Without a Playbook, Your Company May Be One Step Away From Disaster

The following is adapted from The Business Playbook by Chris Ronzio.

While I was a freshman in high school, I started a video-production company with a friend of mine. It started off casually, recording anything someone would pay us to record: weddings, bar mitzvahs, music videos, commercials, and my neighbor’s cousin’s grandfather’s ninetieth birthday party.

Eventually, we got our big break: visiting state administrators saw us carrying camera gear around the high-school gym and asked us to film the following weekend’s state cheerleading competition. In exchange for our services, they said we could set up a table at the event to take video orders from the competitors’ parents.

Of course, we were ecstatic about the opportunity and immediately agreed. I took the orders while my friend ran the camera. That weekend, we made more than $900, the most cash I’d ever laid my hands on. We spread the money out all over my bed as if we had hit the lottery. I felt like Scrooge McDuck; we couldn’t believe our good fortune. Our little company was on its way.

Twice a year for 10 years, we shot and sold videos for this event. At the same time, we started taking on more complicated events for other organizations.

As our productions got more complicated, we began documenting the difficult processes and best practices. We didn’t document the cheerleading event, though, because after all those years, it had become second nature. A simple email exchange with our friends at the state office was all the prep we needed.

Everything went well…until the year it didn’t. That was when we finally hired an event coordinator, one month before the championship. I had moved to Arizona and into less involvement with the business operations. On the morning of the event, I got a frantic set of texts from its host saying, “Where are you guys?”

Nooooo!

Panic set in. I suddenly realized that although we had trained our new event coordinator in the complex stuff, we had left out the event we’d never documented because we took it for granted. We had completely messed up.

That morning, there was no video for the event, no video on the Jumbotron, no video to give the judges for their technical replays — no record of each child’s important state championship for parents to buy and grandparents around the world to livestream. We felt horrible.

Of course, we lost the contract, and not long after, the employee, who quit because of stress; although we didn’t blame her for the incident, we also never set her up for success.

The experience made one fact abundantly clear: institutional knowledge does not scale a business.

It also highlighted an important lesson that came out of that fact: if we had put more time and effort into documenting our events, and if we had shared that documentation with our event coordinator as part of her training, that disaster would not have happened.

The moral of the story? Don’t wait until an emergency strikes to create a playbook.

Wait. Create a what?

By business playbook, I mean a collection and record of the experience, knowledge, and structure of your business. It’s what makes your business unique. Like snowflakes, no two playbooks are alike because no two businesses are either — even within the same industry. In fact, there’s only one thing playbooks do have in common, and that’s the structure you’ll fill in with your business’s specifics.

Those specifics begin with your company’s profile: your culture, your brand, and your spot in the market. They also include who does what, how they do it, and the rules or policies that guide it.

The playbook collects internal knowledge — the ingredients in your special sauce, your company’s DNA: it’s everything you experience and learn from the inside of your business, like who your ideal customers are and how to make them happy.

External knowledge, on the other hand, does not belong in the playbook. You can get that anywhere. It is the stuff you learn at the same time as your competitors — news articles you read, courses you take, conferences you attend.

Along with internal knowledge, your playbook should focus on the highest layers of priority. So you’ll need to make a clear distinction between what’s required — the stuff your staff has to understand and sign off on, what they need to do their jobs, and how to operate within the company — versus what’s reference, or the optional stuff to look up later if and when they need it.

If we had a playbook, the chances are high we never would have lost that contract. Our clients would have remained happy, and our employee never would have quit.

It was a hard lesson to learn…but luckily, you can avoid making the same disastrous mistake that we did.

For more advice on how to create a playbook for your company, you can find The Business Playbook on Amazon.

Chris Ronzio is the Founder and CEO of Trainual, a leading SaaS platform transforming the way small businesses onboard, train, and scale teams. A two-time EY Entrepreneur of the Year Mountain Desert Region Award finalist and Phoenix Business Journal 40 Under 40 Awards recipient, Chris is on a mission to help business leaders document and delegate so they have more time to focus on the things they love. Serving businesses in over 170 countries, Trainual has been recognized on Inc.’s 2021 Best Workplaces list and landed #1 on AZ Central’s inaugural top workplaces list for 2021. Chris hosts The Fastest Growing Companies and Organize Chaos podcasts.