The Operating Manual
Every desk. Every handover. Written down.
The Operating Manual maps how work moves through a business, from first contact to delivery and payment. It produces a flow map of the whole journey and a one-page desk card for every position, covering what arrives, what that desk owns, where it goes next and who else needs to know. Four to eight weeks. From £2,750.
Five Questions About A Phone Call
A call comes into your business this afternoon.
Who answers it. Who do they pass it to. Who else needs to know it happened. Who checks, tomorrow, that somebody actually picked it up. And if that person is on holiday, whose desk does it land on instead.
Most owners can answer the first two. Very few can answer all five, and almost nobody can point at where it is written down.
That is not a failing. It is what happens when a business grows out of a handful of people who all knew each other’s jobs. It worked, right up until it did not.
Half Of Workers Do Not Know What Is Expected Of Them
Gallup, across 550 organisations and 2.2 million employees, found that only half of workers strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work.
Substantial gains in clarity connect to productivity gains of 5% to 10% and to 10% to 20% fewer safety incidents.
Their own conclusion is the part that matters. Clarity of expectations is more than a job description. It is a detailed understanding of how each person’s role relates to their coworkers and to the organisation.
That is the part almost nobody writes down. They document the person. They never document the handover, which is exactly where the work gets lost.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace research.
What A Buyer Actually Looks For
Any decent adviser will tell you that a business built around one person is worth less than one that runs without them.
When somebody comes to buy a business, that is not a soft observation about culture. It is a line in the report. And the way they test for it is to talk to your people and your customers without you in the room, and ask who actually decides things.
If the honest answer is that most of it still comes back to you, that shows up in the price and in the terms, and it decides how much of the money arrives on the day rather than in three years if everything goes well.
Whether you are selling in three years or twenty, handing it on to somebody in the family, or have no intention of going anywhere at all, this is the same piece of work. It is the difference between a business and a job you happen to own.
The Flow Map And The Desk Cards
The flow map. The whole journey, first contact to delivery to payment. Every step, every handover, every decision point, on one diagram. The document that lets you point at where work stops moving instead of guessing.
The desk cards. One page for every position. What arrives here. What I own. What I can decide without asking. Where it goes next. Who I tell. What I do when it goes wrong.
Written in your language rather than in consultancy English. Yours to edit and yours to keep.
How it is built
The walk
I follow the work through the business from the first call to the final invoice, sitting with each desk in turn for about an hour. Not interviewing. Watching a real job, and asking what happens when it goes wrong, which is the question that produces the real answer.
The map
The flow drawn as it actually runs, workarounds included. Then your leadership team stands in front of it and marks two things: every place work waits, and who owns each handover. The silence on that second question is usually the most useful half hour of the whole job.
The desks
A card built with each person who holds one, which is generally the first time anybody has asked them what they actually do.
The redesign
Every stall point and every unowned handover gets one of four answers, decided with you and written down. Owned, with a name against it. Moved, because it sits at the wrong desk. Removed, because it exists for a customer who left years ago. Or accepted, because it is a real constraint and at least now everybody knows it is there.
The handover
It is yours.
Four to eight weeks depending on size.
What you end up with
The redesign decisions, with names and dates against them.
A one-page summary for you: what was found, what was decided, and what is still open.
All of it in a form you can edit, with a version box on every card so it is obvious when one was last touched. Not a locked PDF. A manual you cannot change is a manual that is wrong within a month.
And a review at six months, booked before I leave and priced at the time, where we re-walk two or three desks and check the cards against what people are actually doing now. That is what turns a document into a system.
Nobody Wondering Who Has It
Nobody wondering whether somebody else picked it up. New starters useful in days rather than months. Holiday cover that works, because the desk card is the handover. Managers who can see where work is stalling rather than finding out when the customer rings.
And an owner who is no longer the only person holding the map.
It Is Rarely A Diagram Problem
I built a construction and renewables business from nothing to six million and I still run one. Two decades of putting these systems in place where a failed handover costs real money and occasionally something a good deal worse.
I hold a Master’s in Construction Law and Dispute Resolution, which is very largely the study of what happens when nobody agreed who was responsible.
And I am clinically trained in the psychology of pressure, which is the part most process consultants have no answer for. When a handover is not working it is rarely because the diagram is wrong. It is somebody protecting territory, avoiding a conversation, or carrying a job that was never theirs and not knowing how to say so.
You can redraw the flowchart as many times as you like. Until somebody deals with that, nothing moves.
Price
| Size | Duration | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 15 people | 4 weeks | £2,750 |
| 16 to 50 people | 6 weeks | £5,500 |
| 51 to 150 people | 8 weeks | £8,500 |
| Over 150 | Quoted | Quoted |
The walk is done on site, desk by desk. It cannot be done any other way.
Travel within ninety minutes of Plymouth is included. All other areas will incur costs, which will be communicated before you commit to anything.
The questions owners ask
Will my people think this is a performance review?
They will if nobody tells them otherwise, which is why you send the announcement before I arrive rather than me explaining myself at each desk. Nothing is reported back on individuals. The findings are written as roles and handovers, never as people, and that promise is what makes the walk produce anything worth having.
We already have procedures written down.
Most businesses do, and they almost always document the person rather than the handover, which is where the work actually gets lost. If yours are current and somebody is using them, this is a review rather than a rebuild, and it costs less.
How much of my own time does it take?
Most of it happens with the people who do the work rather than with you. You are needed at the start, for the list of positions and your own account of how a job moves, and again for the leadership session in front of the map.
What if the problem turns out to be a person rather than a process?
Then I will tell you, because a broken handover is rarely a diagram problem. It is usually somebody protecting a patch, avoiding a conversation, or carrying a job that was never theirs. You can redraw the flowchart as many times as you like, and until that is dealt with nothing moves. Where that is the answer, it is separate work rather than something the map fixes on its own.
Last reviewed .
Where To Start
The map shows where the work stalls and what depends on one person. What it cannot do is make somebody hand over a job they have held for years, and that is usually the harder half. Where that is the obstacle, it is worth knowing there is individual work for the people involved, and a stress risk assessment if the pressure is spread across the business rather than sitting in the process.
The first conversation is forty-five minutes on the phone. It will cost you nothing more than your time, and it could be the best investment you make this year.