What is the right ratio of sales and customer handling staff VS other staff?

"What was the best part of you day?" Ideally you could ask in the afternoon .. but it sets a positive intention. I ask this to all my friends + wife everyday when I see them.

You don't. Research the company and hiring manager or would be manager/leader to such things like their needs, recent prior events (& whom else would have been there), near future company goals, products and find a place within that need structure where you would add material value. Then craft what is called a Speculative Application. Get yourself into a position in which travel might be an option as part of your roles.

Please resist the urge to pull the band-aid. I'm not a fan of keeping a poor performer, but unless this person is a behavioral or "for cause" termination, he deserves some professionalism here. 30-day Performance Plan, make the goals aggressive and stick to it - he can consider that his head start to either buck up or start searching. Remember, your other employees watch how you treat their former colleagues. A quick termination before a holiday is prickish, an aggressive performance plan is taking care of business.

Almost all my clients have the same issue as yours. So your challenges are not unique. While making positive business progress is a wonderful thing, external growth must come with relevant similar pace of internal growth. It seems that you are using the same old management approach/ style despite your business has grown from 1 or 2 people into current size. It is no more purely a number game now, mismanaging people will lead to loss of knowledge, valuable customer, profits, and growth potential. Your backyard is having fire currently means your internal support team is having some challenges and you may have uneven growth in some business functions - immediately you should investigate the following areas: 1. Review your management approach/ style and system 2. Review whether you are capable to manage C-level employees. 3. Review your human capital policies and culture diversity 4. Review, whether you have clear/ appropriate a) accountabilities, b) roles and responsibilities, c) committed budget, d) monitoring and control system, e) KPIs, etc 5. Revisit your mission/ vision/ expectations, adjust if necessary. 6. Review workflows and communication models to identify what has triggered the conflict(s). I think the above should help. Upon making the reviewing, you may already have action plans. If you still have problems, feel free to drop me a message

Instead of looking at who does what .. why not look at the things that need to get done for a small techology team. Product: 6 people - 3 full stack engineers - 2 front end developers - 1 designer / product person Marketing & Community, 1 person - Full time hire, or CEO Support & Operations, 1 person - Part time hire, or CEO + Whole team I believe it's important for everyone on the team to help with support. Also, if you have a great product, then support shouldn't be that taxing. Q&A is usually needed when you have a bad development process (no unit testing or continuous integration deployments). Outsource everything else. - Bookeeping - HR stuff - Legal - Government program paperwork Hope that helps. P.S. I would put as many people on product as that's where you'll get the most bang for your buck.