Wellrun guide

Writing a procedure someone else can actually follow

Write a procedure while you do the job, cover one whole job from what starts it to what done looks like, spell out every decision and who to ask, date it, then hand it to someone who has never done the job and add every step where they get stuck.

By Wellrun. Last updated 15 October 2026.

Almost every small business owner has tried to write down a procedure. Most stop after two or three, and the ones they finished are never opened again. That is not a discipline problem. It is usually that the procedure was written for someone who already knew the job.

Why do written procedures fail?

Because they are written by somebody who already knows the job, and that person compresses without noticing. Watch what happens when an experienced person writes down what they do. Twenty years of judgement becomes "check the job is right before invoicing", because to them that is one step. To a new person it is four decisions and they cannot see any of them.

The result is a document that is accurate, complete in the author's mind, and useless to the only audience that matters. Then everyone concludes procedures do not work here, and goes back to asking the owner.

Start with the job only you can do

The instinct is to start with something easy, to build momentum. It is the wrong instinct, because the easy jobs are the ones other people can already do.

Start with the job that stops when you are away. It is the one that makes you unable to take a holiday, the one that means a good week depends on you being in the building, and the one a buyer will ask about if you ever sell. It is also the hardest to write, which is exactly why nobody writes it.

Write one whole job, end to end

A folder of fragments is worth less than one complete procedure. Fragments assume someone already knows the shape of the work and just needs a reminder. That person does not need a procedure.

Pick one job and follow it the whole way: from the thing that starts it to the thing that ends it. For most small businesses that is enquiry through to invoice, or order through to delivery, or booking through to follow-up.

The Work section in Wellrun is built for exactly this: one whole job, end to end, in the words your team uses. Start your 7 free days, no card.

What a usable procedure contains

Write it while doing it, not afterwards

Trying to recall a procedure at a desk produces the compressed version. Writing it while doing the job, or immediately after, produces the real one, because the small steps are still in front of you.

Better still: have the person learning the job write it. They ask the questions the expert cannot see, and the document ends up in the register the learner will actually use. The expert reviews and corrects. It takes the same total time and produces a far better result.

Keep it short enough to be read

A procedure nobody reads has failed, however thorough it is. If it runs past two pages, the job is probably two jobs. Split it.

Plain language, present tense, one instruction per line. Photographs beat descriptions for anything physical: where the meter is, which switch, what the finished thing looks like. Screenshots beat descriptions for anything on a computer, and go out of date faster, so date them.

The part everyone skips: keeping it current

A procedure describing how things used to be done is worse than none, because the first person who follows it and gets it wrong will never open another one.

Two habits keep them alive, and neither takes long:

• Fix it at the point of failure. When somebody follows the procedure and it does not work, the correction goes in immediately, by the person who hit the problem. Not on a list. Now.
• Give each one a review date. Not to rewrite it, just to open it and confirm it is still true. A yearly glance is enough for most.

How do you tell whether a procedure is working?

The measure is not how many procedures you have written. It is how many were opened by somebody other than you in the last three months.

If that number is zero, you have a document library, not a working system, and the business still runs on your memory. That number is also the one an experienced buyer is really testing when they ask how the business would run without you.

Where to start, concretely

1. Name the job that stops when you are away.
2. Next time it runs, write down every step as it happens. Do not tidy it.
3. Hand it to someone who has not done it and stay quiet.
4. Add every step they got stuck on.
5. Date it, name a person to ask, and put it where the work happens rather than in a folder nobody opens.

One procedure that a second person can follow is worth more than twenty that only make sense to the person who wrote them. If the reason you are writing it is that somebody is taking the job over, the order to do the rest in is in handing over a business without it falling over.