In most owner-managed businesses, the way things are done lives in people’s heads, mostly the owner’s. That works until someone is off sick, someone leaves, or you try to take a week off. Then the business wobbles.
Writing it all down sounds like a six-month project nobody has time for. With AI doing the typing, it doesn’t have to be. Here’s how to get your key processes written down in a week.
Day 1: Pick the ten jobs that matter most
Don’t try to document everything. List the ten jobs that would cause the most trouble if they went wrong, or if the person who does them was away. For most businesses that includes taking an order, raising an invoice, chasing payment, ordering stock, setting up a new customer and the month-end routine.
Days 2 to 4: Talk, don’t type
For each job, ask the person who does it to talk it through for ten minutes, recorded on a phone or on a video call with transcription switched on. They should explain it as if they were training someone new: what starts the job, each step, the systems they use, and what usually goes wrong.
Then give the transcript to your AI assistant.
“Here is a transcript of someone explaining how they process a new customer order. Turn it into a clear step-by-step process with numbered steps, the system used at each step, a short checklist at the end, and a list of questions where the explanation was unclear.”
The list of unclear questions is the most valuable part. It shows you exactly where the business depends on someone’s judgement or memory.
Day 5: Check, fix and keep it in one place
Give each written process back to the person who does the job and ask them to correct it. Then store everything in one shared place your team already uses, such as a shared drive or SharePoint, with a simple index page.
Keeping it up to date
A process document is only useful if it’s right. Agree one owner for each process and a simple rule: if you change how you do it, you update the page. Once a quarter, ask each owner to check theirs. AI helps here too: paste in the old version and a description of what has changed, and it will rewrite it for you.
What you have at the end of the week
Ten written processes, a list of the places where the business relies on one person’s memory, and a much easier week off. It’s also the groundwork for automation, because you can’t automate a job nobody has written down.
A typical example
A business with 20 staff spends about an hour per job recording and checking ten processes, plus a few hours of the owner’s time pulling it together. That’s roughly two days of effort in total, spread across a week. Swap in your own numbers.
Writing the processes down is the easy part. Getting the team to follow them, and fixing the ones that don’t work, is where most businesses stall. That’s the part we help with. We’re not IT people. We’ve sat in the MD’s chair and built the systems behind it, and we’ll talk to you in plain business terms.
Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.
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