You know exactly who this is
In most companies between 10 and 100 people there is one person who holds the operation together. She knows which supplier accepts a purchase order on a Friday. She knows the client who always disputes the first invoice.
None of it is written down. All of it is correct.
Owners tend to describe this as a strength, and in a way it is. The trouble starts when the company grows past the number of decisions one memory can hold.
The bill has four lines
Key person dependency is not one cost. It is four, and only the first one is obvious.
- Interruption. Everyone asks her, so her day is shredded. Fifteen questions at four minutes each is an hour of her time, plus the ten minutes she needs to get back into real work after each one.
- Queue time. While she is on holiday, work waits. Not all of it, but the part that pays.
- Onboarding drag. A new hire learns by asking her, so every new person makes her slower for a month.
- Ceiling. You cannot open a second location or a second shift, because the operating manual is a person who sleeps.
Putting a number on it
A 60 person distribution business we looked at had one operations manager on $71,000. Her calendar showed 22 interruptions a day.
Twenty two interruptions at four minutes plus a six minute recovery is 3.1 hours a day. That is 39 percent of a salary she is paid to spend on planning, or about $27,000 a year in pure interruption.
The holiday number was worse. After her two week August break the team needed nine working days to clear the backlog, most of it order chasing that only she knew how to prioritise.
The company was not paying for her knowledge. It was paying for the fact that nobody else had it.
The line nobody prices
Ask an owner what happens if that person resigns on a Monday. The honest answers land somewhere between three painful months and a genuine crisis.
You insure a warehouse worth less than that.
Why writing it down never works on its own
The standard advice is to document everything. Every owner has tried it, and most have a folder of procedures written in 2024 that describe a tool the company stopped using.
Documentation rots because it lives away from the work. Nobody opens a 40 page manual to remember one step in a task they do weekly.
What survives is process embedded in the flow itself. A form that will not submit without the delivery date. A checklist that appears in the ticket. An assistant connected to your workspace that answers in the tool your team already has open.
The difference in practice
The distribution business did three things over five weeks, in this order.
- Recorded her actual decisions for ten days, in her words, at the moment she made them. No writing sessions, just voice notes tagged by topic.
- Turned the 30 most repeated decisions into rules the order system applies on its own, with an exception queue she reviews once a day.
- Pointed an internal assistant at the workspace, so questions like which supplier ships to Portugal on a Friday get answered without her.
Interruptions fell from 22 a day to 6. Her exception review takes 25 minutes each morning. The next holiday produced a two day backlog rather than nine.
The part that is about people, not systems
The instinct in the room is always the same fear. If we write down what she knows, does she become expendable?
It goes the other way in practice. The person who was drowning in questions gets promoted, because she finally has room to do the work only she can do.
We say that plainly at kickoff, with her present. Doing this behind someone's back is how a rollout dies in week two.
How to spot your own version
You do not need an audit to find the dependency. Watch for these instead.
- A question in the team chat gets tagged to the same name three times a week.
- Somebody books holiday and a director quietly checks the delivery calendar first.
- A new hire is still asking basic process questions in month three.
- Nobody can produce last month numbers without one specific person opening one specific spreadsheet.
Two of those and you have a dependency worth pricing. Three and it is already costing you more than the fix.
Three cheap moves before any system
You do not need a project to start reducing this. Three things take a fortnight and cost nothing but attention.
- Put a shared inbox in front of the person. Questions arriving in one place can be answered by two people, and you finally get a record of what gets asked.
- Make her answer in writing once. The second time the same question appears, the answer already exists somewhere the team can find it.
- Hand one other person the second most common task this month. Not as a handover, as insurance.
Most owners find that half the interruptions disappear at step one. The queue was never really about knowledge, it was about where people looked first.
And one that costs money
Pay properly for the fortnight of recording. Asking somebody to document their own job in the evenings produces a file nobody trusts, written by a person who resented writing it.
Five things you can do tomorrow.
- Name the person. Every company has one, and pretending otherwise wastes the exercise.
- Count the interruptions for three days. Tally marks on paper are enough.
- Multiply by four minutes plus six of recovery, then by their hourly cost. That is the annual line.
- Record their decisions for ten days instead of asking them to write a manual.
- Move the ten most repeated decisions into the tool where the work already happens.
