Ops notes
The first 30 minutes of an incident: stabilize, measure, gather facts. What ops teams do when an incident hits: identify, scope, owners, baseline, stabilize, minimize exposure, measure impact, prepare recovery options. Zero-fluff, time-boxed checklist from Ops Starter Kit Vol 2 for 5-30 person teams. Includes the 3-day incident response runbook, decision trees, and playbooks when you upgrade.
A comprehensive vendor management framework: onboarding process, risk assessment, contract templates, vendor performance scoring, and the monthly review system that catches hidden costs before they become emergencies.
A complete SLA template that captures uptime, response time, quality metrics, and dispute resolution. One-hour setup to eliminate ambiguous vendor expectations and protect your business.
A complete supply chain contingency playbook: identify single points of failure, create backup vendors, test your recovery plans, and survive disruptions without operational collapse.
A structured procurement framework that ensures every purchase decision is data-driven, cost-effective, and aligned with your business goals. One-hour evaluation for every major purchase over $5,000.
A step-by-step guide to filing and managing insurance claims for business interruption, property damage, and liability. Reduce claim time by 40% and increase payout amounts by 20% with this playbook.
A daily/weekly checklist for monitoring supplier quality. Track 8 key quality metrics, identify defects early, and drive continuous improvement with actionable data.
One-hour quarterly training that turns every employee into a security sensor: phishing recognition (5-second pause rule), password manager setup, data classification levels, incident reporting procedures, and the human firewall that stops 95% of breaches before they start. Includes real phishing examples from your organization, hands-on 2FA enablement, and post-training phishing simulations. Worked example: 52-employee manufacturing company reduced phishing clicks by 92% and prevented $45,000 business email fraud with quarterly training costing just $2,200 annually.
One formula (par = daily usage × delivery days + one safety day, minus on-hand, rounded to case size), one walk per week that shares its twenty minutes with the food cost count, a par check column that lets the number learn from its surprises, and the quarterly dead-stock audit that finds the lamb shoulder from the special that ended in July. Worked example: the 40-seat restaurant freed $2,300 on day one, killed the Saturday romaine 86 with an honest safety day, and cut the produce par 15% behind the repaired gasket — $180 a week back without buying anything.
One page, ten minutes, every Friday: the only formula on the page (COGS over sales, same seven-day window, current invoice prices), the count by storage area, the theoretical-vs-actual gap that puts a dollar figure on waste, over-portioning and unlogged spoilage, and an investigation order that starts with the scale and ends with the door. Worked example: the 40-seat restaurant whose 4.5-point gap — $1,845 a month — broke down into a $620 burger-patty drift, $700 of spoilage behind a leaking gasket and 62 unapproved voids; six weeks later the tracker reads 30.9% and the fix paid for itself in days.
One hour a week with a dollar bill, a screwdriver and a bucket — the six-point gasket test that catches the leak before the compressor pays for it, the condenser coil where dust becomes compressor death, the evaporator ice that hides until the night it matters, the drain pan that should be wet but not full, and the door hardware that decides whether the gasket lasts a season or a month. Worked example: the 40-seat diner whose Sunday 07:15 walk turned a $125 parts order into two more compressor seasons — instead of a $2,800 compressor and $9,000 of stock in August.
One page, two halves: the weekly ten-minute self-check (six checkpoints — waste bay, dish drains, dry storage, walk-in gaskets, bar wells, delivery thresholds — with activity Y/N, the same-hour fix, initials) and the contractor visit block (license number, bait map, product + EPA reg number, findings, follow-up date, report filed Y/N). The escalation rule (same-day find-and-fix, the 48-hour call-out, the twice-flagged-station work order), the ten-line exclusion list, and the five traps (the visit without a filed report, the unmapped bait box, the outsourced weekly check, hiding activity from the inspector, starting the log after the infestation). Worked example: the 40-seat restaurant whose Tuesday 06:40 walk found three droppings behind the dishwasher — a $12 door sweep on work order #0144 instead of the $4,800 ten