No. 28Founder operations3 min readOCTYN
A founder time audit should count the questions only you can answer.
A founder time audit works when it logs two things for a fortnight: where each hour went, and every question somebody brought you because nobody else knew the answer. Then mark which of those needed your judgement. The ones that did not are hours the operation spent using you as its memory, and they can come back to you.
Say you founded a food distributor that now runs three depots and a few hundred people, and you still keep the office door open because that is how the place has always worked. Before lunch somebody from transport wants to know which haulier you stopped using on the coastal run, and somebody from accounts needs to check whether the hotel group really gets sixty days to pay or whether that was only for the first year. Neither takes long. You answer from memory and they go back to work.
Now run a founder time audit the usual way, with a fortnight of the calendar sorted into categories and compared with where you meant the hours to go. The door does not show up in it. Those questions never had a calendar block, so they get filed under whatever you were doing when someone knocked, and the strategy morning and the pricing review end up looking longer than they felt.
Log the questions next to the hours
For the same fortnight, keep a list of every question brought to you. Note who asked and whether the answer was written down anywhere besides your head, a line each. At the end, sort the list by who the question actually needed.
| the question | did it need you? |
|---|---|
| keep giving credit to a customer who has paid late twice | yes, it is a call on the relationship |
| take on a new grocery chain at those margins | yes |
| which haulier was dropped from the coastal run, and why | no, it was decided once |
| what the dairy agreed when prices last moved | no, if it sat next to the account |
| where the spare chiller parts are kept | a person, but someone on the floor |
What the no column is telling you
The rows marked no are the operation using you as its memory. The answer existed, it just lived in one person, and that person happened to own the company. Hiring an assistant to field them moves the queue to a different desk, where the assistant then has to come and ask you.
What OCTYN argues for is a record of how the operation actually runs, written as the work happens, so the haulier decision sits beside the coastal run and the payment terms sit beside the hotel group. When somebody asks, the answer arrives with where it came from. A company brain is one shape of that.
The aim is to give you back the hours that never needed a human, so the hours that do need one get more of you. In the table, that means more of the afternoon goes on the two rows marked yes.
Put a number on the list
Count it from your own fortnight. Take the questions in a day, times the minutes each one took including getting back into what you were doing, times the days you worked. The figure below uses made up inputs, so put yours in their place. Your team has a version of the same sum for the time they spend finding things, and the page on what a system gives back runs it on their numbers.
Start the list on Monday, and leave room for the questions that waited while you were away, which you will hear about on your first morning back.
Bring the version of this that is about your company.
The first conversation is with the people who would build it. If there is a fit, the Consult comes next.