Maya almost cancelled the engagement on a Wednesday. Her assistant had filed three days of expense reports in the wrong currency, and her bookkeeper had quietly added two hours to the month’s invoice fixing it. Maya messaged me at 5:14pm. The message was four words. “Is this a fit?”
The Wednesday call
We got on a 20-minute call at 6pm. I asked her one question: what would have made this not happen? She thought about it for 45 seconds and said, “I never told her we use AUD on the founders’ card and USD on the operations card.”
That was the whole problem. Not a hiring problem. Not an oversight problem. A context problem. The assistant was running on the brief Maya gave her, which did not include the currency rule, because Maya had been doing the expense reports in her sleep for so long that she did not know it was a rule.
The 22-minute Loom
The fix was Maya recording a 22-minute Loom while she did one round of expenses end to end. The video named every decision she made, including the currency rule, plus three other rules she discovered as she narrated. The assistant watched it the next morning. The Loom is now the SOP. It has been the SOP for ten months.
What the next quarter looked like
By the end of the next quarter, Maya had handed over expense reports, inbox triage, weekly investor digest assembly, and travel booking. We measured her recovered capacity against her prior calendar: 14 hours per week, net of the time she spends on the Monday ritual that briefs the assistant for the week ahead. The numbers are her own, from her own calendar, and they have held for three quarters.
The hinge was not the hire. It was the recording she made on a Wednesday at 6:24pm, in the worst mood of her quarter, that turned everything around.
