It Was All in His Head

A multi-million dollar company running on memory and masking tape?

The day I interviewed at my current company, the owner showed me the warehouse.

Every piece of equipment for every active project was sitting on a shelf. Each one labeled with a client's name in masking tape.

I asked him how he knew what was on each shelf.

"It's all in my head," he said.

"Well, that's isn’t going to work,”I replied. 

That was the moment I understood exactly what I had walked into: a legitimate, successful, multi-million dollar company running almost entirely on the founder's memory. No documented processes. No inventory system. No vendor benchmarking. Just one person who holds it all together, carrying the operational weight of the entire business in his head every single day.

And it was working. Until it wasn't.

Here's what I've learned building operations infrastructure from the ground up: the companies most at risk aren't the ones that are failing. They're the ones succeeding in spite of themselves. Because success hides the cracks until the cracks become crises.

The masking tape shelf system worked fine when there were ten projects. At forty-five it was a liability waiting to happen.

So I started taking stock of what was really there.

Inventory without a system. Vendor relationships that had never been renegotiated. Processes that existed only in someone's memory and would walk out the door the day that person did.

I documented everything. Built the systems. Renegotiated the vendors. And wrote an operations manual from scratch that became the company's cornerstone for onboarding, training, and consistency across four markets.

As a COO I will tell you the most expensive thing in a small business is not bad marketing or high overhead. It is undocumented knowledge. Because when the person who holds it all together leaves, gets sick, or simply gets overwhelmed, the business doesn't just slow down.

It stops.

Can your business run without you? Or is it stuck when you're not around?

If the latter resonates, it may be time to rip off the masking tape and put something more reliable in its place.

I help businesses do exactly that. If you're not sure where to start, let's talk.