Operations

The handover you have not written

If you were unreachable for three weeks, what would stop? That list is your real operating risk.

Ask an owner what would happen if they disappeared for three weeks and the honest answer is usually a wince. Not because the team is weak, but because a set of decisions and details lives in one head and has never needed to live anywhere else.

Do not document the business. Document the decisions.

Documentation projects fail because they aim for completeness, and completeness has no deadline, no client and no consequence for slipping. It is always the thing that gets postponed.

The version that finishes is narrower: write down the twenty percent of decisions that absorb eighty percent of the questions. How a price gets set. Which jobs to refuse. Which supplier for what, and why. What to do when a delivery is late. Those are the things people interrupt you about, and each one written down is an interruption that stops recurring.

Write it when it happens

Nobody sits down to document a business. But everybody answers questions all week. The trick is to answer them once in a durable place rather than repeatedly in conversation — so the documentation accumulates as a by-product of work rather than competing with it.

Two payoffs, one investment

The defensive payoff is the obvious one: the business runs without you, briefly. The other is that the same material is what a new hire learns from, and what any automated assistant needs in order to sound like your company rather than a generic one.

Which reframes it usefully. It stops being insurance you hope never to claim, and becomes the input everything else depends on.