If you vanished for
three weeks.

Ask where a firm's process is written down and the confident answer changes. Almost every firm runs on knowledge recorded nowhere.

The knowledge that lives in one head

Ask a principal how their firm handles an incoming transfer with incomplete cost basis and you will get a confident, detailed answer. Ask where that is written down and the answer changes.

Almost every advisory firm runs on knowledge held by two or three people and recorded nowhere. It works, right up until someone is on holiday, leaves, or the firm is being valued.

Three reasons this is worth doing

Capacity. You cannot delegate a process you have not described. Every undocumented task is one that must be done by whoever already knows it, which is usually you.

Consistency. Two people doing the same task differently produces two client experiences and, eventually, one finding.

Value. A buyer pays for a business that runs. A firm whose operations exist in the founder's head is a job being sold as a company, and it prices like one.

Write checklists, not manuals

The reason documentation projects fail is that firms attempt a manual. Manuals take months, go stale immediately, and nobody reads them.

Write checklists instead. One page per recurring task, in the order it happens, with who does each step. A new hire should be able to follow it without asking. That is the only test that matters.

Start with the ten that repeat

New client onboarding. Incoming transfer. Cash withdrawal request. Quarterly billing run. Review preparation. Death of a client. Beneficiary change. Fee exception. Trade error. Quarter-end reporting.

Those ten cover most of what a firm actually does and most of what goes wrong. Write one a week and you are done in a quarter.

The step that makes it stick

Have the person who does the task write it, not the principal. The principal's version describes how it is supposed to work; the practitioner's version describes how it actually works, including the workaround nobody mentioned.

The gap between those two documents is usually the most valuable thing the exercise produces.

What you will discover

Firms that do this consistently report the same finding: a meaningful share of the steps exist only because of a system limitation, a vendor requirement, or a decision made years ago that nobody has revisited.

Writing it down is how you find out. That is worth as much as the documentation itself.