Your best salesperson closes deals one way. Your second best does it completely differently. Your newest hire is quietly inventing a third way, because nobody ever showed them either one.
On a good day, it works. On a bad day, a customer gets a different experience than last time, a new employee makes a mistake nobody warned them about, and the problem lands right back on your desk.
It is October. The gaps you ignored in March are now showing up in your margins, your turnover, and your customer complaints. You are probably telling yourself you need better people.
You might. But after years of guiding founder-led companies, I have found the real problem is usually something else. By the end of this post, you will know what to do about it before January.
When your best people keep reinventing the wheel, ask yourself a simple question. Did anyone ever give them a wheel? In most founder-led companies, the knowledge that runs the business lives in a handful of heads, and every time one of them is busy, out, or gone, the business starts over. The fix is Optimized Playbooks, the third of the Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations®, and it is how we help companies build a business process playbook their people will actually use.
The Problem: Tribal Knowledge You Cannot Repeat
In Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations, I tell the story of Evan, a young field supervisor whose first day at a construction company started at a charred fuse panel. An apprentice was replacing a blower motor without pulling the fuse, and the wiring caught fire.
When Evan asked if there was a checklist for electrical work or for supervising apprentices, a veteran electrician laughed. Everyone just followed what the guy before him did.
That describes more businesses than most owners admit. The work gets done from memory, and everyone’s memory is different. Your A-Players become the help desk. And every judgment call routes back to you.
So let me ask you this.
How many of the fires you fought in the last ninety days came from the same kinds of breakdowns? And how many would never have started if someone had been trained on, and was following, a clear process?
What One Missing Step Cost a Client
One of our clients, an HVAC distributor, had documented playbooks in place for years. They still had a gap, and it was costing them.
When a contractor had trouble with new equipment, a technical service advisor diagnosed it and recommended a fix. But when the contractor rejected that fix, the playbook left the next move to each advisor’s judgment, and every advisor improvised. Some kept negotiating. Some replaced the entire unit, easily a ten-thousand-dollar decision. Some closed the ticket and left the contractor upset.
The salesperson who owned that relationship usually had no idea anything was wrong. The result was friction between sales and operations, damaged customer relationships, and money walking out the door one judgment call at a time.
Their Next Level Growth Business Guide had the team walk the process on a whiteboard, and the missing step became obvious. Now, before any further negotiation, the advisor escalates to a sales manager, and the final decision rests with sales. Why sales? Because this company made the customer experience central to its purpose. That is an Inspiring Purpose shaping an Optimized Playbook, and it is why a playbook borrowed from someone else’s business rarely fits yours.
Notice where the wheel was being reinvented. The documented steps held up fine. The trouble lived in the gap, where good people were left to figure it out alone.
The Root Cause: Why Most Founders Never Document Their Processes
Why do so few founder-led companies have them? In my experience, three reasons.
- They confuse playbooks with SOP manuals. They picture hundreds of pages nobody ever opens, so they never start.
- They think they already have them. When pressed, the documentation is scattered across shared drives, old emails, and one long-tenured employee’s head.
- They are too busy firefighting. Which is the irony, because most of those fires would not have started with a clear process in place.
Most leaders are too busy and distracted to do the very thing that would keep them from being too busy and distracted.
Almost every business issue traces back to people or process. If you do not have Optimized Playbooks for your people to train on and follow, you cannot be certain your people are the problem.
Is there someone on your team you have been frustrated with lately? Have you ever given them a clear, documented way to do the job you are holding them accountable for? And what is it costing you to keep treating a process problem like a people problem?
The Solution: What a Business Process Playbook Actually Is
An Optimized Playbook works like a roadmap. It shows the starting point, the destination, the ideal route, and the major milestones. The turn-by-turn detail, the part most people picture when they hear SOP, lives underneath it, ideally as short videos recorded by the people who already do the work well. Our own playbook at Next Level Growth for handling a new prospect has just thirteen steps.
Most companies end up with ten to twenty critical playbooks across areas like Sales, Operations, Accounting, and Customer Service. Every one starts by answering six questions:
- What is the purpose of this playbook?
- What triggers it to start?
- What is the desired outcome?
- What should we measure?
- Who receives the handoff?
- Who owns it?
This is the answer to the title of this post. You build your playbooks around your best people. Put a handful of them in a room for two hours and map what you should be doing, not just what you do today. The people who were reinventing the wheel become the ones who design it.
The best person to write your playbook is the one who has been standing in for it.
Then optimized earns its place. Every time something goes wrong, ask: do we have a documented process that should have prevented this? If not, build one. If so, fix the step that failed. And once a year, the leader who owns each playbook, a responsibility written into their role on the Next Level Accountability Chart®, reviews it with their best people and the team receiving their handoff.
What Changes When You Stop Being the Bottleneck
New hires get productive faster. Your leaders stop working “down and in,” putting out fires, and get back to what Jocko Willink calls looking “up and out.” Customers get the same experience every time, which is what keeps them. And fewer errors and less rework show up directly in Growing Profits and Cash Flow.
It changes your role, too. After losing my family’s business as a result of a business partner’s fraud and embezzlement in the i Great Recession, I built my next company around documented processes that did not depend on me. Within five years, I handed the reins to my leadership team. That freedom came from giving good people a clear way to win. That is the path from Good, to Great, to ELITE.
If the hard calls stopped routing back to you, what would you do with the time you got back?
So here is your Q4 move. Pick one playbook. Choose the process behind your most frequent customer complaint or most expensive recurring fire. Block two hours with your best people, answer the six questions, and bring the draft to your Q4 planning.
Because if you walk into next year with the same undocumented processes, the same few people carrying the knowledge, and the same problems landing on your desk, what does next October look like?
When coaching conversations are not producing movement, you need a defined path rather than a slow drift: Quarterly Calibrations to keep everyone honest about where they stand, and Coaching (Corrective Action) Plans to either coach someone up or coach them out, with the emotion and the storytelling removed.
The Bottom Line
- Reinventing the wheel usually points to process, even when it looks like talent. It happens wherever people are left to figure it out alone.
- It is expensive. It costs you time, margin, and customer relationships, usually before you see it.
- An Optimized Playbook is a roadmap built around your best people and kept current.
- Q4 is the time to start. One playbook, two hours, six questions.
Doing this well takes a principles-based framework applied to how your business actually works, and a guide who has done it before. Every Next Level Growth Business Guide has been an owner, CEO, or president of a company with at least $10 million in revenue and 50 or more employees. The natural next step is simple.
