Start with the work.
Before asking whether you have the right organisational chart, ask: What actually needs to get done? Who owns it? Do they have the authority to do it? Do they know what good looks like? Do they have the capacity and capability?
Titles matter less than clarity.
Watch for hero dependency.
Many SMEs are held together by a handful of exceptionally capable people. Often the owner is one of them.
That can work surprisingly well until somebody takes leave, gets sick, resigns, becomes overloaded, retires or stops answering their phone.
The question isn't whether key people are valuable. They should be. The question is whether the business has become dangerously dependent on them.
Could the business operate properly for a month without you? Don't treat the answer as a judgement. Treat it as information.
Accountability should be visible.
People should know: What am I responsible for? What decisions can I make? Who depends on me? How do we know whether this is working? When should I escalate something?
Unclear accountability creates meetings, duplicated work and problems that somehow belong to everybody and nobody.
Culture is behaviour at scale.
Who gets promoted? What gets praised? What gets tolerated? How are mistakes handled? Can someone disagree safely? Does somebody actually deal with poor behaviour from a high performer?
Those signals teach people how the business really works.
The goal isn't to remove the owner. It's to remove unnecessary dependency.