The Approval Chain Written Only in Texts

Every purchase over a certain size needed the owner’s sign-off — reasonable policy, except the sign-off happened however it happened. Sometimes a text. Sometimes a hallway conversation. Sometimes a thumbs-up emoji on a photo of an invoice. Nothing was ever written down anywhere a second person could find it later.

The owner’s phone died on a fishing trip, somewhere with no signal for four days. Three purchase orders that needed his blessing just sat there, because nobody had ever actually been given authority to approve them — only the owner had, informally, by text, whenever he happened to see the message.

The vendors weren’t thrilled. Neither was the ops manager, who spent those four days explaining to increasingly annoyed suppliers that the decision-maker was, technically, unreachable by design.

If you were unreachable for four days starting today, is there a real approval process behind your sign-off — or does everything just wait for you personally?