You open a second location. Same signage, same product, same name over the door. Within six months, it’s running like a different company.
Nobody decided that. Nobody wrote down how the first site actually worked, so the new one filled the gaps with whatever the new manager did at their last job, and called it “the way we do things here.” Add a third site, a new country, or a new hire brought in to “build the procedures,” and the pattern repeats. You don’t end up with one business running in several places. You end up with several businesses that happen to share a logo.
Recent research on manufacturing technology adoption backs this up in numbers most founders would recognise immediately. Nearly every manufacturer surveyed had rolled a new operating system out at one site. Fewer than a quarter had that same system running the same way across every site they operate. The technology wasn’t the problem. Nobody had decided, in writing, which site’s version was the standard before the rollout started.
Three sites, three ways of doing the same job
Picture a founder-led manufacturer with plants in three countries, all approved for the same technology upgrade at once. Each plant has quietly built its own version of “how we do things” over years, because nobody at head office ever sat down and said which version wins. The upgrade doesn’t fix that. It just runs three different processes faster, in three different accents.
Or picture a business old enough to have outlived several generations of staff, where a new piece of equipment is about to land on a shop floor that has run for decades on person-to-person knowledge, never written down. The equipment doesn’t care how things have always been done. It needs someone to have decided, ahead of time, what the process actually is now. If nobody has, the equipment inherits whatever habits happened to be standing closest when it arrived.
Or picture a company hiring someone specifically to “implement new administrative procedures” — language that, read plainly, usually means the procedures don’t fully exist yet. The business has been running fine on memory and habit. It just can’t hand memory and habit to a new hire, a new site, or a new system, because neither of those travel.
None of this is anyone being careless. It’s what happens by default when a business grows faster than anyone had time to write things down. The gap isn’t a training problem or a hiring problem. It’s that nobody has ever named, in words a stranger could follow, what “how we do it here” actually means.
What actually closes the gap
First, pick one process this month and write down the version that’s actually the standard, not the version that happens to be running at your best location by accident. Whichever site’s approval workflow, onboarding routine, or inspection process has the fewest exceptions is your baseline. Everything else adjusts to match it, not the other way round.
Second, name an owner for that process. A person, not a department. “Operations owns it” means nobody owns it. A named person who can say yes or no when two sites disagree is the difference between a playbook and a suggestion.
Third, before rolling out any new system, site, or hire meant to carry the process forward, test whether someone who’s never worked for you could follow it from the document alone. If the answer is no, you don’t have a process yet. You have a habit, and habits don’t scale.
None of this closes the whole gap in an afternoon. It’s the start of a conversation worth having properly.
If you’re opening a new site, bringing in new equipment, or hiring someone to build procedures that should already exist, let’s talk it through: https://calendar.app.google/nJyTsHMsJJ5TnCzBA