Playbook

A playbook is a written guide for handling a recurring situation rather than a single task. Where an SOP says how to close a job, a playbook says what to do when a key employee resigns, a major customer complains, a slow month arrives or a new location opens. It carries the owner's judgement, including what to prioritise, what to avoid and when to escalate, so a manager can act without a phone call.

In owner managed companies across British Columbia the playbook is where the owner's experience gets out of their head. Without it, every unusual situation returns to the owner, which keeps them in the day to day no matter how well the routine work is documented. With it, managers develop judgement faster because they have a starting point and a standard to measure against.

In practice a playbook is a few pages: the trigger, the first hour, the first day, who is informed, what is decided by whom, the common mistakes and a short debrief at the end. It is written with the owner and the manager who will use it, tested on the next real situation and revised. Playbooks sit in the same manual as SOPs and have the same owner and review date. Ali Sedighi's team writes playbooks for sales, operations, hiring and customer service situations as part of its SOP and operations engagements, and for investors taking over a business, the first hundred days plan is itself a playbook.