Is your business running on you?

Shared ownership looks collaborative and behaves like absence. When something stalls, nobody feels the pull to move it.

Pick the five most recent client requests. For each, write one name next to it. Any request with two names, a team name, or a blank fails.

Add a required "Owner" field to wherever work is tracked. Rule: one person, never a group. Backups are named separately as "Cover".

A process nobody else can run is a personal habit. It caps your capacity and makes every absence risky.

Hand your main process (onboarding, delivery, or billing) to someone who has never done it, with only what is written. Count how many times they need to ask you something.

Record yourself doing the process once, then turn the recording into a numbered checklist of 10 steps or fewer, each starting with a verb and naming the tool used.

Everything that waits for you during a week away is a decision or knowledge you have not handed over yet.

List what you did last week that only you could do. Mark each: decision, knowledge, or access. Those are your three leaks.

Pick the single most frequent item on that list and write the rule behind it ("if X, do Y, up to Z"). Hand it over this week.

When status lives in conversations, the only way to know where things stand is to ask you. That is a status meeting with one attendee and no end.

Ask a teammate: "What is the status of client X?" If the answer needs more than one place or one person, it fails.

Create one list with four states: New, In progress, Waiting on client, Done. Every request lives there. Chat is for discussion, never for status.

A handoff in chat has no definition of done. The sender thinks it is passed and the receiver has not seen it.

Find the last handoff between two people. Can you see what was passed, who received it, and by when? If you have to scroll a thread, it fails.

Use one handoff note with four lines: what is being passed, what is done, what is pending, and the date it is due. The receiver confirms in writing.

Approvals feel like quality control. Past a point they are a queue that you alone service.

Count how many items waited for your approval last week and how many you changed. If you changed fewer than 1 in 5, most of that queue was unnecessary.

Write a limit: "Anyone on the team can approve up to X in cost or Y in scope without asking. Above that, come to me." Start with the approvals you rarely change.

Processes drift as clients, tools and people change. Without a review habit, the checklist from six months ago describes a business that no longer exists.

Open the oldest process document. Is it still true? If nobody has touched it in 90 days, assume it is not.

Put a 30-minute monthly review in the calendar. Bring the one process that caused the most rework last month and change one step.