Melissa D.

Operations Consultant | Business Systems, SOPs & Continuity Planning

Everything works, until the one person who actually knows how it works isn't there. If that sounds familiar, you're not alone, and it's fixable. Most small businesses run on workarounds and whatever one person remembers. Sometimes that's the owner. Sometimes it's someone who's been there for years and just knows how things get done. I help founder-led service businesses get out of that pattern and into a playbook the whole team can actually use, before it costs them a client, a deadline, or a redo nobody had time for. What I do: 💠Figure out how the work actually gets done, including all the workarounds nobody ever wrote down 💠Design workflows that don't fall apart when one person is out sick or moves on 💠Build dashboards so owners can actually see what's happening instead of asking around 💠Implement using whatever tools make sense for the job Tools I work in: 💠Airtable 💠Make and Zapier 💠Jotform, Google Forms, and Fillout 💠Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 💠Excel and Google Sheets Who I usually work with: Founder-led service businesses, typically somewhere between 5 and 20 people, where the business has outgrown what one person can reasonably hold in their head. If you've thought "we'd be in real trouble if that person left," this is probably for you. A little background: Before consulting, I spent about 15 years in corporate finance doing financial analysis, budgeting, forecasting, and management. That background is part of why I can move between the numbers side of a business and the operational side without missing much. If your business runs on workarounds and one person's memory, and you're ready to change that, I'd like to hear about it.