Ask a founder what their company’s biggest risks are and you’ll hear about churn, runway, competitors. Almost nobody says “Dana is the only person who knows how invoicing works.” But that’s the risk most likely to bite this quarter.

Every process that lives only in someone’s head is a liability with a start date — you just don’t know the date yet. It comes due when that person goes on holiday, gets promoted, goes on parental leave, or hands in their notice.

The math nobody does

Try this exercise for one critical process in your team:

  • Interruption cost. How many times a month does someone ask the process owner “how do I…?” Multiply by the length of the interruption — for both people. Twenty minutes of combined context-switching per question is a conservative estimate.
  • Onboarding cost. How many hours does a new hire spend shadowing someone to learn what a document could have taught them? Multiply by everyone involved.
  • Failure cost. What happens when the process is done wrong because the one person who knew it was unavailable? A missed invoice run, a botched deploy, a compliance gap.

For most teams, a single undocumented process quietly burns hours every month. Multiply by the dozens of processes in a typical company and the number stops being abstract.

Why it stays unfixed

Everyone knows documentation is worth it, so why doesn’t it happen? Because the cost of writing a doc is concentrated (one person loses an afternoon, today) while the benefit is diffuse (everyone saves a little time, indefinitely). Concentrated costs beat diffuse benefits every time — that’s just how incentives work.

You don’t fix an incentive problem with a policy. “Document your processes” as a company value changes nothing. You fix it by collapsing the concentrated cost until it’s trivial.

Collapse the cost

This is the entire argument for recording-first documentation. If creating an SOP means doing the task once while a screen recorder runs — something you were going to do anyway — the afternoon-long cost drops to minutes. The AI writes the steps, captures the screenshots, and formats the document.

At that price, documentation stops being a project you schedule and becomes a habit you don’t notice. And the liability with a start date quietly comes off the books.