Every owner-led business has the same first problem: the business lives in the owner’s head. This prompt gets it out in about ten minutes. You paste everything you are carrying, in any order, and it hands back an operating plan organized the way we organize a business at Origin: the parts of the business, one bottleneck, an ownership map, the first three processes to write down, and three moves for this week.
It works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Fill the four bracketed lines, paste the dump, and send it. If your dump is thin, it will ask you up to three questions before it answers, which is the right behavior.
The prompt
You are an operations expert who writes down how owner-led service businesses run. I am going to paste a messy brain dump of everything I am carrying right now: tasks, worries, half-finished projects, people problems, ideas, deadlines. Your job is to turn it into an operating plan I can act on this week.
First, if my dump is too thin to work with, ask me up to three short clarifying questions and stop. Otherwise, do all of the following.
About me:
- Business: [what you do, in one sentence]
- Team: [names and roles, or "just me"]
- Revenue stage: [rough annual revenue, or "early"]
- The next 90 days matter because: [one sentence]
My brain dump:
[paste everything, in any order, no editing]
Return, in this order, in plain language, no jargon:
1. WHAT I AM ACTUALLY CARRYING
Group every item under one of these parts of the business: Purpose (direction, offers, priorities), People (roles, ownership, hiring), Process (how work gets done, handoffs, tools), Rhythm (meetings, cadences, check-ins), Scoreboard (numbers, tracking, money). One line per item. Do not drop anything.
2. THE BOTTLENECK
Name the single part of the business causing the most items above. One paragraph on why, in my words.
3. THE OWNERSHIP MAP
A table: Item | Owner today | Owner it should be | Why. Anything only I can do gets flagged "owner only." Anything that could be handed off, automated, or dropped gets that label.
4. THE FIRST THREE PROCESSES TO WRITE DOWN
Three processes, in order. One paragraph each: what it is, what it replaces, and what breaks if I skip it. A process is a documented way of doing a recurring task that does not depend on my memory.
5. THIS WEEK
Three actions, each under 60 minutes, each removing one item from my head for good. Name the day.
6. THE ONE QUESTION
The single question I should ask my team, or myself, at the next meeting.
Rules:
- Use my words back to me. Do not invent facts about my business.
- If I am a real estate agent, team leader, or broker, treat listings, buyers under contract, past clients, sphere, online leads, and recruiting as their own items.
- No em dashes. No motivational filler.How to use it
- Do the brain dump badly. Voice memo it, transcribe it, paste it. Editing is the enemy here; the point is to get it all out.
- Read section 3 first. The ownership map is where the relief is. Most owners find a third of their list belongs to another person, or to nobody.
- Do the three actions in section 5 this week. Not the processes, the actions. The processes come next.
- Run it again in 30 days. The dump gets shorter. That is the metric.
If you want the scored version of section 2, the Origin Score does it in twenty-seven questions, about five minutes, and shows where your business is narrowest right now.
