How to Get Your Shop's Know-How Out of One Person's Head

Most established shops have one or two people everyone turns to when they aren't sure how something should be done. That reliance reflects years of experience, and it also means some of the shop's most valuable knowledge lives in only one place. When that person is busy or out, questions wait, and the work starts to depend on who's in that day.

The goal is simple: move the most important know-how out of a few heads and into the whole team, in a way that fits a busy shop. Here are three steps, and one habit that makes them stick.

Step 1: Pick one topic at a time

Start with the questions people keep bringing to the go-to person: how certain work gets priced, how fragile pieces get handled, what a key client expects. Then choose one. Trying to capture everything at once is what stalls most efforts. One topic at a time adds up faster than it sounds.

Step 2: Record a team conversation about it

Gather the team for a short session. The person who knows explains the topic and, where possible, demonstrates it. Everyone else asks questions, especially "What if?" and "When wouldn't you do it that way?" One person records the whole thing on a phone.

The questions are what make this work. They draw out the exceptions and reasons that someone explaining alone would skip. The discussion also tends to reveal when two people have been handling the same task in different ways, which is worth settling.

Step 3: Turn the recording into a short written page

Most phones and many free apps can turn a recording into text. Paste that text into an AI assistant such as ChatGPT and ask it for a one-page summary: when this applies, what we do, and what to watch out for. The person who knows reads it over and corrects it. Then the page goes wherever the shop keeps its reference material, whether that's a binder or a shared folder.

Be realistic about that page. Most people in a shop won't open a manual when they hit a problem; they'll ask someone. The page is there for the day the person who knows isn't, such as when someone needs a firm answer to coordinate with another location. The real learning happens in step 2, when the team hears it, sees it, and talks it through together.

Putting it into practice: a short weekly meeting

The steps work best as a standing habit. While the shop is getting its key knowledge out in the open, hold one 20-minute meeting a week, on the same day and time, covering one topic:

• First 5 minutes: explain what we do and why.

• Next 10 minutes: demonstrate it and take questions.

• Last 5 minutes: agree on how the shop will handle it going forward, choose next week's topic, and decide who turns the recording into a page.

Record every meeting. Once the most-asked questions are covered, the meeting can move to every other week or once a month, and come back whenever something changes: a new supplier, a new service, a new person on the team.

Twenty minutes a week is a small commitment. Over a season, it gives the whole team the answers that used to live with one or two people, and it gives those people back time for the work that truly needs their judgment.

Looking ahead: answers on your phone

Every meeting you record and every page you write adds up. Over time, those recordings and pages, together with the references the shop already depends on, such as vendor catalogs and price lists, become one collection of what your shop knows, kept in one place.

That collection opens up a new possibility. Instead of tracking someone down or flipping through a binder, a team member could pick up a phone, ask a question out loud, and hear the answer in the shop's own words, along with where it came from so they can check it. Tools that make this possible are already within reach of a small shop, and it all starts with the meetings described above.

So I'm curious: if you held your first 20-minute meeting next week, what topic would you start with?