Louis Massaro recounts how opening three offices in one year led to chaos because he lacked documented processes. He argues that businesses need living, regularly-updated playbooks that act as the single source of truth; when processes change, the playbooks — and the teams trained on them — must be updated and retrained.
I told you guys that I opened up three additional offices in the first year that I decided to expand, and it was a nightmare. I was on plane here, playing there, trying to figure it out because I didn't have a playbook. I didn't have documented processes, and that's when I learned that skill. Sometimes we don't learn things until we feel the pain of it, right? It's like it's not really necessary. You don't start taking. Some people don't take care of their health until you have the heart attack. Having playbooks or having a manual on the shelf is not what we're talking about. We're talking about a living, breathing document that is updated, right? That is always the source of truth for what you do in your business. You have a meeting, you change the way you do something. You go back after these three days, you got your playbooks, and you want to change some things. The playbooks need to be updated. The team that's involved in those playbooks, they need to be updated and possibly retrained, but it needs to be that source of truth constantly.
