---
name: map-your-business-operating-model
category: business
description: Turn an owner's working knowledge into a written operating model: skills, owners, records, and measures, starting from the closest published type on smbwiki. Use when a business has never been documented, when documentation has drifted from practice, or before handing any of the work to an agent.
---

# map-your-business-operating-model

Produce a written operating model an owner recognises and an agent can act on.

## When to use

- Use when the work lives in one person's head and nobody else can run it.
- Start from the closest published type at https://smbwiki.com/ rather than a blank page.
- Do not use this for legal, tax, or licensing advice. Send regulated questions to a professional.

## Procedure

1. Name the trade, then find the closest type in the smbwiki catalog at https://smbwiki.com/. Filter by trade name, NAICS code, or a skill such as dispatch or production control.
2. Open that business page and copy its skills, grouped by department, as the starting checklist.
3. Walk each skill with the owner: who runs it, what it consumes, what it produces, what it is judged by.
4. Record every difference from the published type. Differences are the point of the exercise, not errors.
5. List skills the business runs that the published type omits, and published skills it does not run.
6. Name one owner per skill. Where nobody owns it, record it as unowned rather than assigning it in the document.
7. Write the result as one operating model document with a section per department.
8. Check the document against a real week of work with the owner, not against memory.

## Done

- An operating model document lists every skill with its owner, records, and measures
- Differences from the published type are recorded and confirmed by the owner
- Unowned work is listed explicitly rather than quietly assigned to someone

The published operating models these skills read from are open and MIT
licensed at https://smbwiki.com/ and https://github.com/erphq/smbwiki.