Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was your business. Months, even years, of hard work were spent to get you to where you are today. Now that you have succeeded, it’s time to ensure everything you have worked towards pays off. Susan Finch Solutions wants to give a few tips and a few tricks to help guide business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs through the bumps in the road. There’s no catch, just free advice to those who might need it.
You’ve built something real; now here’s how you keep it.
Starting with your business systems…your team knows how your business runs. Do you?
Now, there’s a version of this story that ends badly.
A key employee leaves — retires, moves on, has a health emergency, or just gets a better offer. And the business grinds to a halt not because the work was hard, but because everything they knew lived entirely in their head. This includes: the passwords, the workarounds, the “we always send this email before that invoice,” the plugin update requiring three manual file changes every time, and the renewal deadline that nobody else had on their calendar.
None of it was written down. All of it is gone.
Lany Sullivan and I work with businesses to make sure this doesn’t happen to them — and the process is less complicated than most people expect. But it does require confronting a few things honestly.
First: your team members may feel threatened.
When you announce you’re documenting everything, some people hear “we’re figuring out how to replace you.” That reaction is human and predictable, and it will stall your whole project if you don’t address it upfront.
The framing matters. This isn’t about replacing anyone. It’s about what happens when someone goes on vacation, takes family leave, or gets promoted. It’s about building a business that isn’t held hostage by any single person’s institutional knowledge — including yours.
Second: your money is in your operations.
This is one of the things Lany says that I think gets overlooked. Everyone talks about marketing, branding, and sales. And those things matter. But if you want to actually scale — if you want to grow, bring on clients, or eventually sell — the work happens in your operations. You cannot scale chaos. You can only scale systems.
Third: you have to get granular.
I have a framework I call peanut butter and jelly. How would you explain making a sandwich to a Martian who has never seen a jar of peanut butter? You can’t just say “spread it on the bread.” You have to say: get the jar, open the lid, use a knife, start at one edge of the bread.
That’s an SOP. Every step that feels obvious to you is a step someone else will miss if you don’t write it down. I’ve sat down to document what I thought was a five-step process and come out the other side with 25 steps. That’s not unusual. That’s what real documentation looks like.
Here’s how to start:
Build a hub — a single place where all your processes live. Could be Google Drive, or any preferred project management tool. Doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is that it exists and everyone knows where it is and uses it.
Then storyboard before you write procedures. Start with the full arc: what’s the goal, what’s the path to get there, what could go wrong, what happens at the end. Get that story clear before you write a single step.
Then document to the role, not the person. Your SOPs should say “the Operations Manager does X,” not “call Jennifer.” People leave. Roles stay.
And put it on the calendar. Every renewal, every time-sensitive update, every “we always do this in Q4” — it needs a calendar event with a lead time. One missed renewal deadline can cost you a year.
If you want to hear the full conversation, Lany and I recorded both parts of this series live in the same room — which almost never happens. Find Rooted in Revenue in any podcast app, or both parts are up at susanfinch.com; the link is below.
And if you’re looking at your business right now, thinking we need to do this — reach out. This is exactly what we help with.
http://rootedinrevenue.com/e/getting-it-out-of-their-heads-and-into-your-business/