Ask Don Chuy

Nobody was expecting her.

The receptionist doesn't know which desk she'll sit at. Her system user hasn't been set up. Her boss is in a meeting “that ran long”. Someone tells her the line that, in many companies, replaces an entire manual:

“Ask Don Chuy. He knows how everything is done.”

Don Chuy has been with the company for 19 years and, indeed, knows how everything is done. What he doesn't have is time to explain it, and nothing is written down either. That week Lupita learns by looking over his shoulder, writing down keyboard shortcuts and trying to guess why some customers are invoiced one way and others another.

Three weeks later, at the Monday meeting, someone comments that “the new hire isn't cutting it”.

The funny thing is that the same company invested last year in a new administrative system, paid a recruiting agency to find Lupita and replaced the whole department's computers. What it never did was draw the map.

We invested in the boots and forgot the map

Imagine buying the best hiking boots to climb Cerro de la Silla, the lightest trekking pole and the most expensive backpack, but nobody tells you where the trail starts, where the water is or at what point you should turn back. You'll climb, sure. But you'll struggle, you'll get lost and you probably won't make it.

Or, closer to home: you buy the best grill for Sunday's carne asada, but nobody agreed to bring the charcoal, nobody knows what time to light it and every guest has their own theory about when to flip the meat. The grill isn't to blame.

The same thing happens in companies, with bigger numbers:

We buy technology with enthusiasm, but the problem that worries us most isn't solved with a license. And when technology arrives without preparing the ground, it gets expensive: a McKinsey study with the University of Oxford of more than 5,400 IT projects found that large projects cost on average 45% more than budgeted and deliver 56% less value than expected (Bloch et al., 2012).

Technology rarely fails on its own. It fails because it arrives at a place where nobody agreed on how things are done.

A habit is what people do when nobody told them how to do it

Here is the heart of it all, and it's simpler than it seems.

When a company doesn't have a clear process, work doesn't stop. People find a way. Lupita doesn't stop invoicing: she invoices the way she understood Don Chuy does it. Her colleague on the other shift learned from someone else and does it differently. The salesperson in a hurry sends the order by WhatsApp instead of entering it. The warehouse guy keeps his own spreadsheet “because the system doesn't add up”.

Each of those improvised solutions, repeated for months, becomes a habit. And when the new system arrives, it doesn't find a process: it finds five different ways of doing the same thing.

Automating the mess only makes the mess go faster.

Now think about the day Don Chuy doesn't show up. A resignation, an offer from the competition or a retirement everyone knew was coming. The knowledge he had in his head leaves with him. And it's not a problem exclusive to SMEs:

A company that depends on certain people never being absent doesn't have processes. It has luck.

Arriving without a map: what happens inside

Let's talk about what doesn't show up in any financial report.

Arriving at a new place and not knowing how things are done is exhausting. Not just because of the work, but because of everything the person has to guess: who to ask, what counts as a serious mistake, why the boss got upset about that email, whether it's okay to ask the same thing a third time.

In Mexico we have an exact word for that brake: pena(embarrassment). “I'm embarrassed to ask again”. And out of embarrassment, many people prefer to make mistakes in silence.

All that energy spent decoding the environment is energy that doesn't go into the work. A capable person ends up looking clumsy, not for lack of talent, but because nobody gave them the map.

Compare it with arriving at a place where they greet you with your user account active, a guide for your first 30 days, a simple diagram of how an order flows from the moment it comes in until it's collected, and a person assigned to answer your questions. It's not a luxury. It's the difference between walking blind and walking a marked trail.

The EY study with Oxford University's Saïd Business School, with more than 2,000 leaders and employees in 23 countries, also found that in transformations that go wrong, the team's emotional strain increases 136 % (Saïd Business School, 2022). Gallup, for its part, found that only 29 % of people feel fully prepared when they finish onboarding, and estimates that it takes someone about 12 months to reach their full performance (Wetherell and Nelson, 2021). Twelve months is a long time to leave to chance.

The candidate who “already knows everything” doesn't exist

When things don't work out, the most common reaction is to look for better people. And there's nothing wrong with wanting good talent. The mistake is expecting someone to arrive who, by magic, knows your company without you explaining it.

Some job postings say it all. You've surely seen one like this on a job board in Monterrey:

In 2026 the general minimum wage is $315.04 pesos a day, about $9,580 a month. The opening offers $10,000: barely above the minimum and below the roughly $11,500 a junior administrative assistant earns on average in Monterrey. It asks for a profile that took years and a lot of money to build, for an entry-level position, with an entry-level salary, at a company without a single written procedure. Meanwhile, dozens of people spend time, bus fare and hope on interviews for an opening nobody will fill, because that candidate doesn't exist or won't stay.

It's not our exaggeration:

Deloitte also notes that many “entry-level” positions now ask for two to five years of experience (Mallon et al., 2025). And raising requirements doesn't guarantee better results either. Research by Harvard Business School with Accenture analyzed more than 26 million job postings:

ManpowerGroup reports that what employers in Mexico look for most is professionalism and work ethic, communication, collaboration and the ability to learn (Publimetro, 2026). None of those qualities is measured with a master's degree. And they all flourish better when the person knows what's expected of them.

They didn't hire the perfect person. They gave a good person the path to become one.

PwC Mexico says it too: talent's confidence is built with continuous learning and clear direction. In its most recent survey, 75 % of employees in Mexico learned new skills in the last year, versus 56 % of the global average (PwC Mexico, 2026). Mexican talent wants to learn. The question is whether our companies have something clear to teach them.

What changes when everything is mapped

A documented process isn't a file for the audit. It's what lets you move with agility when the things that always happen, happen:

And when technology arrives, it finds a process, not five habits fighting each other. That's when the system really takes off.

The KLIMMER view

This is our position, and we say it with our feet on the ground: no system, artificial intelligence or hire makes up for a process nobody understands.

That's why at KLIMMER we spend so much time on what you don't see in a demo:

• Analyzing how work is really done, not how the org chart says it's done. We talk to the people who do the work, not just to whoever supervises it.
• Redesigning the flows to remove steps that add no value, approvals nobody remembers the reason for and re-entry that steals hours from the team.
• Drawing journey maps, for customers and employees: how your customer experiences each contact with your company, and how your people experience their first day, their first month, their first promotion.
• Documenting so it gets used: short, visual, living guides that a new person can follow without having to ask Don Chuy everything.
• Organizing the mechanisms that help people grow: how you hire, onboard, train and promote, and how you develop your next leaders from within.

It's not the most glamorous part of a transformation. It's the part that makes everything else work. When the process is clear, technology gets adopted, new people perform sooner, departures weigh less and leaders are developed in-house instead of being sought outside.

The companies that climb highest don't always have the best people at the start. They have the best map, and that's why their people become the best.

The stories of Lupita, Don Chuy and Mariana are illustrative, built from common situations in growing companies in Nuevo León. The names are fictional.