Creating a Winning Playbook

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🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• Research: When should startups scale? (HBR)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• The role VCs play in founder’s mental well-being (MSN)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• Why the “Eisenhower matrix” is a fantastic productivity hack (Big Think)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• What is IFTTT: Getting to know no-code in 2024 (Cloudwards)

💡 Hiring Insights

• High-tech’s latest trend: employment without borders (CTech)

👀 ICYMI

• Retain your talent with these growth tactics (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

📕 Playbooks: your company’s blueprint for scaling operations

There isn’t a successful company in the world that hasn’t scaled without a good playbook.

From Ford’s early days of revolutionizing how cars get built with assembly lines, to modern day examples like Amazon redefining the supply chain, throughout history, companies that implemented standards using playbooks effectively set themselves up for scale and eventual success.

Playbooks work because of these three core tenants:

• Consistency

• Efficiency

• Scalability

In building a playbook, creating uniform tasks and responsibilities enables your employees to streamline their work as they begin to know what to expect from one another.

As a result, the success you see from consistent, streamlined work, can then be replicated across functions and departments as your company grows.

But if business examples don’t resonate, perhaps the origin of the playbook itself will: Football.

Love them or hate them (Go Birds!), Tom Brady’s New England Patriots redefined what it means to have a great playbook.

Adaptability leading to unpredictability and vice versa

The Patriot’s playbook was known for being adaptable and flexible in order to adjust their game plan from week-to-week depending on their opponent, throwing defense’s for a loop.

As your business evolves, an adaptable playbook will guide your employees, even when operations seem unpredictable.

Results sometimes come from being unconventional

The Patriots were also known for setting up their player formations in unconventional ways, causing the defense to awkwardly adjust, ultimately exposing their weaknesses.

While it may not be necessary to continuously place employees in different roles or teams, having a playbook that allows for employees to cross-pollinate in your organization creates connections and synergies that would otherwise stay siloed.

Staying prepared by being situational

A unique aspect of the Patriots’ playbook was that it had a strong emphasis on “situational football”, which essentially meant, what you should do during critical moments in a game.

With a playbook that defines key situations or processes, you’re enabling your employees to self-manage what comes their way and to choose the right “Play” for the situation.

For instance, if you’re an e-commerce business, including angry customer scenarios in your playbook becomes a helpful guide for your customer support team to navigate those kinds of scenarios.

The playbook constantly evolves

Perhaps most importantly, the Patriots continuously refined and expanded their strategies as teams and the league changed, resulting in a playbook that remained current and relevant, and subsequently leading them to six championships.

As the market continuously evolves, so too should your business’ playbook.  Revisiting your playbook a couple times a year helps ensure your company is getting the most out of the procedures and operations defined within it, while staying optimized for change.

🗣️ Let your playbook do the talking

As your business grows and scales, maintaining a clear and concise direction for your employees starts to become more challenging.  The more people who need to hear the message, the more chances it gets lost in the shuffle.

And if your employees work out of multiple locations, this just adds fuel to the potential miscommunication fire.  A playbook that clearly outlines tasks and processes relating back to your overall company strategy ensures your employees stay on track, even when you or your management is not around to coach them.

There’s no greater example of employees performing standardized work across multiple locations than McDonald’s.

Ray Kroc is famous for scaling McDonald’s through standardized processes that all locations could follow ensuring quality and the overall McDonald’s experience remained the same, no matter which location you went to.

Consistency matters, a lot

Establishing standard processes, procedures, and expectations across your organization will inspire consistency in your employee base.  When managed effectively, this creates an environment and peace of mind that the ship continues to sail, even in your absence.

In McDonald’s case, even the most specific details down to portion sizes and ingredients are measured for all employees so that there’s no question how to prepare food within any of the restaurants.

A consistent system of food preparation across all McDonald’s means a Big Mac ends up tasting the same in New York as it would in Los Angeles.

Train employees and the trainers

To some extent, you can also think of a playbook as an employee manual.  By maintaining up to date processes, procedures, and general company strategies within your playbook, new hires have a document they can learn from and refer back to as they start their job.

On top of this, employees that train new hires now have a document to refer to as well, effectively scaling your onboarding process.

At McDonald’s, the playbook is essentially the employee handbook, walking new hires through their job, the processes they should be aware of, and all the intricate details step by step of their role.

Each section builds on the other one, ensuring logical progression of skills and knowledge.  With each handbook being standardized, all employees receive the same information across the company.

A cohesive brand identity across your organization

In the early days of your company, it’s easy to share the vision with everyone and have them tell the same story to outsiders.  This is not so easy as you scale.  Including your brand identity and key marketing messaging in your playbook ensures employees all have the same messaging and general idea of who your company is and what it does.

McDonald’s can write a masterclass on scaling brand identity through its playbook.  From location and signage design, to uniform standardization, to consistency across marketing and advertising messaging, McDonald’s ensures that no matter where you are in the world, you will recognize their restaurant.  Recognizing a McDonald’s location in Tokyo is just as easy as recognizing one in Boston.

Think of your playbook as your guide, listing out all the elements of your business that you need to keep track of.

It acts as the document answering a lot of the who, what, where, when, why, and how’s of your business. It also acts as your beacon of resilience, the thing you can continue to refer back to when you face the inevitable unknowns of growing a business.

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Pick a function within your business and create a playbook for it.

• Scale Yourself → Define and document standards for a process that can be shared across your entire company without you.

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