How We See Your Business
The responsibilities that exist in your business, whether or not there's a department for them.
A ten-person company with no HR department is still hiring, onboarding, and running payroll. Someone's doing it - anatomy is a way to name what's actually there.
Working Model - Under Construction
This is the least mature of the three ways we currently describe a business on this site. The list below is a candidate, still being pressure-tested against real businesses - not a finished, authoritative taxonomy.
What do we mean by "anatomy"?
Anatomy is the set of responsibilities that exist in a business, regardless of whether there's a formal department, a job title, or a line on an org chart for it. Small businesses handle all of these; they just don't always name them.
Take a ten-person company with no HR department. Someone is still deciding who to hire, walking a new person through their first week, and running payroll every two weeks. The responsibility exists and is being handled - by the owner, by whoever's closest to it - whether or not "HR" appears anywhere in the company.
Or take the Completed Work → Invoice workflow. Whose job is it to actually send the bill? Often that's genuinely unclear - Operations knows the job is done, but Finance is the one who invoices, and neither function was ever explicitly told the handoff was theirs. That's an anatomy question: which responsibility owns invoicing, not just which workflow moves the paperwork.
The candidate list
Not every business has all ten in a meaningful way, and this list may change as we test it further.
Finance
Money in, money out, and knowing where you stand.
Marketing
Getting your name and offer in front of the right people.
Sales
Turning interest into a signed, paying customer.
Operations
Actually doing and delivering the work.
Customer Service
Answering questions and handling issues after the sale.
People / HR
Hiring, onboarding, and taking care of your team.
Technology
The tools and systems everything else runs on.
Legal / Compliance
Staying out of trouble - contracts, licensing, regulations.
Procurement
Buying what the business needs to operate.
Administration
The paperwork and logistics that keep everything else running.
How this is different from health, systems, and workflows
Anatomy is not a score. It doesn't tell you whether something is going well - that's what Business Health is for. A function can exist and still be struggling, or barely exist and still be fine for a business this size.
Anatomy is also not the same as a system, capability, or workflow. Sales, for example, is a responsibility (anatomy) - the actual machinery that creates and closes opportunities is Demand and Conversion (a system), the specific things your team can do within it are capabilities, and Inquiry → Qualified Opportunity is one of the workflows that moves through it. Anatomy names who's responsible for an area; systems, capabilities, and workflows describe how the work in that area actually gets done.
Not sure who actually owns a responsibility like this in your business? The Workflow Finder can help you spot where that's causing friction - no email required.
Try the Workflow FinderNot sure who owns what in your business?
We'll talk through where responsibility is unclear before recommending anything.
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