The ten jobs your company repeats every week

Ask a founder what their company does and you get the pitch. Ask what it does every week and the answer gets vague around the fourth item. That gap is where most operational trouble lives.

Almost every small company runs on eight to twelve repeating jobs. Quote the work. Take the order. Plan the week. Do the work. Check it. Send it. Invoice it. Chase the invoice. Pay people. Hire someone. Say goodbye to someone. The list is shorter than people expect, and it is the same list in a roastery, a care provider and a machine shop.

Write the list before you fix anything

Sit down with two people who actually do the work and write the jobs on a single sheet. Not a flowchart, not a tool — a list. Anything that happens at least monthly goes on it. You will argue about the wording of three of them, and that argument is the useful part: if two people describe the same job differently, it is being done two different ways.

Give every job one name

Beside each job, write the name of the person who owns it. One name, not a team, not a department. Owning it does not mean doing it all — it means being the person who notices when it stops working.

Most lists come back with two names covering nine jobs. That is the finding. It is also the reason the founder cannot take a fortnight off.

Then measure three of them

Not all ten. Pick the three that customers feel: the promise you make about time, the promise you make about quality, and the thing that costs the most when it goes wrong. Count them weekly, in public, on one sheet.

A client of ours spent two years buying software for a problem that turned out to be a pick list sorted in the wrong order. The list would have found it in an afternoon.