# Burnout and documented business processes > When the founders become the bottleneck: how to document business processes, which work to write down first, what a step-by-step procedure needs, what to automate, and how others take over the work. - Course: [From Idea to Profitable Product: Building Without Investors](https://productovi.com/courses/bootstrapped-product.md) - Module: Without heroics, and for sale - Lesson 27/30, ~26 min - Source: https://productovi.com/courses/bootstrapped-product/burnout-and-written-procedures ## Three weeks without a day off: key-person risk **Alex Tutor:** Late night at GarageDesk, and Nina writes to you and me because she needs advice. **Nina:** Friday, 11 p.m.: the SMS service announced an outage for the whole weekend. Only I know how to switch to the backup, and it had to be done before reminders start at 9. Finished at 1 a.m. My third weekend in a row. **Oscar:** And every new shop's setup still goes through Nina. We have 200 shops now, and about twenty new ones a month. **Alex Tutor:** That's not dedication, it's a single point of failure. If Nina gets sick for two weeks, reminders stop and new shops wait. That's **key-person risk**. ![A whole bridge rests on a single central pillar, which is one tired founder holding the span up with both arms.](https://productovi.com/courses/bootstrapped-product/inline/burnout-and-written-procedures-illustration-2.webp) *If one person holds everything, one sick week stops the business.* **Sofia:** But she's the developer. Who else could do it? **Alex Tutor:** Most of it isn't development. It's knowing the steps, and steps can be written down. Document the business processes that only Nina knows, and others can run them. > **Exercise:** What is the main risk in how GarageDesk works in August? ## Which business processes to document first **Alex Tutor:** List everything that repeats. For each: how often, how long, who can do it today, and what breaks if it's done wrong. **Nina:** Onboarding a new shop: twenty times a month, only me. The monthly payment check: once a month, only me. Reminders going down: rare, but a disaster. Switching the SMS provider: once a year, and I'd have to remember how. **Alex Tutor:** Then those four are your first procedures: the frequent ones eat your time, the rare ones are forgotten exactly when they matter. **Oscar:** And updating the website text? Nina does that too. **Alex Tutor:** Rare, harmless if it waits a week, and anyone can do it. Last on the list. ![Write procedures first for frequent tasks that eat time (onboarding, the payment check) and rare critical ones (outages, a provider switch); website text comes last.](https://productovi.com/courses/bootstrapped-product/diagrams/m8-l1-what-to-write-first.png) *Frequent or critical first; rare and harmless last.* > **Exercise:** Which GarageDesk tasks should get a written procedure first? Choose all that apply. ## A process document someone else can follow **Sofia:** What makes a procedure good, and not just a note to herself? **Alex Tutor:** An **SOP**, a standard operating procedure, is written so that someone who has never done the task can do it. Note the steps while you do the task yourself, then add screenshots, why each step matters, the known traps, and how to check it worked. Better too much detail than too little. ![A colleague follows a step-by-step card of pictograms at a workstation while the author stands behind her, watching in silence.](https://productovi.com/courses/bootstrapped-product/inline/burnout-and-written-procedures-illustration-3.webp) **Alex Tutor:** Then test it: someone else follows it while the author watches in silence. Wherever they get stuck, the document is wrong, not the person. And update it whenever the product changes. **Oscar:** Martha tried the onboarding one yesterday. Stuck at step four: “set up the reminder rules”. Which rules? For which services? **Alex Tutor:** Nina rewrites step four. Which version would get Martha through? > **Exercise:** Which version of step four should go into the onboarding procedure? > **Exercise:** Put the steps for creating a working procedure in order. ## Write it down, then automate it **Nina:** Writing out the onboarding showed me something: setting up each shop's reminder rules by hand, services, intervals, texts, takes me about an hour and a half, and it's almost the same every time. **Alex Tutor:** That's a bonus of procedures: they show what a machine could do. Twenty shops at an hour and a half is 30 hours a month, about seven a week, well above your own four-hours-a-week rule for automating. How long would a tool take? **Nina:** About 45 hours for a setup wizard with ready-made rules for typical services: oil change, brakes, timing belt. The shop just adjusts them. **Alex Tutor:** Then it pays back fast, if onboarding keeps its pace. The rule: write it down first, automate what's frequent and stable, keep a person for the exceptions. > **Exercise:** GarageDesk onboards about 20 new shops a month, and setting up each shop's reminder rules takes Nina 1.5 hours per shop. A setup wizard would take her 45 hours to build and would remove that work. After how many months does the tool pay back her time? **Alex Tutor:** Not everything on the list deserves a tool. Pick the right one. > **Exercise:** Which of these GarageDesk tasks is the best candidate for automation? ## Other hands: handing work over and ending founder burnout **Oscar:** With the procedures, Martha takes onboarding and the payment check. And from October we bring in Ethan, a contract developer, part time for 35,000 a month. **Nina:** Ethan and I take turns on weekend duty with the incident procedure. And every week I take one full day off. Written in the calendar. **Alex Tutor:** Weekend duty only frees Nina if Ethan never needs to call her. What makes that work? > **Exercise:** Nina and Ethan take turns on weekend duty. What best lets Nina's weekend off stay truly off? ![A founder relaxes on a park bench with her phone face down while, in the office, a colleague calmly handles an alert on a laptop.](https://productovi.com/courses/bootstrapped-product/inline/burnout-and-written-procedures-illustration-4.webp) **Alex Tutor:** Good. A founder who rests makes better decisions than a hero who's always on call. And notice the side effect: a business that runs from written procedures is worth more to anyone, including you. **Sofia:** Even if they never sell it? **Alex Tutor:** Especially then. They're the ones who'd otherwise be answering at 1 a.m. > **Exercise:** **True or false:** written procedures are only worth the effort for founders who plan to sell the business. ## Your turn **Nina:** The one I want written most: what to do when reminders stop going out. So that whoever is on duty doesn't have to call me. **Alex Tutor:** Draft it. Steps in order, who does what, and how the shops hear about it. > **Exercise:** GarageDesk's 200 shops rely on SMS reminders that go out every morning from 9:00 through an SMS provider, and there is a backup provider to switch to. Write a short procedure (5–7 steps) for the person on duty when GarageDesk's reminders stop going out. > **Key ideas** > > - Founder heroics hide **key-person risk**: if one person is the only one who knows the steps, the business stops when they do. > - Write down first what's frequent and what's rare but critical: onboarding, the payment check, outages, switching a provider. > - An **SOP** has numbered steps, the reason for each, known traps and a way to check; test it on someone else and fix where they get stuck. > - Procedures show what to automate: 20 × 1.5 = 30 hours a month of manual setup, repaid by a 45-hour tool in **1.5 months**. > - Hand the work to others, share weekend duty and take real days off. A business that runs from procedures is worth more. **Alex Tutor:** Next time: in October, two offers arrive in the same week. One wants to buy GarageDesk, the other wants a piece of it. - Previous lesson: [Why you and not a notebook? A positioning statement](https://productovi.com/courses/bootstrapped-product/why-you-and-not-a-notebook.md) - Next lesson: [Sell, keep or raise: an exit strategy](https://productovi.com/courses/bootstrapped-product/sell-keep-or-raise.md) --- Productovi Learning. Free, no sign-up needed to read.