I’m a big fan of using a business maturity model to get an understanding of where your agency is at today, and what you could be striving to achieve. Check out the short presentation I shared with Agency Hackers below for my point of view.

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How your handbook moves you up the maturity curve

What’s an important part of getting out of the chaotic and ad hoc early stages of maturity? Having a central agency handbook, defined best practice, and consistent ways of working. In the short webinar below, I share with Agency Folk, why a handbook is so important, my favourite tools for documentation, and how to embed best practice that sticks.

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Why Coda?

You’ll find that in the ‘How to stop winging it’ video above, as well. But in a nutshell, it’s an easy place to start. It’s got a nice UI, and if you’ve used Notion, it feels very familiar. My favourite bit? The price. You just pay for Doc Makers, editors and viewers are free. That beats most other platforms!

Speaking of maturity...

Documentation and consistent ways of working is just one part of the journey for maturity.

I believe that there comes a time in every agency’s life where a professional services automation (PSA) platform like

Scoro⁠

becomes essential.

A PSA tool brings your projects, resources, and finances into a single system. To consolidate your data, automate reporting, and give you visibility into your business and profitability. It’s the single source of truth your business needs to scale with ease. And it differs from PM tools in that it covers the end-to-end workflow from quoting right through to getting paid.

I believe a PSA platform is an essential part of the journey to business maturity and cracking 'level 3' of the maturity curve – and a foundation for getting to ‘level 4’.

I brought Scoro in at my agency and it complete changed the way we worked. You can check out my case study below.

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Try Scoro for free

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How to use this template

This template isn’t meant to give you the content – that’s your job (in fact, I’m certain you may already have this scattered around in various places). Instead, it’s meant to serve as inspiration to start centralising the knowledge in a single place.

I’d start by jotting down a nested bullet list of the table of contents. What are the main sections you’d like to include? What sub-topics under each?

So click duplicate on this template, then add and delete pages to align with your table of contents, and start plugging in content. You can delete this page as well (or right-click on it in the sidebar and click “Hide”).

Once you’ve got your structure, I’m certain you’ve got loads of the content scattered around in different places – just start copying it in to the relevant pages.

Remember, a handbook is an evolving place to reference the latest information – nothing here should be set in stone, but regularly updated to reflect your latest working practices.

A few other points – you can control the visibility settings of your Handbook, including allowing people to log in via SSO (Microsoft and Google).

TIP: the

‘How to Stop Winging It’ webinar⁠

embedded above explains how I’d start planning your content, as well as tools you can use to create the documentation, and how to embed best practice in your agency. Definitely check it out.

Other resources & connect!

I host The Handbook: The Agency Operations Podcast, and send out an operations newsletter every other week. I’d love for you to to subscribe on Apple or Spotify (or on your favourite podcast service). Share your thoughts with me on LinkedIn!

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Connect on LinkedIn

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Subscribe to my bi-weekly ops newsletter

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Hi, I’m Harv Nagra!

Business maturity

How your handbook moves you up the maturity curve