The two roles that hurt most
When I look at which departures cause the most damage in an SME, two roles come up again and again. The assistant to management, and the buyer.
The buyer has relationships with suppliers. Small things: who responds to a call and who only to an email, who always delivers a week late, who will make an exception if you ask the right way. None of it is written anywhere.
The assistant is even more connected. She sees the inbox across every topic, sorts what comes in and passes it to accounting, marketing, production or sales. She is wired into every department like a spider web. The job title says small role. The damage when she leaves says otherwise.
What actually leaves
The files stay. The tools stay. What leaves is everything between them. Which request goes to accounting and which to production. Which department head always needs a reminder. Why a certain customer is handled differently. Why a rule has an exception.
The new person starts from zero. The rest of the company quietly pays for it in questions, delays and small mistakes for months. And the usual fix, letting the new person start a month early so the old one can explain, only works if the old one is still there.
By SOP I do not mean a Word document
When I say SOP, people picture a four-page Word file that somebody wrote once and nobody has opened since. That is not what I mean.
A useful process description is connected. It knows the main process it belongs to. It knows the goals of the role, for the next quarter, half year and year. It knows where this work was discussed in meetings. And it gets updated while the work happens, not once a year when someone remembers.
A process chain, version one
A usable first version is smaller than people expect. The main process. The SOP that belongs to it. The goals for the role. And the meeting notes where this work came up. Four things, connected.
That is already enough for a new person, or an assistant tool, to ask a real question and get an answer that fits this company. Everything else can be added later, one source at a time: first the process, then the meeting context, then one more data source.
People already know the tools
I try to introduce AI as simply as possible. No big rollout, no new platform people have to learn, no training weeks. Most employees already use ChatGPT or Claude privately. They know how it works. They like it.
So they get a second login, a company account next to their private one. Through the Model Context Protocol, that company account can read their own SOPs, their goals and the meeting notes of their department, within the rights the company sets. They work on their own processes in a tool they already trust.
Too much access, or too little
The first worry in almost every conversation is that someone will see too much. That is a fair worry, and access should be narrowed per role.
But in practice the opposite problem is far more common. People have too little company knowledge to do their job well. They do not know what was decided, what the goal is or why a rule exists. The risk of knowing too much is real. The cost of knowing too little is paid every day.
Talking instead of typing
The salesperson has five minutes between two meetings and updates the customer record by speaking into the phone. The assistant keeps a small microphone on the desk and talks quietly while she coordinates.
This is not about building a podcast studio. Tools like Wispr Flow turn quiet, almost whispered speech into clean text wherever the cursor is. Nobody else in the office has to hear it.
From that voice note the chain can produce an SOP update, a CRM entry, a reminder or a draft email. The person keeps working. The process description keeps up by itself.
I work this way myself
Almost everything I write now starts as speech. I speak at around 156 words a minute and type at 40 to 45. For me the difference is not a small efficiency gain. It changes what I bother to write down at all, because recording a thought no longer costs me anything.
That is the real point for a company. When updating the process is as easy as saying one sentence, people actually do it.
When someone is away
The test of all this is not the day someone resigns. It is an ordinary Tuesday when the assistant is ill, the buyer is on holiday, or a position has been empty for two months.
If the chain exists, the person covering does not have to reconstruct anything. They load the process and continue. The work does not stop because one head is not in the building.
