Knowledge operations
The firm’s memory, in order.
Small businesses run on three or four people's memories. When one of them goes on leave — or leaves altogether — the business re-learns its own routines. We design a knowledge layer that captures what your team already knows, keeps it searchable, and ensures new hires reach full productivity in weeks rather than months. It is the least glamorous of our services and quietly the most compounding.
How it shows up
Signs the work is needed.
- 01 Three people in the business who know how something works; nobody else, and you are nervous about the implications.
- 02 SOPs last updated in 2023 — if they exist. More often, they live in a Slack thread someone saved.
- 03 New hires spending their first six weeks hunting for the right link, the right credentials, the right person to ask.
- 04 Clients asking the same question for the fourth time in a month and getting a slightly different answer each time.
- 05 A sense that the "company wiki" is a graveyard of half-finished pages — a tax on contributors, not a resource for readers.
How we design it
The shape of the setup.
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a.
We interview the people who already know.
The first week is spent sitting alongside the two or three people who hold the institutional memory. Structured conversations — how do you do X, what do you do when Y, why do we do Z — converted into clean written process notes. Their work is more comfortable afterwards, because the thing they have been repeating in their heads finally lives on a page.
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b.
We build a searchable layer, not just a wiki.
Notion or a similar workspace is the canvas, but the real value is a retrieval layer — your own people can ask natural-language questions ("what's our policy on out-of-hours support for X-tier clients?") and get the right answer with source attribution. Internal, private, searchable. This is the one place we actively use modern language-model retrieval, because the payoff is genuine.
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c.
We design the maintenance cadence.
Knowledge bases die because nobody owns them. We assign one page per person, rotate ownership quarterly, and put a gentle expiry date on every page. "This page was last confirmed on 2026-08-01 by Rachel." If it's older than six months, the system reminds someone to confirm it — kindly, in the context of their other work.
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d.
We write the new-starter path.
A new joiner, on day one, knows where to start. A structured first-two-weeks reading and doing list. Knowing what they do not need to read is as important as knowing what they do. The week-one and week-two deliverables are tiny but real, so a new hire leaves their first fortnight with evidence of contribution.
What “done” looks like
Outcomes we hold ourselves to.
These are the benchmarks we aim for on a typical engagement. Your specifics will vary — the diagnosis document names the ones that apply to your business, in writing, before work starts.
- Two-week new-starter ramp
- A new joiner is productively contributing by the end of their second week, not their sixth.
- 90% of recurring questions answerable from the wiki
- The knowledge base earns its keep — measured not by contributions but by lookups.
- A quarterly freshness audit
- Every page owned by someone, every page stamped with a last-reviewed date, every stale page surfaced for review.
- Continuity through holiday and leave
- The business keeps running when its people don't — because the dependency has shifted from heads to pages.
A representative engagement
What an average client looks like.
The context
An eighteen-person UK accountancy firm that had grown quickly and realised, on a partner's two-week holiday, that three operational questions went unanswered because only he knew the answer. They had a Notion workspace with sixty-four pages; fewer than a dozen were accurate.
What we built
- Seven structured interview sessions with the four longest-tenured partners and operators, converted into forty-one clean process notes organised around client lifecycle stages.
- A private retrieval layer over their Notion workspace: the team can ask natural-language questions in a Slack channel and receive answers with page-level source attribution.
- A page-owner model with quarterly rotation, and a weekly digest to each owner listing their pages due for review (light, never nagging).
- A new-starter induction path with a two-week structured curriculum ending in a small real-client deliverable.
Six months on
New-hire time-to-first-client-contribution dropped from five weeks to ten working days. Partner-dependency incidents (things that only one person could answer) reduced from a pre-engagement audit of 23 to 4 in six months. The knowledge base became something staff actively referenced rather than dutifully avoided.
This is a composite drawn from the pattern we see most commonly in this area of work. The shape holds; the specifics change.
When this isn’t the right fit
Times we say no.
- You are under five people. At that size, you are the knowledge base. Formalising too early wastes money and flexibility; revisit when you hit eight to ten.
- Your business is so bespoke per client that there is genuinely no repeatable process. Very unusual, and usually a diagnostic problem — but occasionally true, particularly in early-stage advisory work.
- You already have a thriving wiki that people contribute to and read. If it works, leave it alone; we are not a solution in search of a problem.
- You want the knowledge base for sales or marketing purposes. This service is for internal operational memory; external-facing content has different shapes, audiences, and governance.
If this describes the shape of your week, write to us.
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