"We'd be fine if Sarah wasn't on leave."
Most founders who manage a team, can point to one person who seems to hold an unreasonable amount of the business together.
They know where everything is. They remember what clients like. They catch mistakes before anyone else sees them. When they're away, things wobble. The obvious fix is to document what they do. So someone starts writing procedures, creating folders and recording Teams meetings.
But a few months later, everyone agrees the documentation exists, but nothing has really changed for Sarah, and everything keeps running through her.
The reason isn't usually a lack of information.
The real problem is that the process was never a process. It was a collection of judgement calls built up over years. The business isn't dependent on information. It's dependent on interpretation.
Documentation captures what happens when everything goes normally. The valuable part of the role is often knowing what to do when it doesn't.
The fix isn't always more, or even better documentation. It's identifying where decisions are being made and creating shared ways of making them. Once judgement becomes visible, the documentation becomes useful.
This problem can appear anywhere. Agencies, studios, consultancies and service businesses. Anywhere a reliable person quietly became infrastructure.