One night, one of my best customer service leads was closing alone in our 40,000-square-foot warehouse. Earlier that evening, someone had tossed a cigarette into the work dumpster without fully putting it out. It smoldered, caught a box, then the dumpster, then a tree about thirty feet from where she was working. Smoke started drifting into the building.
She never smelled a thing. She was born with congenital anosmia.
The fire department could see our building from their station, and they got there before it jumped. The burn marks stopped a few feet from a wood-and-glass wall. We had fire extinguishers and signage because the law required them. We didn't have fire safety training, and not one of us had ever thought about what her not being able to smell could mean in an emergency. We stopped allowing a single closer, of any kind, from that day forward.
That's the whole argument for operations playbooks. Your team isn't careless. You just don't know what you don't know about the specific people on your team until the gap finds you. So you write the playbook before it does.
The boring playbooks are the ones that work
Here are a few we ran at Smoke Cartel. None of them are exciting. That's the point.
- Chargebacks: a hard ceiling of 1% of monthly volume, or your processor audits you. The process behind it was concrete: pull the Shopify order, the payment transaction, the tracking, and the support thread. File with the fraud-insurance provider and the card processor. Log it. Flag the account.
- Fraud blocks: one short rule. Only after a chargeback, or a confirmed case of a minor using someone else's card. Block by email, card, and IP. Door shut for good.
- Damage and loss: anything over $100 shipped insured, automatically. When one shipment arrived destroyed, a loss of just over $33,000, the claim settled for just under $20,000, because the documentation already existed before we needed it.
- Break-ins: a checklist, in order. Call the police, file the report, photograph and video everything, secure the space, board up what's open, pull and copy the security footage, and hand a copy to the police. Only then start documenting what's missing for the claim.
A playbook doesn't need software
Our entire returns process once ran in Slack. CS receives the request, talks it through with the customer, and sends the label. Every return gets logged in a shared channel with four things: name, order number, return reason, and a link to the conversation, so anyone can pick it up without asking around. Then we tracked it with emoji:
- 📦 Item received
- 💲 Refund issued
- 📝 Product back in inventory
- ✅ Customer contacted, loop closed
A five-person team doesn't need a ticketing system. It needs to decide, once, exactly what "done" looks like.
Write down the ticket your team gets every day
"Tracking says delivered, but I never got it." Most agents assume the customer is lying. Usually they aren't. Packages get delivered to the wrong address constantly, and when that happens, the standard process is to return it to the sender. That can take months, because it travels back to a regional sorting facility, not the post office down the street. Tracking that's stuck on "pre-shipment" is its own common failure and deserves its own saved reply instead of agents improvising every time.
Train your team on this before the ticket comes in, and "delivered" stops being a dead end in an argument and becomes the first step of an actual investigation.
Plan the floor before you move a box
When we set up our largest warehouse, every station was sized to the actual workflow before a single shelf went up. Six shipping stations, eight by four feet each, wired with four outlets apiece, because nothing kills a shipping day faster than someone hunting for a free plug. Twenty by ten feet of open floor set aside just for incoming pallets. Product shelves spaced exactly three feet apart, so an order cart could get through with room for a second person working the same aisle.
None of those numbers were guesses.
Spread your risk before there's a reason to
We spread manufacturing across Vietnam, Mexico, Savannah, and California so no single country or vendor could take the whole business down. When the 2018 U.S.-China tariff fight broke out, competitors who'd built everything around one country scrambled. For us it was a non-event.
You don't get credit for calling something like that in advance. You get the version where nothing happens, because you already fixed the thing that would have broken.
Where to start this week
- Pick your three most common "what do we do when..." questions and write the answers down.
- Define "done" for every recurring process, in one line each.
- Ask what your specific team doesn't know yet. Not what the law requires. What could hurt you because of who's actually on the floor.
- Check your numbers on a rhythm, not in a crisis. Then you'll already know whether you're running prevention or triage.
Want the book when it's ready?
This post is adapted from a chapter of The Team You Build, the book I'm writing about building a team that will outlast you. Drop your email below and I'll let you know when it's out, along with new posts on operations, e-commerce, and building teams.
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