Getting the procedure out of your head and onto a page

The knowledge that only exists in one person

In most small businesses the way things are done lives in the owner’s head. It works, until somebody is ill, until you want a holiday, until you hire, until you want to sell.

Writing procedures down is universally recommended and almost never done, for an honest reason: it is dull, it takes hours, and nothing breaks today if you skip it.

The barrier is the writing, and the writing is the part that can be handed over.

Talk, do not type

Do the task, or walk through it in your head, and describe it aloud into your phone. Ninety seconds to four minutes. Do not organise it: say it in the order it happens, including the bits that go wrong.

Then:

Below is a transcript of me describing how we do X.
Turn it into a numbered procedure a new employee could
follow.

Rules:
- Use ONLY what I said. Add nothing.
- Where a step is unclear or a detail is missing, write
  [GAP: what is missing] instead of filling it in.
- Keep my words for anything specific: names, quantities,
  supplier names, times.
- At the end, list the questions you would need answered
  to make this complete.

Ten minutes of speaking becomes a first draft you can correct, which is a completely different task from producing one from nothing.

The gaps are the point

The [GAP] markers and the question list are worth more than the procedure.

They are the steps you know so well you no longer mention them. “Then you check it’s right”: check what, against what, and what do you do if it is not? That unstated step is precisely what a new person gets wrong in week one, and it is invisible to you because you have done it four thousand times.

Expect eight to twelve gaps in a first pass on any procedure of substance. Filling them is the actual work, and it takes twenty minutes rather than an afternoon.

Do not let it invent steps

The specific failure here is that a model asked for a procedure knows what procedures look like. Ask for one on stock-taking and it will produce a professional-looking document containing sensible steps you have never performed.

That is worse than nothing. It describes a business that does not exist, a new employee follows it, and the actual practice is quietly replaced by a plausible generic one.

The use ONLY what I said instruction is what prevents this, and you check by reading against your transcript. Anything present in the procedure and absent from the transcript is either a gap you should fill deliberately or an invention to delete.

Test it on a person

The only real test: give it to somebody who has not done the task and watch them try, without helping.

Every place they hesitate is a defect. Note them, do not intervene, and fix afterwards. Twenty minutes of watching produces a better document than two hours of editing, because you cannot see your own assumptions and they trip over them immediately.

What to write down first

Not everything. In order:

1. What breaks if you are away for a week. Opening, closing, payroll, the order that has to go in on Tuesday.
2. What you explain to every new person. You have given the same explanation eleven times; it deserves ten minutes.
3. What goes wrong repeatedly. A written procedure is how a recurring mistake stops recurring.
4. Anything with a legal or safety dimension. Handling, storage, hygiene, data.

Four to six procedures, one page each, covers most of a small business. That is an afternoon with a phone and a model, and it is the difference between a business that depends on you and one that could run for a fortnight without you.

Keep them alive

A procedure written once and never touched becomes wrong within a year, and a wrong procedure is worse than none because somebody will follow it.

Two habits keep them honest. Put the date and an owner’s name at the top of each. And whenever somebody follows a procedure and finds it does not match reality, they change it there and then: a scribbled correction on the printed copy is enough, provided somebody types it up that week.

The failure to avoid is a review process so formal that nobody makes the correction. In a business of four people, the person who found the error is the person who fixes it.

The version for a business you might sell

If there is any chance of selling the business, or handing it to family, procedures stop being an operational convenience and become part of what is being sold.

A business that runs on one person’s memory is worth less than one that runs on documented process, because a buyer is purchasing the ability to continue without you. That gap is often larger than the effort of writing six pages, and it is the strongest argument for doing this in a year when nothing is forcing you to.