How a 70-person UK Logistics Firm Built Its FirstOperations Manual and Halved Manager OnboardingTime

Konsyte Insights — Strategy. Systems. Growth.

The founder realised how dependent the business was on one person when his operations manager resigned. She had been with the company for nine years, since it was a 12-person business with one warehouse in Warrington. It had since grown to 70 employees and three depots, and she was the person who knew how everything worked.

With only four weeks before she left, the founder tried to write down everything she handled. He got eleven lines in before realising he couldn’t actually explain what she did or how someone else would take over her work.

Most of the business’s processes existed only in people’s heads. She knew which clients needed which paperwork, which delivery routes clashed with depot timings, and how to handle supplier disputes. None of this was properly documented. Now, all that knowledge was about to leave with her.

Konsyte came in during her four-week notice period. Instead of trying to document everything, it focused on one question: which processes would cause serious problems if she left without passing them on? The consultant spoke to the outgoing manager, two depot leads, and the founder using the same questions: How is this done? Who else knows how to do it? What happens if you’re not here?

They found around 40 processes she handled regularly, but only 20 were critical. The rest had backups, simple workarounds or weren’t important enough to document immediately.

Those 20 processes became a simple operations manual. Each one explained what starts the process, the steps to follow, who owns it, and who the backup is. There were no complicated diagrams or long policy documents. A depot lead reading the driver- scheduling entry could follow it without a translator. Each process was assigned a single owner, whoever on the existing team was best placed to hold it.

The manual was completed a week before she left. Three months later, her replacement joined. Onboarding took six weeks instead of the three months it had taken to bring the outgoing manager up to speed years earlier, back when there’d been nothing to hand over, the new hire had the 20 key processes from day one and was handling supplier disputes independently by week five.

The founder’s biggest worry had been that one resignation could throw the business into chaos. Now, the knowledge had a place to go.

The founder had worried that losing one person could seriously disrupt the business. Now, the important knowledge no longer sat with just one person — it was documented and available to the whole team.

If this sounds familiar — book a free 30-minute Strategy Health Check at konsyte.com