We crested a pretty large number of users on the platform a while back, and AI gave us an opportunity we never would have had otherwise. Nobody is going to hire a room full of analysts to scrub millions of user records. But AI does that in a heartbeat.
So we sicced it on the database like a police dog. Full regression. We wanted empirical data, not a hunch. We started building a predictive model to answer one question that has been on my mind for ages: what is the profile of an account that truly wins at this?
We looked at everything. Industry. Size. Business maturity. Adoption across users. Number of playbooks. Daily usage. All of it, just trying to get a feel for the standard distribution.
And we got what you'd expect. A curve. Some outliers who were absolutely crushing it. Some outliers who were sucking. A big fat middle.
Then we looked at the ones crushing it.
Every single one of them had a WHO.
Not a feature. Not a bigger budget. Not a smarter leadership team. One person, somewhere in that organization, who had decided building Playbooks and driving adoption was theirs to own. Someone who said, out loud or otherwise, I own this.
And here's the part that surprised me: It was almost never senior leadership.
It was somebody in the middle. An ops person. An admin. A marketing assistant. Somebody who wasn't running the company but had taken the thing personally.
The anecdotal side backed it up immediately. Our team looked at the list and went, oh yeah, we know exactly who that is. "We've been talking to her!" or "He's the one asking questions." "They're the ones showing up on the webinars." "They're the ones who email support with an idea instead of a complaint."
So we started interviewing them. Deconstructing what they were doing. Hey, what's working over here? What are you guys doing differently?
And I'll tell you what we found. They were doing what I'd been doing for twenty-five years as a consultant. Same patterns. Same moves. Same instincts. It was one of those struck-by-the-obvious moments, except now the data substantiated it.
There's a seat in your organization that nobody named.
Large companies figured this out a long time ago. They've got learning and development. They've got somebody in HR who owns training. At scale, that's not unusual, it's expected.
But under a couple hundred employees? That seat doesn't exist. And the small team thinks, well, we'll hire that person once we're big.
That's a fallacy. That's backwards. Locking down process, reducing variability, training people, holding them accountable, that's how you get big. It isn't the reward for scale. It's the mechanism.
Most small businesses running on an operating system have been introduced to process. They've been told it matters. But they think of it as housekeeping. Something you get through. A rock for the quarter. Document them, check the box, we're done.
And they neglect this at their own peril.
Because for the majority of small businesses, it isn't the competition handing them their lunch. It isn't the guys across the street. It's worse than that. It's friendly fire. It's the fact that the guy who runs the place figured this out ten years ago and cannot for the life of him get everybody else to do it that way.
Ask any business owner what frustrates them most. It's rarely the market. It's the inconsistency. The lumpiness. People forgetting the right way to do things.
That's a management problem. Except we fired all the middle managers.
So who's driving best practices now?
Somebody has to own it. And when somebody does, the data is not subtle about what happens next.
Curious to know how we can help? If you know the person, send them to look at our certification program. It's free. It's 60 modules, and it teaches this person how to do the job. Certification.
