• “I can’t find a right way of doing it,” says Simon Cole, founder of Ridgeway. “You either have too much documentation or too little documentation.”
• How do YOU document YOUR agency’s processes?
• In this session, we’ll be discussing how to create a process ‘playbook’ for your agency, and strategies for encouraging people to stick to it.

Trying to document your agency’s processes is harder than it looks – especially as they have to adapt as you grow. 

So how can you foster a ‘one version of the truth’ approach that everyone understands, is easy to onboard, and make sure people stick to it?

“It’s quite difficult in our team, because myself and my business partner work in very different ways,” says Lucy Snell, co-founder of Cherry. 

“I think anyone that works with us finds that quite hard, so we wanted to kind of ‘standardise’ it across us both and have agreed working practices.” 

“We also wanted to put together a ‘playbook’ for when we work with new consultants – including expectations of what we want and expect from them, how we work with clients, and what clients expect from us.”

After a year or so, the Cherry business ‘bible’ was ready. But trying to get the team to follow it is a whole different story.

“I still don’t know whether people even look at it,” Lucy says.

Simon Cole had a similar issue at his agency, Ridgeway. As a digital agency, Ridgeway offers a lot of different services, so creating processes to cover everything can be challenging. 

“I can’t find a right way of doing it,” he says. “You either have too much documentation or too little documentation.”

“The work that we do is not very formulaic – it’s hard to define, and all of our systems are bolted together. It’s really difficult to enshrine in a paint-by-numbers approach.”

For Simon, the motivation for creating their agency playbook was to make his staff onboarding process easier. 

“Our business coach told us, ‘You’ve got to accept that it takes six months to get somebody up to speed.’ But you’re like, ‘How on earth?’ The manager that’s just joined us is on £65k a year. You’re telling me I have to wait six months to see any return on that?”

In this session, we’ll be discussing how to create a process ‘playbook’ for your agency, and strategies for encouraging people to stick to it. Come along to see if you’re in need of an operational refresh, and hear from others who are battling this problem in real time.