Are You Playing By The Book With Your Playbook?

By Debbie Nicholson, Think-to-INK!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbie-nicholson-24a53627/ 

Play It Again and Again!

A business playbook is a manual that describes your company’s policies, workflows, and procedures. It explains how your business operates and the role each person plays.

This needed playbook helps the team visualize targets, understand the continuous improvement model, and know what is needed to achieve organizational goals.

In my opinion, using a playbook proposition contributes to the needed continuous learning improvement business model. You know, I write about that a lot!

You Don’t Have A Playbook?

Okay, so you have a playbook – created five years ago? Yikes!

That brings me to these questions. Has your business model changed, added upper management, purchased new equipment, hired or didn’t retain specific staff, or lost customers because you did not meet their deadlines?  Has it been updated?

So, you don’t have time to edit or create a playbook. Instead, you are too busy reprinting mistakes, scrambling to get work delivered on time, can’t land new clients, continually onboarding new employees because new hires don’t work out”. Sound familiar”?

It is a set of plays on how you run your business. It could be called your own Internal Content Marketing Strategy. Writing a Playbook is a continual process -- not a one and done, by any means.

A few categories to get you started:

• SOPs:  Standard Operation Procedures -- customer service, sales, operations, shipping…
• Resources:  Product Offerings, Price Points, Customer Solutions…
• Templates:  Plug and play scripts, job applications, onboarding materials, emails, letters…
• Playbook Backlog:  Calendar time for editing current plays and adding new plays…

Take Action – Ask for Help -- Don’t Wait!

In the beginning, start with a program overview document that captures everyone’s process.

Next, you will need to document the high-level steps from the beginning to the expected result. Then you continually refine and add more detail on a calendared event.

Gather your internal team(s) to create structured, repeatable, scalable documents and checklists. This defined playbook outcome will eliminate the fire drills inside your company.  In addition, it will allow employees to be more creative and spend more time with customers and their projects.

In Closing!

It is difficult and somewhat daunting to take time to work through how your playbook should read; you will find the reward will be great. Also noted -- the employee team-building experience will be informative and powerful.