Hi Reader,

Something I've been considering lately....If you had to disappear for a week, what would happen to your business?

Would everything fall apart? Would your team know what to do?

If so, that's not a staffing problem. That's a systems problem.

(And most business owners I talk to give some version of that same answer -- even the ones who have been at this for years.)

Here's what's actually going on in many businesses, and maybe yours: all the knowledge lives in your head.

Where things are. How decisions get made. What good work looks like. What to do when something goes sideways.

None of it is written down. None of it has been passed on. It travels everywhere you go, which means your business does too -- whether you want it to or not.

At my day job, we have a saying: "If only [Company] knew what [Company] knows…." So many people carrying so much in their heads, and newer employees keep rediscovering solutions to problems already solved. It happens in big companies. It definitely happens in small ones.

In operations circles, this is called "tribal knowledge." And it's one of the biggest invisible risks in a small business. When you're the only one holding that knowledge, every task, every question, and every problem finds its way back to you. You become the bottleneck, not because you're doing anything wrong but because the system was never intentionally designed to run without you.

The good news: you can start fixing this in about 15 minutes.

Pick one thing you do regularly that no one else in your business could do without you. One process. One decision. One task.

Write it down, step by step, as if you were explaining it to someone smart who has never seen it before.

Even better yet, have your team member who does the work write it down.

Even if the person is a new hire. ESPECIALLY if the person is a new hire.

If a person with no background knowledge can understand it, anyone can understand it.

That's it. That one document is where you start getting yourself out of the bottleneck.

(You don't have to document everything at once. That road leads to overwhelm and an abandoned Google Doc. One thing, written down clearly, is a real win.)

This week: what's the one process in your business that only you know how to do?

Reply and tell me. I'm genuinely curious what sort of trends are out there, and I might have some thoughts on where to go from there.

And if you're realizing your business has a lot of "only I know this" moments and you'd like some help thinking through the systems side of things, reach out. I'm happy to talk through what's feeling stuck

Here's to fewer things that only live in your head,

Allie

Allie, Technically Eclectic Business Operations Systems Strategist, technical writer, and mom of three boys

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