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In her head, it was a simple 5-step job. It turned out to be 50.
- Clare Mayell
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
On paper, the job looked straightforward.
Put together a kit.
Send it out.
Run the session.
Five steps.
Easy.
Done.
In reality, it was much closer to fifty.
And that gap was quietly creating stress, rework and unnecessary cost.
This florist runs remote flower arranging sessions for the general public.
Not trained florists.
Not experts.
People who are keen, but relying entirely on what turns up in the box.
Every kit had to be prepared on specific prep days, a few days before each session.
Those were intense, time-boxed days, with teams of freelance florists brought into an industrial unit to get everything packed and shipped on time.
That context matters.
Because when the pressure is high, the process has to hold the detail.
The work was physical. The thinking was invisible.
All the materials were there, in bulk.
Flowers.
Sponge.
Containers.
Tools.
Extras.
They were stored in different places across the unit and not clearly labelled.
Some items looked similar.
Some varied by session.
Some needed exact quantities.
So the same questions came up again and again:
“Is this the right one?”
“How much sponge goes in this kit?”
“Does this need packing differently?”
The answers existed.
They just lived in her head.
In her head, there were five steps
In reality, there were closer to fifty invisible ones.
Micro-steps like:
Knowing which items were easily confused
Remembering exact sponge dimensions for the final arrangement
Understanding what needed to be visible and accessible during the session
Knowing what absolutely could not be missing
None of this was written down.
So each freelancer packed kits based on partial information and reasonable assumptions.
Why simple processes collapse at scale
When it was just her doing the work, everything made sense.
Her eye.
Her standards.
Her way of doing things.
That’s what made the sessions successful and why people kept booking.
The process worked because it lived inside her.
But growth meant bringing other people in.
And that’s when the problem surfaced.
When the owner is the brand, the detail matters more, not less.
Her style isn’t optional.
Her standards aren’t flexible.
“Near enough” changes the experience.
So when the process is vague, people still do their best.
They fill in the gaps sensibly and make reasonable calls.
But reasonable guesses aren’t the same as delivering her way.
That’s when problems start to show up:
Kits go out with items missing or hard to locate
Sessions are disrupted because participants can’t follow along
Breakages mean last-minute courier fixes
Costs creep through rework and replacements
The owner spends her evenings stepping in to protect the experience
Nothing looks dramatically broken.
But the thing that made the business successful starts to feel fragile.
The fix wasn’t more rules. It was the right format.
The answer wasn’t a longer process document.
The owner and her team wouldn’t have used it.
It didn’t match how the work actually happened.
Instead, we pulled the real steps out of her head and turned them into a single, one-page pictorial guide.
Photos of items that were easy to confuse.
Clear visuals showing exactly how each kit should be packed.
Simple call-outs for quantities, including exact sponge dimensions.
A final visual check so nothing could be missed.
It was printed in colour, at A3, and stuck on the wall directly in front of the work benches.
No reading mid-task.
No hunting for instructions.
Just clarity where the work was happening.
What changed once the process carried her standards
Once her way of doing things was visible:
Freelancers stopped needing to ask
Kits went out right every time
Prep days became predictable
Overnight courier costs disappeared
Evenings stopped being spent fixing preventable mistakes
She didn’t lose control of the work. She got it back.
The process wasn’t replacing her judgement. It was protecting it.
Simple isn’t the same as clear.
Many processes look simple until you ask them to carry someone’s standards at scale.
If the owner is the brand, the process has to hold the detail exactly as she would.
Because when five steps quietly turn into fifty, pretending they don’t exist doesn’t make them go away.
It just makes success harder to repeat.
If something in your business keeps not getting done - or getting done differently every time - it’s usually because key steps are undefined or still living in someone’s head.
You don’t need more effort.
You need to make those steps visible.
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