Totally get it - nobody gets excited about process documentation. It doesn't show up in a pitch deck, it doesn't move a valuation, and most founders treat it as the thing you'll get to later, once things "calm down." Whether they realize it or not, things rarely calm down.
Here's why that's a mistake, especially past the earliest stage - undocumented process is invisible risk. If the only place your onboarding flow, your escalation path, or your compliance check actually lives is in one person's head, you don't have a process, you have a dependency. It only works as long as that person doesn't get sick, get busy, or get pulled onto something else, which in a growth-stage org is never long.
This matters even more in regulated industries. In healthcare spaces specifically, that paper trail isn't a nice-to-have next to the actual work - it's treated as equivalent to the work itself in an audit or a review. A brilliant process that was never written down is totally indistinguishable, to a regulator or an acquirer doing diligence, from a process that doesn't exist.
I've seen the sophisticated end of this firsthand. In an earlier engagement at a large consulting firm, I worked directly with Celonis on process mapping - genuinely excellent technology, capable of mining and modeling process at a level of granularity most companies never get close to. But it demands real system sophistication/infrastructure to get value out of it - clean data, integrated systems, the operational maturity to feed it something worth analyzing in the first place. That often exists in enterprise orgs, but most $5M–$20M companies don't have it yet, and honestly don't need something that heavy to get real value out of documenting how they actually work.
That gap between enterprise-grade tools like Celonis and having nothing at all is significant, and a newer wave of lighter, more accessible tools is starting to fill it. They're not nearly as sophisticated, but they don't need to be. The value at this stage isn't mining years of transaction data for six-sigma-level optimization. It's simpler - it's understanding the why and how behind how your process actually runs, and getting it out of one person's head and into something the rest of the company can see, trust, and rely on.
The practical takeaway isn't "go buy a tool." It's simpler and less exciting than that... if you can't point to where your critical processes actually live outside of someone's head, that's worth fixing before it becomes the reason a deal, an audit, or a key hire's departure turns into a crisis instead of a Taco Tuesday.