Are there hard definitions of these job titles?

[teddymines]

If someone creates a small local "business" that repairs computers or mows lawns, are there any laws prohibiting the creation of inflated job titles? For example, a lawn mowing company could have:

a Vice President of Sales (Bobby, who answers phones),
a Senior Vice President of Human Resources (Mike, who calls for backup if someone is sick),
a Chief Operating Officer (Lou, who schedules jobs),
a Chief Financial Officer (Rick, who divvies up the cash from sales),
and a CEO (who filled out the DBA form at the county hall).

All these could be high-school grads or college drop-outs for all anyone knows. If nobody has ever heard of this company, and reads an article in some trade journal, how can they judge the reality of the title, especially since most private companies don't need to disclose financial data, unless incorporated, etc.?

 

[teddymines]

bump

 

[Michael]

As the owner, you can give your employees any title you want. Note - there is some small legal risk as you may be making them more of an "agent" of your business than you want, but that's different than the title themselves.

Michael

 

[amnesiac]

I want to be Grand Poobah.

 

[GasX]

You ever hear of the internet boom?? Half of the "vice-presidents" in the country were 21 year old pimply geeks with no real world experience. Half of them are now working the drive-in window at taco Bell...

You can call them whatever you want. As Michael said, your only risk is that they may be perceived agents of your company. Why is this a problem? Suppose they authorize a vendor to ship something you can't afford. The vendor shipped on approval from the vice-president of sales - a reasonable thing to do. You now have to pony up for the dough...

If that kind of thing isn't an issue, go crazy...

Matt Wilding
Vice-President of Useless Posts
NEF, Inc.

 

[FoBoT]

why would there be laws against doing that?

if its your business, you can make up whatever you want

owner = "Imperial Czar of the Empire"

guy that mows the lawn = "Chief Engineer - Field Operations"

guy that cleans all the lawn mowers = "Manager - Field Equipment Maintenance"