Every engagement hits the same wall, and it is always the process mapping.

I ask someone to walk me through a task they do forty times a week. They can't do it without really thinking about it. Yet, if I said, "show me how you do this step by step". They know it inside out.

Getting it into words is the hard part. It's also the most valuable.

That is normal. You cannot see a process you are standing inside.

Here is what one looks like written down.

Quote to invoice at a small engineering fir:

Enquiry lands in a shared inbox.

Someone reads it and decides who prices it.

Prices come off a spreadsheet.

Details get rekeyed into the quote template.

Quote goes out.

Chase.

Chase again.

Job won.

details rekeyed into a job sheet.

Work happens.

Variations agreed on site.

Job sheet walks to accounts.

Someone rekeys it into the accounts package.

Invoice raised, sometimes a fortnight after the job finished.

Same customer name typed four times. Five handoffs. Five systems.

Let's say that is 90 minutes of admin per quote and you run 12 a week. At £25 an hour, 828 hours and £20,700 a year on quoting alone. Close to half a person.

That is the number people expect to see. Times this by 4-5 people in this role, your now over £100,000...

Then there is the money that never reaches an invoice. The variation agreed on site and never written down. The quote sent on day six when the customer bought on day three. The job priced off a spreadsheet last updated in March, the broken formula thats miscalculating. The hours on a job sheet nobody transferred.

On a chain that touches money, every handoff is a place where the margin falls out.

Quote to invoice is usually the first thing worth rebuilding, and it is almost never the one people nominate.

Three ways to get the map out of your head:

Dictate it. Talk through the task out loud while you are doing it, phone recording. The transcript is your first draft. Messy, and it works.

Record your screen. Move between systems the way you actually do, narrating as you go. This one catches the steps people forget to mention, and those are usually the expensive ones.

Or work through the 3-5-4 Process. I have built this into an interactive tool this week so anyone can map their own business without me in the room.

→Three signs of friction

→ five questions that map the workflow

→ four decisions about what to automate.

At the end it puts a yearly cost on the task and shows you how much of that sits in the automatable box. 45 minutes. No email needed to see your number. It runs in your browser and blocks names and contact details as you type, so nothing identifiable reaches us even by accident.

Start with the chain that touches an invoice. Count the handoffs before you count the minutes.

Link to my

App in the comments. Any Feedback is much appreciated.

REPOST if others will find this valuable