Beyond Process
How to Think About Operational Consistency When Your Capital is More Intellectual, Less Physical
Intro
What happens when we no longer need to just delegate tasks, we need to delegate thinking?
We need to update the way we think about process and also the way we practice it.
Recently I referenced my grandmother’s button factory days to make a point about the current pace of change.
In the 50s, my grandmother didn’t make many decisions at work, they were made for her. That was just how things were: clock in, do what you’re told, clock out. We still had doctors and lawyers and accountants of course…
…but “knowledge workers” made up a much smaller slice of the workforce than people like my grandmother. About 20%.
Today, knowledge workers make up over 60% of the U.S. workforce.
Fewer of us are making widgets, more of us are trading in what we know, or in the services and experiences we create for people.
That means we need fewer people who show up to do what they’re told, and we need more people who show up to solve problems, make decisions, and create those experiences.
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In the 90s a business journalist at Fortune, Thomas Stewart, coined the term “intellectual capital” to try and make sense of this shift. He broke it down into 3 categories:
Human capital - what your people know
Structural capital - what your people do and how they do it, and
Relational capital - who you know and who knows you
It felt a little “fluffy” at the time, but not anymore.
In the past 25 years, entire industries have emerged where 100% of the value created is intangible (e.g., software, media & content marketing, all the different kinds of coaching).
More and more, intellectual capital is not just our “secret sauce”—it’s the very thing that makes our companies valuable.
The Exit Planning Institute and others like it now recognize transferable intellectual capital as a major factor in valuation.
And investors now explicitly look at knowledge assets—things like proprietary frameworks, client lists, brand authority—when deciding whether or not to buy.
What started as the “icing on the cake” in the 90s has become the cake itself in 2025.
If you’re an entrepreneur, what do you do?
We need to focus less on developing SOPs—these rigid standard operating procedures—and more on developing proprietary frameworks for decision-making.
Here are some examples:
You might codify for your team how to create the customer experience you’ve honed over the years
You learned through trial and error, and it seems obvious to you, but it’s not
It’s probably a little different than your competitor down the street, it has to be
And it’s a little different from how your best employee did it at their last job
It’s not a 10-step process, it’s a set of best practices you’ve developed over time
It’s a proprietary framework
You might codify for your team how to estimate job costs
This one’s tricky because there’s not a right or wrong, and no two jobs are identical
So it’s not a 10-step process, it’s a set of best practices you’ve developed over time
It’s a proprietary framework
It’s not a method for doing, it’s a method for deciding.
The point is, intellectual capital is your company’s fingerprint, it’s DNA. Something we used to soak up through years long apprenticeships.
But we don’t usually have years anymore. Sometimes we have months or weeks.
So we adapt by distilling what we know into proprietary frameworks for decision-making.
Those give us less bureaucratic overhead, more lightweight assets that protect our companies’ value, which in 2025 is what it knows.
If your capital is more intellectual than physical, your next investment is clear: document it. I’ll help you build the training playbook that turns knowledge into leverage.
Hi, I'm Elizabeth
After growing and selling my first business in the food industry, I started Untangled to help other business owners scale their business without losing its soul. .
I've been working with fascinating, smart, growth-minded entrepreneurs ever since. Most have rapidly growing small businesses where it's challenging to get everyone aligned around doing things the same way.
Curious about working together? Reach out here: elizabeth at untangleyourbiz dot com or contact me here.
