The question I ask every business owner
Before I start working with a business, I ask the owner one simple question.
If you left for a three week holiday tomorrow and turned your phone off, who would be the first person to call you? And what would they be calling about?
Most owners can answer straight away. They know exactly which question is coming, because they get asked it every single week.
That answer is gold. It tells you where your business is still running through your head instead of through a system.
Why the business can't run without you (yet)
It isn’t because your team is lazy or can’t be trusted.
It’s because the knowledge they need lives only in heads. And mostly yours.
How you price a job. Which clients get billed monthly and which get billed after every visit. Where the supplier portal login is. What a finished job should look like before it’s signed off.
When none of that is written down, the only way for your team to get it right is to ask you. So they do. On holiday, on weekends, at 9pm on a Tuesday.
The calls aren’t the problem. They’re the symptom.
How to take the holiday test
Grab a piece of paper and work through these four questions. Be honest.
The first question: who would call you first, and what about? Write down the top three things you’d be asked.
The second question: what would quietly go wrong without anyone calling? Invoices not sent, follow-ups forgotten, a job done slightly differently every time.
The third question: what only lives in your head? The rules, the shortcuts, the ‘just know’ bits that nobody else has ever been shown.
The fourth question: if you could hand over just one of those things before you go, which one would buy you the most peace?
That last answer is your first system.
What a client did with her answer
One of my clients ran this test months before a planned two-week break. Instead of hoping for the best, she asked herself what would bother her most while she was away, and started building systems for exactly those things.
She didn’t try to document the whole business. She started with the things that would have rung her phone.
Another client, Mavis from West Oz Water Filters, found out what this was worth the hard way when she was unexpectedly out of the business for two weeks. In her words: “Had we not had processes in place, our business would not have been able to carry on so smoothly without me.”
That’s what you’re building. Not a business that never needs you, but one that doesn’t fall over when you step away.
You don't need to write a manual
This is where most owners get stuck. They imagine weeks of writing procedures, so they never start.
You don’t need to write anything to begin. Next time you do one of those ‘only I know how’ jobs, record yourself doing it. Talk it through on your phone or share your screen. The transcript becomes the first version of the system, and these days AI can turn that transcript into tidy step-by-step instructions in minutes.
Your first system doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to exist.
And once your systems exist, they become the foundation for everything else, including the AI tools everyone’s talking about. AI can only follow instructions that have been written down. Systems first, then AI.
Find out how dependent your business is on you
If you’d like a clearer picture than a piece of paper can give you, I’ve built a free 5 minute quiz that does exactly this.
It’s called ‘Is your business too dependent on the owner?’ You’ll answer a few quick questions about how your business runs day to day, and your results land in your inbox with your owner dependency score and one clear first step to act on this week.
It’s designed for trade and service businesses with a team of around 2 to 20 people, where the owner is still the go-to for almost everything.
Your next holiday should feel like a holiday.
Systems are how you get there.