The Myth of "Figure It Out Later"
When you're starting a business, everyone tells you the same thing: just get going. Ship the product. Find customers. Worry about "process" when you're bigger.
It sounds reasonable. You're scrappy. You're fast. You don't have time for flowcharts and procedures—that's corporate stuff for companies with HR departments and compliance officers.
So you do what every founder does: you figure it out as you go.
And it works. For a while.
You close your first customers. You deliver. You get referrals. Things are moving. You're exhausted, but it's the good kind of exhausted—the kind that comes from building something real.
Then, somewhere around customer ten or employee three, you notice something uncomfortable:
You've become the operating system.
Every question routes through you. Every decision needs your input. Every ball that doesn't get dropped is a ball you personally caught. You're not building a business anymore—you're being the business.
This isn't a growth problem. It's not a hiring problem. It's not even a "you need to delegate more" problem.
It's a design problem. And it started on day one.
You're Building Two Things (Whether You Know It or Not)
Here's something I wish someone had told me twenty years ago:
From the moment you start a business, you're building two products simultaneously.
Product #1
The thing you sell.
This is obvious. It's your service, your software, your craft. It's what customers pay for.
Product #2
The system by which you deliver it.
This is less obvious. It's how work actually moves—from first contact to final delivery to ongoing relationship.
Most founders obsess over Product #1. They refine their offering, perfect their pitch, iterate on features.
Product #2? It just happens. It emerges accidentally, one urgent decision at a time.
"I'll just handle onboarding myself for now."
"Let's use this spreadsheet to track jobs until we find something better."
"Just text me when that's done and I'll follow up with the client."
Each decision makes sense in the moment. None of them are designed to work together. And before you know it, you've built an accidental operating system—a Frankenstein of workarounds, tribal knowledge, and "I'll remember to do that."
The problem isn't that you made these decisions. The problem is that you'll spend the next five years living with them.
What "Deliberately" Actually Means
Starting deliberately doesn't mean creating a 50-page operations manual before you have customers. That's just procrastination in a business costume.
Starting deliberately means asking a different question from day one:
"If this works, how will it need to run?"
Not "how do I get through today?" but "what am I building toward?"
It's the difference between laying pipe as you go versus knowing where the plumbing needs to end up.
Here's what this looks like in practice:
1. Name Your Work Types Early
Even if you're a solo operator, you have different types of work. Maybe it's:
- → New client inquiry
- → Active project
- → Support request
- → Invoice and follow-up
Just naming them changes everything. Instead of an undifferentiated pile of "stuff to do," you have categories. Categories can have patterns. Patterns can become workflows.
You don't need software for this. A sticky note on your monitor works. The point is to see your work as distinct types, each with its own path from start to done.
2. Define "Done" Before You Start
For each type of work, ask: What does "done" actually look like?
Not "done for now." Not "done enough." Actually done—where you can close the loop and move on without it living in your head rent-free.
For a new client inquiry, maybe "done" means:
- ✓ They've received a proposal, OR
- ✓ They've been marked as "not a fit" with a reason, OR
- ✓ They've been added to a nurture sequence for later
Notice how specific that is. There's no ambiguity. No "I should probably follow up on that eventually." The work has a clear finish line.
When you define "done" upfront, you stop carrying half-finished work in your head. That mental overhead is invisible, but it's killing your capacity.
3. Design the Handoff (Even If It's to Yourself)
The most dangerous moment in any workflow is the handoff—when work moves from one stage to the next or one person to another.
"But I'm just one person," you say. "I'm handing off to myself."
Exactly. And you're terrible at it. We all are.
When you finish a sales call, how does that become an active project? When a project wraps, how does it become an invoice? When a client has an issue, how does it get resolved and closed?
If the answer is "I just remember" or "it's in my head," you've built a system with a single point of failure: your memory. And your memory is already overloaded.
Design the handoff. Write it down. Make it a checklist if you need to. The goal isn't bureaucracy—it's making sure future-you knows exactly what to do without present-you having to think about it.
4. Build for Your Second Hire, Not Your First
Here's a mindset shift that pays dividends:
Every system you create, every process you document, every workflow you design—build it as if you're going to hand it to someone else next month.
You probably won't. But building this way forces clarity.
- → Can someone else follow this without asking you questions?
- → Is the "why" obvious, or just the "what"?
- → If you got hit by a bus (or just took a vacation), could the work continue?
When your first hire does show up, they won't spend three months learning "how things work around here." They'll have something to follow. And you won't spend three months answering the same questions.
The $0.75 Lesson
I need to tell you something embarrassing.
Early in my career, I was building systems and workflows for my clients. Helping them get organized, get efficient, get their work to flow. I was pretty good at it.
Meanwhile, my own business was pure chaos. I was so broke that spending seventy-five cents on a donut at the grocery store was a real decision. Overdraft fees stacked up. I was drowning.
Here's the part that still stings: I had no clue how valuable systems and processes were for me—even though that's exactly what I was building for everyone else.
I was the cobbler's barefoot kid.
Don't be me. Don't wait until you're scaling to think about how work flows. Don't assume that "process" is something you add later, like a feature.
The way your business operates isn't separate from your business. It is your business.
Start Small, Start Now
You don't need to map every workflow before you have revenue. You don't need project management software before you have projects. You don't need a team wiki before you have a team.
But you can start deliberately today:
- 1 Pick one type of work—probably the one that pays the bills.
- 2 Write down the stages it moves through, from trigger to done.
- 3 Define what "ready" and "done" look like for each stage.
- 4 Identify the handoffs and make them explicit.
- 5 Run it for two weeks, then adjust.
That's it. One workflow. Documented. Designed. Deliberate.
When that one feels solid, pick another.
This compounds. Each workflow you design is one less thing living in your head. One less thing that depends on your heroics. One more part of your business that can run without you being the operating system.
The Real Advantage
Here's what nobody tells you about starting deliberately:
It's not just about efficiency. It's about capacity.
When your operating system is accidental, growth means more work for you. More balls to juggle. More plates to spin. More heroics required.
When your operating system is deliberate, growth means more throughput. The system handles more, not you. You can take on more clients, hire more people, or—revolutionary idea—take a weekend off.
The founders who scale aren't the ones who work the hardest. They're the ones who designed their business to run without requiring heroism every single day.
You can be one of them. But it starts with a choice:
Accidental or deliberate?
The work is the same either way. The outcomes are not.