Your first week inside a business: what to do and what to leave alone

You've been invited into someone's business. It's tempting to show up with ideas. Don't. Show up with a notebook.

The first week has one job: understand how the work really gets done, which is almost never how the owner describes it. You're not fixing anything yet. If you fix something on day two, you've probably fixed the wrong thing.

Before you walk in

Do three things before day one.

Ask the owner to tell the staff you're coming and why. "They're here to find the stuff that wastes your time" works. Without that, people assume you're there to grade them.

Ask for a normal week. If the owner picks the quietest days to be kind to you, you'll miss the actual problems. A busy Friday teaches you more than a slow Tuesday.

And ask what they think the problem is. Write it down. It's useful, and it's often not the real answer, but it tells you what they already care about.

Day one: watch and keep quiet

Spend most of day one standing or sitting where the work happens. Behind the counter. In the office. In the passenger seat of the truck, if they'll let you.

Don't give opinions. Don't say "oh, you could just..." out loud, even when you're sure. People stop showing you the messy parts the moment they feel judged.

What to write down:

Every time someone copies information from one place to another
Every time someone says "ugh," "again," or "I just have to"
Every time someone stops to look something up or ask somebody
Every sticky note, whiteboard, and paper form. Take a photo if they say it's okay
How long things actually take. A rough count beats a guess: "the schedule took 40 minutes" is better than "the schedule takes a while"

Keep tally marks for repeated things. If the phone rings 11 times in an hour and eight of those are "are you open Sunday?", you've learned something, and nobody had to tell you.

Days two and three: shadow different people

Pick the people who do the work, not only the ones who manage it. The person who answers the phones, the one who closes out the register, the one who types up the invoices. Ask each of them if you can sit with them for an hour or two.

Then ask the questions from the "what did you do last week" interview. The shadowing shows you what people do. The interview shows you what they find annoying, which isn't always the same thing.

Pay attention to the workarounds. A staff member's private spreadsheet, a notes app full of reminders, a text thread nobody else is in. Workarounds are where a business tells you what its official systems can't do.

Days four and five: pull it together

By Thursday you'll have pages of notes. Don't try to solve anything yet. Sort them.

Write each problem as one plain sentence: "Catering orders arrive by email, text, and phone, and get retyped into a notebook."
Next to each, write who feels it and roughly how many hours a week it costs
Circle the ones you saw yourself, not only the ones you were told about

Then rank them with the staff, ideally in a 30-minute meeting. Bring the list to the people who live with it. They'll correct you, and you want that.

End the week with a one-page list of the top three problems and what you'd do about each. Short. The owner will read one page.

What to leave alone

This matters as much as what you do.

Don't change anything people use today. Not a setting, not a label, not a file name. You don't yet know what depends on it.
Don't touch money. Payroll, the books, bank accounts, and card readers are off limits unless you've been asked and you know what you're doing.
Don't poke around customer data beyond what you need. Ask before opening any file with personal information in it.
Don't criticize. "Why do you do it that way?" is a fine question if you really want to know. "That's a weird way to do it" is not.
Don't promise anything. Saying "I can probably fix that" on day one creates a deadline you haven't earned.

What goes wrong

The most common mistake is spotting a familiar problem in the first hour and deciding that's the one. You've seen it before, you know a fix, and you stop looking. Keep looking for another day. The one you noticed first is sometimes real, but it's a mistake to pick it before you've seen the other options.

The second most common is only talking to the owner. The owner knows the business. The staff know the work, and those aren't the same.