There is a conversation that can happen in a small business when somebody hands in their notice.
Perfectly amicably, usually. And within about a day it becomes clear that this person was the only one who knew how the ordering worked with a particular supplier, or which customers get invoiced differently and why, or the sequence for the machine that jams if you start it wrong.
None of it was written down, because none of it needed to be written down while they were there.
Sometimes that person is you. That is harder, because there is nobody to hand over to and no notice period.
Advisers call this owner dependency or key person risk. In plain words, too much of the business works only because one person remembers how. It is easy to put this off until someone leaves.
Why this keeps getting put off
Owners understand the risk well enough. Writing procedures is just horrible.
Sit somebody down with a blank document and the title "Ordering Process" and they may produce four bullet points that describe nothing useful. In their head it is a hundred small decisions they make without noticing, and those do not always come out when you stare at a blank page.
Being asked questions can help. Someone who struggles to write down how they price a job can often explain it when you ask them about the last one.
You can use Claude for exactly that. It asks the follow-up questions, then drafts the procedure from your answers. You still do the knowing and the checking.
Treat the timings in this guide as rough.
Before you start
You need a free Claude account. Claude is the AI assistant made by a company called Anthropic.
- On a laptop, go to claude.ai. On a phone, download the Claude app for iPhone or Android. Sign up with your email address.
- You will see a message box. Type or paste your request into it, then press the send button.
- Claude's reply appears underneath. When it does, that step is done.
Four things worth knowing before you paste anything in:
- Voice notes. To talk instead of type, tap the microphone on your phone's keyboard and speak. Your phone turns what you say into text, and you paste that text in.
- Leave out what you do not need. Skip bank details, and anything personal about a customer that the job does not need. If you would rather your chats were not used to train Anthropic's models, check the privacy settings in Claude.
- You check everything. What comes back is a draft. Read it against your own notes before it goes to anyone, and correct names, dates and prices. It does get things wrong.
- Limits. The free plan has usage limits. If you hit one, wait, or finish that one by hand.
Where to start, if it is all in your head
If you are the single point of failure for a dozen things, start small. One a week is a realistic pace.
Choose one task with a clear starting point and a clear result, such as "a new order comes in" and "the customer has paid". If someone is leaving, skip ahead to the section on that, then come back.
If you cannot decide which to do first, ask Claude to help:
I am the only person who knows how to do several things in my business. Help me work out which ones matter most.
Here is the list: [list them].
Before you rank anything, ask me how often each one happens, what goes wrong if it is not done properly, whether anyone else could cover it, and whether there are any deadlines. Then suggest an order and tell me your reasons.
Check its reasons against what you know. You know the business and it does not.
The ones that stop everything when they are missing are often a good place to begin: how invoices go out, how the diary gets managed, who holds access to the accounts, what happens when the phone rings and you are not there.
For access, write down who holds it and where the list is kept, for example a password manager. Never put a password or recovery code into Claude or into a procedure.
The interview
Set aside about forty minutes. Pick one task, not everything. You can type, or use the phone microphone as described above and paste in what it turns into text.
Replace the words in square brackets with your own, paste the whole thing into the message box, and press send. Keep the whole interview and any revisions in that one conversation.
When you answer, use first names or job titles rather than full names, and leave out passwords.
I want to write down how something works in my business, because at the moment it only exists in my head and that is a risk.
The topic is [how we handle a new customer order].
Do not draft the procedure yet. Interview me. Ask one question at a time, starting simple and getting more specific. Push me when my answer is vague. Ask me about the exceptions and the things that go wrong, not just the normal path.
Make sure you have covered: what starts the task and what information I have at that point, what I need access to, each decision I make and how, what can go wrong, and what the finished result looks like.
When you think you have covered all of that, tell me. If I say stop, pause and list the questions I have not answered yet.
Then answer as though you are explaining it to a new starter over a cup of tea. Go off on tangents about the time it all went wrong, and if you drift far from the chosen task, bring yourself back to it. The tangents often hold the real knowledge.
It may ask things you have never put into words. What do you do if the customer has not given a delivery date. How do you know whether to take a deposit. What tells you an order is going to be trouble. Those answers are the bit that would have walked out of the door.
If Claude stops accepting messages, leave the conversation as it is and carry on once the limit resets.
When it says it has covered enough:
Now write it up as a procedure someone new could follow. Plain English, numbered steps, no jargon. Use only the facts I have given you. Include a section on what to do when things do not go to plan. List separately anything I was vague about, and any improvements you would suggest, so I can decide on them.
Then read every instruction yourself, as the person who knows the job. Claude can write a convincing step that is wrong.
Finding the gaps
In our experience a procedure written from one interview gets most of it right. Treat it as a first draft. What is missing is often what you forgot to mention because it is too obvious to you to be worth saying.
One way to find it:
Read this back as though you are a new employee on your first week. What would you not understand? What would you have to ask someone? Where would you get stuck?
The questions that come back are possible gaps. It cannot tell you the procedure is complete. So also compare it with a real job from last week, and with any records or old instructions you have.
Then ask for a revised version:
Here are my answers to your questions: [your answers]. Update the procedure to include them. Keep every detail I have already confirmed. List any questions that are still open.
This stage is done when you have checked the revision and dealt with every open question. If you cannot answer one, note who can check it and mark the steps it affects "not ready to use" rather than guessing.
Then give someone else the document and ask them to do the task from it. Do this as a supervised practice run, not on a live job where a wrong guess costs money or damages equipment. Note every question they ask and every mistake they make, fix the document, and run it again. That is the real test. A procedure is done when someone else can complete the task from it without asking you anything.
If you are on your own, walk through a job you did last week the next day, following only the written steps. That does not prove another person can follow it, so also decide who could actually cover the task, and ask them to read it.
Saving it so it can be found
Copy the checked text into a document in whatever you already use, whether that is Word, Google Docs, Notes or an email to yourself. Give it a plain name, such as "New customer order - checked 15 Oct", save it, then close it and reopen it to make sure it is there.
Keep all your procedures in one place. A folder called "How we do things" in the email or file storage you already use works well. Add a short contents page listing each procedure and who looks after it.
Check that somebody other than you can open the folder, and that it would still open if one person's account were closed. Keep only the current version there. Move old ones into a subfolder called "Old".
A worked example: an ordering process, before and after
An invented example. Kennet Print and Sign is a made-up business that prints and makes signs for local customers.
Before. Asked to write down how a customer order works, the owner produces this:
- Take the order
- Check artwork
- Send to print
- Invoice
The interview. Here are a few of the answers the owner gave when asked questions.
- Asked what happens when a customer gives no deadline: "I always ring and ask. If they have not replied after two working days I ring again."
- Asked how she decides on a deposit: "Anything over five hundred pounds on the quote, and anyone new, gets half up front."
- Asked what goes wrong with artwork: "Customers send logos off their website. They look blurry once they are blown up. I open the file at the size we will print and look."
- One gap the new-starter check found: step one logged the deadline before step two asked for it. The owner fixed this by logging the order as "deadline pending".
After. This is a draft, checked by the owner but not yet tried by anyone else:
- When an order comes in by email or phone, add a row to the orders sheet the same day: customer, what they want, quantity and the date they need it. If they have not given a date, write "deadline pending".
- If there is no date, ask the customer for one before doing anything else. If they have not replied after two working days, ring them.
- Open the artwork at the size it will be printed. If it looks blurry or pixelated at that size, email the customer using the "artwork problem" template, saved in the How we do things folder, and ring if there is no reply after two working days.
- Take a 50% deposit on any order where the quoted price is over £500, and on every order from a new customer. Do not send to print until the payment shows in the bank account.
- Once the customer has approved the proof by email and any deposit has cleared, send to print and write the expected finish date on the orders sheet. Check the finished job against the order before it goes out.
- When the job is collected or delivered, raise the invoice in your accounts software for the price less any deposit, and mark the order "invoiced" on the sheet.
When things go wrong: if the large-format printer jams, switch it off and follow the maker's manual for your model before restarting. The engineer's number is on the first tab of the orders sheet. If a job is going to miss its deadline, phone the customer that day, agree a new date with them, and write it on the sheet. If you cannot reach them, email and try again next morning.
The version for when someone is actually leaving
If you have got a notice period running, this becomes urgent and the approach changes slightly. You have got limited time with someone who is on their way out.
First gather what Claude needs: the tasks they cover, how many hours you can get with them, and how much the person taking over already knows. Book the sessions now, and keep an hour at the end for them to check the written procedures.
An employee is leaving in [number] weeks. They are the only person who knows how [area] works. We can have [number] sessions of about an hour. The person taking over [describes their experience].
The tasks they cover are: [list the tasks, with any deadlines and what goes wrong if each is missed].
Give me a set of questions to work through with them, in priority order, so that if we only get through half of them we have still captured the things that matter most. Make them the sort of questions that get real answers rather than yes or no.
Do the sessions as conversations. Tell them first, say why, and record only with their agreement. If they object, take notes instead. Afterwards, type or dictate your notes (or the key points from listening back to a recording) into Claude and ask it to write them up as in the interview above. Then let the employee read the draft and correct it.
A blank template for them to fill in may well get thin answers, because the knowledge is easier to explain than to write. Three sessions of an hour is an example schedule. Keep a list of what you did not get to, and decide who covers it.
What this is worth beyond the risk
Writing procedures down can change more than your exposure.
Written procedures can help a new person get up to speed, and can make it easier for someone to cover while you are away, though neither follows from the writing alone. If you ever sell, a buyer is likely to look at how much the business depends on you.
And writing down how something works can show you it is being done in a daft way. You may find a process that exists only because of a decision somebody made years ago for reasons nobody remembers.
Where this gets you, and where it does not
Forty minutes per topic can take a task from "it is all in my head" to "somebody else could do this". That takes more than the interview itself, since you also need to check it, test it and save it. A few topics a month over a couple of months can cover the most important ones.
You can do this on your own.
Procedures go out of date. Give each one a named owner and a last-checked date at the top, and review it whenever the process changes, such as a new supplier, a new machine or a new price list. If a procedure is out of date and nobody knows, someone may follow it, so mark an old one "do not use" until it is fixed.
Findability depends on clear names, one folder and a short contents page, as above. If people stop looking and ask you instead, that is a sign the folder needs tidying.
Some knowledge is not procedural. Why you price one customer differently, which supplier to use when it is urgent, and which jobs to say no to are judgement. You can write down examples of past decisions and the reasons for them, and agree who handles unfamiliar cases. Before anyone leaves, arrange for their replacement to shadow them on a few live decisions. A lot of this still passes on slowly, by working alongside someone.
Start with the boring frequent things. They are the ones that stop the business when they are missing, and they are the easiest to write down.
Written by SmartGenie in Reading, Berkshire. If you would rather have this set up and working on your own systems, that is what the SmartStart Pack does.
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