← The 7 Mills

Saw Mill

Dimension 02 of 07

Documented Process

Are your operations legible to someone who has never met you?

Why buyers price against it

A buyer is acquiring a working system, and they need to believe the system keeps working after the people who built it move on. Documented process is the evidence. When operations are written down, the company owns its own know-how and can hand it over. When they are not, the buyer is really buying a group of individuals and hoping they stay, which is a far riskier thing to pay for.

What weak looks like

Critical tasks only one person knows how to do. Onboarding that happens by sitting next to someone for a month. Quality that depends on who happens to be doing the work. Answers to how something is done that begin with the name of an employee rather than a process. In diligence, this reads as key-person risk spread across the whole operation, and it makes every other strength look more fragile.

How to strengthen it

Begin with the processes the business could not run without, then the ones that live in a single head. Write them so a competent newcomer could follow them without you in the room. Keep them practical and current rather than exhaustive and stale. The aim is legibility: a buyer, or a new manager, should be able to read how the business works and see that it will keep working when the founders are gone.

Frequently asked questions

How much documentation does a buyer actually expect?
Not a manual for every task. They want the core operating processes written down clearly enough that the business could keep running if a key person left: how work is delivered, how customers are handled, how the critical systems and decisions work. Enough that the knowledge is in the company, not only in individuals.
Isn't documenting everything a huge project?
It is smaller than it feels if you start with what matters most. Document the handful of processes the business could not run without, and the ones that currently depend on a single person. That covers most of the risk a buyer cares about, and you can extend from there over time.

See how you score on documented process and the other six.

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