What You Learned That Should Be Written Down

Why it disappears

Because it never felt like information at the time.

A job that overran by three days because of something nobody anticipated is an irritation in March and a lesson in June, and by the following March it is gone.

Which means the same mistake is available to be made again, and frequently is.

Businesses that price well are usually not cleverer. They have a record of what things actually cost.

What is worth recording

• What a job actually cost against what you quoted.
• Why anything overran, specifically.
• Suppliers who were good or poor, and on what.
• Decisions and the reasoning behind them.
• Anything a customer asked that you had not been asked before.
• What produced work this year.

The first is the one that changes the business, since a pattern of underquoting a particular kind of job is invisible without it and obvious with it.

The quoting record

Worth its own attention, because it is the highest-return version of this.

For each job: what was quoted, what it actually took in hours and materials, and the difference.

Two numbers and a note, recorded when the job closes.

Over twenty jobs a pattern appears: a type of work consistently taking longer than quoted, a material consistently underestimated, a customer type where the scope always grows.

Which is directly actionable, since the next quote for that kind of work can be adjusted with evidence rather than instinct.

Most trades know this intuitively and are wrong about the specifics, because memory over-weights the recent and the dramatic.

A worked example

A business that started noting quoted against actual on every job.

After a year they had thirty entries.

The pattern was not what anybody expected: their large jobs were priced accurately and their small jobs consistently lost money, because the fixed cost of travelling, setting up and paperwork was the same regardless of size and had never been in the calculation.

They introduced a minimum charge, which they had resisted for years on the grounds that it would put people off.

Some smaller enquiries went elsewhere, and the ones taken were profitable, and the year's revenue was similar with considerably less work.

None of that was visible without the record.

Where to keep it

Whatever you will actually use, which is a lower bar than any system.

A notebook works. A note on a phone works. A single document works.

What matters is that there is one place rather than five, and that it is somewhere you look occasionally.

A spreadsheet is better for the quoting figures specifically, since the pattern only appears when the numbers sit together.

Anything requiring software to be opened deliberately will not survive a busy month, which is an argument for simplicity over completeness.

The handover argument

The reason this matters beyond your own pricing.

Everything undocumented lives in one person's head, which makes that person unable to be away, unable to delegate, and unable to sell the business for what it is worth.

A business whose knowledge is written down can take somebody on, hand over during an absence, or be valued as an operation rather than as a person.

Which is a long-term consideration that only becomes urgent at the point it is too late to address.

Two pages a year, accumulated over five years, is a genuine asset.

Writing down what somebody else needs

A different category from your own lessons, and worth separating.

How a job is normally done, in order. What gets checked before leaving. What is said to a customer at each stage.

Which is not interesting to write and is exactly what somebody new needs, and its absence is why taking somebody on is harder than it should be.

It does not need to be a manual. A page per common job type, written as a list of steps, covers most of it.

The useful moment to write it is while explaining it to somebody, since that is when the gaps become obvious.

The counter-case

Where this is disproportionate.

A sole trader with no intention of growing, selling or taking anybody on, where the knowledge only ever needs to be in one head.

Highly variable work where no two jobs are comparable and no pattern would emerge.

And anybody who genuinely will not maintain a record, for whom an abandoned system is worse than none because it produces a false sense of having one.

Even there, the quoted-against-actual figure is worth capturing, since it takes thirty seconds and is the one that changes what the business earns.

Recording decisions, not just outcomes

The category most often missed, and the one that saves the most argument later.

Why you chose a supplier, why you turned down a kind of work, why a price was set where it was.

Because in eighteen months the reasoning is gone and only the decision remains, which makes it impossible to tell whether it should still hold.

A decision whose reasons are recorded can be revisited properly when circumstances change.

One that is not becomes a rule nobody remembers agreeing, which is how businesses end up doing things for reasons that stopped applying years ago.

The December review

The moment to do the reading rather than the writing.

Read back through whatever was recorded, in one sitting.

Look for repetition: the same problem, the same supplier, the same kind of job going wrong.

Write two or three sentences at the end of the year saying what the pattern was and what you will do differently.

That summary is what makes the year's notes useful, since nobody reads thirty entries again and everybody reads three sentences.

Starting

1. One place for all of it.
2. Quoted against actual on every job.
3. A line whenever something goes wrong, saying why.
4. A note on suppliers as you use them.
5. Read it back each December.
6. Write three sentences on what changed.

The second is the one worth starting even if nothing else on the list ever happens, since it costs about thirty seconds a job and it is the single entry that changes pricing.

None of this is a system. It is a habit of writing down the thing you already noticed, at the moment you noticed it.

The marketing version of the same record is covered in deciding what success looks like first.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.