business of this size and ask for the same three columns. What the section is supposed to contain, so you can tell an absence from a choice, is set out in the organization plans guide.
6. What not to do in a review
Do not rewrite biographies. Do not argue about whether a founder is the right person, which is a conversation the document cannot settle. Do not ask for more detail generally, because the answer is a longer section rather than a better one.
And do not treat completeness as quality. A section with a paragraph under every expected heading, naming no gap and no decision rule, has passed a checklist and failed a review.
Common questions
How long should a review take?
An hour, plus the payroll reconciliation. Less than that and you are reading for tone rather than for substance.
I have never run a business of this type. Can I still review it?
Yes. Every check above is arithmetic or absence, and an outsider asks the questions an insider assumes are settled.
The author disagrees with a finding. What then?
Ask what evidence would settle it. If the answer is a payroll record, a quote or an adviser's letter, the disagreement has become a task.
Should I review the section before or after the financial model?
After the model exists, because most of the first pass is a comparison. Reviewing a team section with no payroll schedule to check it against is guesswork.
