A marketing agency owner told me he spent three months training his new project manager. Showed her everything. Answered every question. By month four, she was running accounts on her own.
Then she quit.
When he hired her replacement, he realized the problem. All that knowledge was gone. He had to start from scratch because nothing was written down. Another three months of his time were burned.
The “I’ll just show them” trap
Most small businesses train new hires the same way. Follow someone around, watch how they do things, and ask questions when stuck. It feels efficient because there’s no prep work.
But tribal knowledge is fragile. When the person who knows everything leaves or has a busy week, new hires are stuck waiting. And every time you hire someone, you repeat the same explanations you gave the last person.
The real cost isn’t the training itself. It’s the inconsistency. One person learns from Sarah, another from Mike. Six months later, you have three people doing the same job three different ways.
Documentation changes everything
The teams I’ve seen handle growth well have one thing in common. Their core processes exist outside of anyone’s head.
New client onboarding. Employee setup. Weekly reporting. The steps are captured in a place the whole team can access, update, and follow.
This doesn’t mean creating fifty-page manuals nobody reads. A simple checklist with key steps beats a detailed document that lives in a folder nobody opens. The goal is to make sure important stuff doesn’t get skipped when things get busy.
Onboarding is where this matters most
New hires form opinions fast. Research suggests employees decide within the first few weeks whether a job is right for them. A messy first week full of confusion sends a clear message about how the company operates.
When someone starts, and there’s a clear system waiting for them, everything changes. Day one has structure. They know what to expect. The team knows what to do. Nobody wastes time figuring out the basics because they’re already mapped out.
Some companies build onboarding checklists into their workflow tools. Others use dedicated platforms like FirstHR that handle the employee side while keeping the process repeatable. Either approach beats improvising every time someone joins.
Start with what breaks most often
You don’t need to document everything overnight. Start with the process that causes the most problems when it goes wrong. For most growing teams, that’s onboarding.
Write down what should happen before day one. What happens on day one. What the first week looks like. Get it out of your head and into a system your team can follow and improve.
The agency owner I mentioned finally built an onboarding workflow after losing his second project manager. Took him an afternoon. Now his new hires ramp up in five weeks instead of twelve.
That’s the difference between a process and a habit. Habits walk out the door. Processes don’t.
