Swaney Group Capital proudly uses Attio as our CRM

On Sunday afternoon Tom Brady held up a laminated sheet on national television: his offensive call sheet from Super Bowl LI, the 28-3 game. Every call on it is filed by situation, third down, the red area, the 2-point conversion, each personnel grouping. Printed alongside are the Falcons' tendencies, 100% man coverage on 3rd and 6 to 9, a 4-man front 60% of the time, so the answer to each situation sits next to the reason for it. He built it with his coordinator during the week. By the end of the game, he said, it looked like a Picasso, because he had been marking it up between series.

Arguably, the best quarterback who ever lived, in the most chaotic hour of his career, down 25 points to a defense that had studied him for weeks and weeks, ran the whole comeback off a page written on Tuesday.

Monday morning I was back in a conference room hearing that customer service could not have standard work. Too many variables. Every call is different. I have heard that sentence at every company I have walked into, and I have some sympathy for it, because the person saying it has usually spent 15 years absorbing those variables with nothing but memory and goodwill. I no longer accept it, and the sheet is the reason.

A call sheet is an index of decisions that have already been made. Down one side are the situations. Across from each is the answer, and beside the answer is what the opponent tends to do in that spot. Nobody knows on Tuesday which of them Sunday will bring. What they know is that the game is made of a finite number of situations, that each has a best answer, and that a man with 12 seconds on the play clock and 70,000 people screaming at him is the wrong person to invent that answer from scratch.

That is the part the objection misses. The variability lives in the situations. The right response to each one barely moves. What feels like infinite variety on the phone is a dozen situations arriving in random order, which is also a fair description of a football game.

Standard work moves the decision to Tuesday afternoon, when there is time to make it well, and leaves the person on the phone with a job that can be done at speed: recognize the situation, run the answer, mark the sheet where the answer was wrong. Brady's Picasso is that last part. The marks are how next week's sheet beats this week's.

I spent 7 years as an enlisted nuclear operator on submarines, and nothing since has come close for variables. Flooding, fire, a loss of electrical power, a reactor scram at depth. The Navy's answer was a procedure. Every casualty had immediate actions, a short list you memorized cold and performed without opening a book, and supplementary actions, read aloud while you executed. We drilled the immediate actions until they ran below the level of thought. A frightened brain narrows. The standard carries the first 30 seconds until thinking comes back.

Nobody on a submarine ever argued that flooding had too many variables to write down. The variables were the argument for writing it down. The procedure did not know which pipe would fail or at what depth. It knew what the first 6 actions had to be regardless, and it saved the judgment for the moment judgment was needed, which came after the water stopped.

The job that looks too chaotic for standard work is usually the job that needs it most, and the person who says otherwise is usually describing how tired they are.

The desk in question belongs to a manufacturer I work with, where 2 people answer the phone and the shared inbox, a manager who came up through the shop covers when they are out, and the objection was hers. She was right that every call is different. She was wrong about what that meant.

So we sat there for a week with a tally sheet. By Thursday there were 11 situations on the whiteboard, and 9 of them covered better than 9 of every 10 contacts. Someone wants to know where an order is. A delivery date slipped and the customer found out before we told him. The wrong part went out on the truck. A quality complaint, a quote request, a rush order, a customer on credit hold who needs parts today, and a customer who wants to talk to the owner about something the owner has not heard of yet.

Each had a best answer, and the people at the desk already knew most of them. What they lacked was permission to write them down. The slipped delivery got a rule: pull the order, read the new date off the schedule, offer a partial shipment above a set quantity, and say nothing about a discount until the customer asks, because the sheet also notes the tendency, which is that about half of them will. The credit hold got a dollar threshold, and everything above it went to the controller the same day. The whole thing fit on one page in a sleeve next to the phone, and the first version was wrong in 3 places, which the desk found inside a week.

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Swaney Group Capital proudly uses Attio as our CRM

At Swaney Group Capital the sequence runs the same way at every desk, dock, and work cell where somebody tells us the work is too variable to standardize, and it starts in the first 100 days after close. Under SGOS, our operating system, the first move is to watch the work before touching it: a week beside the people who do the job, counting situations rather than collecting complaints. The top handful, sorted by how often they show up and how much damage they do when handled badly, get an answer written by the people who will use it, with the manager in the room and her pen in her pocket. I have lost that argument myself, more than once, by writing the thing for people instead of with them.

The escalation rule gets decided out loud, because the 2-point column is on Brady's sheet for a reason. Every standard has an edge, and the desk needs to know where it is and whose phone rings past it. Then the sheet goes up and the supervisor's own standard work begins: 5 real calls checked against the page every Friday, marks reviewed, page reissued when they pile up. Toyota's old line, that without a standard there can be no improvement, is true in a way you only feel at a desk that runs on memory. There is nothing to improve. There is only whoever is sitting there today.

By day 90 the desk runs the same on the best person's vacation as on her best day, the new hire in month 6 has a page instead of a hunch, and the manager who told me it could not be done is the one marking it up. That last part matters more than the sheet.

If you own a business, find the part of it you have decided is too variable to write down. That is where your best person's irreplaceability lives, which means it is where a buyer will discount the price or, if the buyer is me, where he will spend his first 100 days. A business that runs off sheets is worth more than one that runs off memory, and diligence finds the difference whether or not anyone says the words.

The advantage of doing this as an independent sponsor is mostly permission. I do not need a committee's blessing to sit at a desk for a week, and nobody above me is waiting on a steering deck before the first page goes up. Brady had 120 answers before kickoff. Your desk needs about 10. Write them down.

I am the founder of Swaney Group Capital, a fundless sponsor focused in the lower middle market. LeverUp® is published weekly. More if I have something else to say.