Nine offices, one appointment

The hardest part of growing past one location is not hiring. It is that the thing you built stops being watchable.

When we were one office I could hear everything. I knew who was struggling before they told me, because I was standing there. That is not management, it is proximity, and it does not survive a second market.

The question we ran into around the third office is the one every multi market company runs into. Does a customer in one state get the same appointment as a customer in another, and if not, who would even know.

Most companies answer this with culture, which is a way of saying they hope so.

What worked was less inspiring than that. One documented process, the same one everywhere. One training program every rep goes through regardless of market or experience. Recordings scored against the same standard by people who did not hire the rep and have no reason to go easy. Managers promoted out of the rep seat, so the person holding the line is somebody who ran it.

That last one mattered more than I expected. A manager hired from outside has to be taught what good looks like. A manager who came up through the seat already knows, and more to the point, the reps know he knows.

It is slow and none of it photographs well. It is also the only version I have watched hold up across five states, and I have watched the other version get tried twice.

The payoff is not consistency for its own sake. It is that a problem in one market becomes information for all of them. When every office runs the same appointment, one office's fix is everybody's fix.