Take a week off. Not a long weekend: a real week, phone off. What happens?
For a lot of businesses the honest answer is that things slow down, then stop. Decisions wait. Customers wait. Someone calls you anyway. That isn't a staff problem. It's a design problem: the business was built around a person instead of around a system.
Five signs
- Only one person knows how to do something important, and it isn't written down anywhere.
- Staff ask you the same questions every week.
- Two people do the same job two different ways, and get two different results.
- You hear about a problem when a customer complains, not before.
- Licences and renewals are tracked in someone's head, or on their phone.
If two or more of those sound familiar, the business is carrying a risk it doesn't see. Every one of them can be fixed, and none of them needs a big budget.
Where to start
Pick the one task that would hurt most if the person who does it left tomorrow. Sit with them while they do it. Write down the steps in plain language, in the order they actually happen. Then ask someone else to follow the steps while the first person watches.
Where the second person gets stuck is exactly where the knowledge lives only in someone's head. Fill those gaps and you have your first procedure. It won't be perfect, and it doesn't need to be. It needs to exist, and to have an owner who keeps it current.
A business that runs on what it knows, not on who happens to be in the room.
Write one procedure a month and within a year the knowledge lives in the business, where it belongs, instead of in a few people's heads. That is what success by design means.