The Notebook in the Bottom Drawer

Every rush order in a client's shop got priced by one estimator, using a private notebook of rules of thumb he'd built over eleven years — how much extra to charge for a same-week turnaround, which materials had unreliable suppliers and needed a buffer, which customers had historically pushed back on rush fees and which hadn't.

None of it was written down anywhere official. He wasn't hoarding it on purpose — nobody had ever asked him to hand it over, and it had just never occurred to him that it mattered outside his own head.

He took a two-week medical leave. Rush orders during that stretch either got wildly underpriced or the team just declined them outright, because nobody else knew the rules he'd been quietly applying for over a decade.

If your most experienced person got hurt tomorrow, what pricing or process knowledge would disappear with them for a few weeks?