Issue No. 13 · November 4, 2026
TL;DR
Find the tasks only one person knows how to do, write down the critical few, and keep them in one place your team can find. It takes about ten minutes to see your biggest risk.
Hey there, Ops Connectors... how's everybody connecting the dots this week?
Quick question, and I promise it's more useful than morbid. If your most important person disappeared for two weeks, what would actually stop?
If a critical step lives in one person's head, the whole workflow has a gap.
Not what would be annoying. What would stop? Invoices going out, payroll running, a customer getting an answer. If you had to think about it, or the honest answer was "everything," this one is for you. And if that person is you... keep reading.
What is the "Hit by a Bus" test?
The "Hit by a Bus" test is a simple audit that asks which parts of your business would stall if one specific person were suddenly unavailable. Yes, the name is dramatic. The reason can be a vacation, a sick kid, a resignation, or an actual bus, and the result is the same.
The goal isn't to document everything. Most small businesses can't, and shouldn't try. The goal is to find the few things that would hurt most and get them out of one person's head.
How do you run the test?
Four steps. Spend ten minutes (set a timer) identifying the risks; document the top three afterward.
Make the "only me" list. Write down every task that only one person knows how to do. Start with yourself, then your office manager, your bookkeeper, your best salesperson. If you catch yourself saying "oh, only Dana knows that," write it down.
Rank by pain. Next to each task, ask: if this didn't happen for two weeks, would it cost us money, a customer, or a deadline? Circle those and ignore the rest for now.
Document the critical few. Pick the top three, not twenty. For each one, write the steps, where the files live, and who to call when it breaks. Point to where access lives (like your password manager) instead of pasting passwords into the doc. One page is plenty. Rough beats perfect.
Keep it in one place, and keep it alive. One shared folder your team can actually find, with a quarterly reminder to review it. A document nobody updates turns into a very confident wrong answer.
That's the whole framework. Short on purpose.
List the tasks, rank the risks, document the critical few, and set a review date.
This week's AI prompt
AI is good at sorting and first drafts. It can't know what's true about your business, so you stay in charge of the facts. Give it job titles and tasks, not customer names, passwords, or anything private.
The Single-Point-of-Failure Prompt
“Here are the roles in my small business and the tasks each one handles: [PASTE LIST]. Identify every task where only one person seems to hold the knowledge. Rank them by what would go wrong if that person were out for two weeks.
Then take the top three and draft a one-page checklist outline for each, with blanks for details only I can fill in. Ask me questions if anything is unclear instead of guessing.”
Afterward, check two things. Does the ranking match reality? You know your business better than any prompt does. And does each checklist reflect how the work really gets done? Have the person who does the task read it and correct it. That correction is the most valuable minute in the whole exercise.
The Ops Lesson
Here's a fictional scenario to show how this can happen.
Picture a 12-person home services company. Every other Thursday, the office manager, Tanya, runs payroll. She's done it for years, and she does it from memory.
One Wednesday night, Tanya gets sick. The owner opens the payroll system Thursday morning and realizes he doesn't know the steps, the cutoff time, or which two employees have a different pay setup. Two people get paid late, and one gets paid twice.
Write down the payroll steps, cutoff time, special cases, and who to call for help.
Nobody did anything wrong. The knowledge just lived in one head. When Tanya came back, she spent twenty minutes writing a one-page checklist: the steps, the cutoff, the two special cases, and who to call at the payroll company. The next time she was out, the owner ran payroll in half an hour.
The risk was never Tanya being out. The risk was that payroll only existed in Tanya.
Not sure where your biggest dependency is? (free)
The free Business Operations Quick Check points to the parts of your business that depend on people remembering instead of a written process, which is usually right where this test would find your "only me" list.
Your challenge this week
Name the one task that would hurt most if its owner were out tomorrow. Document it this week, even if it's rough. Reply and tell me which task it was. I read every one.
Quick Answers
What is the "Hit by a Bus" test in business? It's an audit that identifies which tasks only one person knows how to do, so you can document the critical ones before that person is ever unavailable.
How many processes should I document first? Three. Pick the tasks that would cost you money, a customer, or a deadline if they stopped for two weeks, and write those down before anything else.
Where should I store process documents? In one shared place your whole team can find, with a quarterly reminder to update it. An outdated document can mislead people, so give it an owner and a review date.
Know a business owner who is the only one who knows how everything works? Forward this. It might be the most useful ten minutes they spend this week.
Until next time, keep connecting the dots.
Regina Morgan
aka The Dot Connector™
Founder, Break Into Ops™
Founder, The Ops Connector™
Helping professionals and businesses connect the dots through better operations, smarter systems, and AI.
Next Wednesday: Only One Person Knows How? That's a Risk, Not a Strength. Five signs your go-to person is a single point of failure, and how to build a real backup.