A process that lives in your head is a rumour

In nineteen years of manufacturing I learned that the phrase "everyone knows how we do it" is always, without exception, false. What it means is: three people know most of it, two of them disagree, and the definitive version is in the owner's head, available between 7am and whenever he goes home. That is not a process. That is a rumour with seniority.

How rumours bill you

Rumours are why quality dips when Marek is on holiday. Why the new starter is "not working out" — she is following the version of the job she was told on a busy Thursday, which differs from the version you assumed. Why every mistake produces a reminder rather than a fix, and the same mistake returns in November wearing a different hat. None of these appear as a line in the accounts, which is why they survive. Priced honestly — rework, chasing, the owner as a walking manual — the rumour system is usually the most expensive supplier an SME has.

What "written down" actually requires

Owners hear "document your processes" and picture a consultancy binder nobody will open. Wrong picture. The test is narrower: could a competent new hire follow it without asking you anything? That usually means one page: the trigger ("when a signed order arrives"), the steps in order, who does each, what good looks like, and the two places it usually goes wrong. Photographs beat paragraphs. A checklist taped to the machine beats a manual in a drawer. The bar is a recipe, not literature.

The 20-minute habit

Do not schedule a Documentation Project; it will die the death all such projects die. Instead: each week, in a protected 20 minutes, write down the one process that most recently routed through you. Just the one that interrupted you. In our client work this ordering matters enormously — you are documenting in order of annoyance, which is close to order of value, and each page written is a category of interruption that stops. Twenty minutes a week is 25 processes a year. Most businesses under £5m only have about 20 that matter.

The objection, answered

"My business is bespoke — every job is different." I coached a shopfitting firm whose owner said exactly this. Every job was different; the way the firm surveyed, quoted, ordered, sequenced and signed off was the same fifteen steps every single time, and none of them were written anywhere. Bespoke output, standard machinery — that is nearly every "unique" business we meet. The craft stays yours. The rumours are what you are writing down.