Building something before you need it
Written by someone doing exactly this in real time.
There’s a version of this I could write from the outside. The consultant’s perspective, the clean framework, the advice I give clients about building infrastructure before the crisis arrives.
But the more honest version is this: I am doing it right now. In this business. While writing this newsletter.
The prospect tracker I mentioned a few weeks ago, scattered across three spreadsheets, several tabs, and at least two AI conversations I’ll never find again, I rebuilt it. It now lives in one place. Has a status column. Is color coded. I feel like a person who has their life together and I am fully aware this feeling may not survive contact with next week.
The invoicing system, a different process for every client, which meant it wasn’t a process at all, I’m still building that too. Slightly embarrassing for someone whose entire job is fixing exactly this.
I’m writing about building things before you need them while building things I needed about two months ago. This is the cobbler’s children situation and I have decided to just be honest about it.
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Why most people build after instead of before.
Because before feels premature. The business is small, things are moving, there’s real work to do, so why spend time documenting a process for three clients when you could just be doing the work for three clients?
Because the problem isn’t visible yet. A system you don’t have doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly costs you time, in small increments, in ways that look like normal business friction rather than a fixable gap.
And because building infrastructure feels like overhead. Like something big organizations do. Like something you’ll get to when you’re bigger, when you have more help, when things slow down enough to think.
Things don’t slow down. The bigger you get, the more the missing infrastructure costs you. The time to build it is always before you need it. Which means it will always feel too early, right up until it’s too late.
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What building before you need it actually looks like.
It doesn’t look like a systems overhaul. It doesn’t look like a full operational audit followed by a six-week implementation plan. It looks like thirty minutes on a Thursday building the template for the thing you’ve rebuilt from scratch four times this year.
It looks like writing down the onboarding checklist before you have enough clients that skipping it costs you.
It looks like creating the proposal template before you’ve lost enough time that you notice.
It looks like building the prospect tracker before you have so many conversations happening at once that the scattered spreadsheet system breaks completely.
Small. Specific. Before the moment when you need it badly enough to feel it. That’s the discipline. And it’s harder than it sounds because it requires spending time on something that doesn’t feel urgent yet.
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The things I’m building right now.
Since I’ve been talking about my own gaps here anyway, here’s the real list.
The prospect tracker is done. One place, clear statuses, a follow-up rhythm I can actually maintain. Built it and immediately used it and it already saved me time I didn’t know I was losing.
The invoicing system is in progress. Right now every client has a slightly different process and I’m losing time at the end of every month reconstructing what I’m owed and from where. Building one clean process. Should have done this six months ago. Doing it now.
The client onboarding documentation is next. I know how I onboard clients. I do it well. None of it is written down, which means if I ever want to bring someone in to help me, I am the bottleneck by default. Writing it down before that moment arrives.
None of this is complicated. All of it is just the decision to do it before the need is urgent rather than after it’s obvious.
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One thing before you go.
What’s the thing in your business you’ve been meaning to build for months, the template, the process, the documented system, that you keep not doing because it doesn’t feel urgent yet?
Name it. Seriously, that’s the first step and it’s more than most people do.
Hit reply. I want to know what it is.
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— Nicki
Marlowe Strategies publishes every Tuesday. Subscribe at marlowestrategies.substack.com or on my site https://www.marlowestrategies.com/