How a 12-Person Agency Cut Onboarding Time by 60%

When Sarah took over as Director of Operations at a Portland-based digital agency, she inherited what every growing agency has: a bunch of smart people who know exactly how things work and zero documentation of any of it.

New hires took 12 weeks to get fully productive. Three months of asking "how do we do this?" and getting different answers from different people. Three months of senior team members pulled off billable work to explain processes they'd explained four times before.

It was costing them roughly $15,000 per new hire in lost productivity. And they were hiring 4-5 people per year.

The Documentation Graveyard

Sarah had tried the obvious fix: documentation.

She set up a Notion workspace. Assigned sections to team leads. Gave everyone two weeks to document their processes.

Here's what happened: three people wrote excellent docs. Two people wrote bullet points that only made sense if you already knew the process. Seven people wrote nothing.

The wiki sat there for six months. New hires would get pointed to it. They'd read outdated instructions, try to follow them, hit a wall, and walk over to someone's desk for the real answer.

"The problem wasn't that people didn't want to document," Sarah said. "It's that sitting down with a blank page and writing out every step of what you do — that's a completely different skill from doing the work. Most people just can't do it."

A Different Approach

Instead of asking people to write, Sarah started recording conversations.

The idea was simple: sit with each team lead for 30 minutes. Ask them how they handle specific scenarios. Record it. Turn the transcript into a playbook.

It worked brilliantly — for about two weeks. Then Sarah ran out of time to do the interviews, transcribe them, clean up the transcripts, organize them into playbooks, and keep them updated.

That's when she found Understudy.

How It Actually Worked

Understudy flipped the model. Instead of starting with a blank page, it started with a conversation.

Each team lead spent 20-30 minutes talking through their domain — not in a structured interview, but naturally. How they handle client onboarding. What they check when a campaign isn't performing. How they know when a project is going off-rails.

Understudy turned those conversations into structured playbooks automatically. Not raw transcripts — actual step-by-step processes with decision trees, checklists, and the context that makes them useful.

Here's what surprised Sarah: the playbooks captured things nobody would have thought to write down. The judgment calls. The "if you see X, it usually means Y" insights. The tribal knowledge that lives in experienced people's heads and never makes it into a wiki.

The Results

Sarah measured onboarding time before and after. The numbers were clear:

Before Understudy:

Average time to first solo project: 12 weeks
Questions to senior staff per new hire per week: 15-20
Time senior staff spent on training per new hire: ~8 hours/week
New hire confidence rating at 30 days: 3.2/5

After Understudy:

Average time to first solo project: 5 weeks
Questions to senior staff per new hire per week: 4-6
Time senior staff spent on training per new hire: ~2 hours/week
New hire confidence rating at 30 days: 4.4/5

That's a 58% reduction in onboarding time. But the bigger win was what it did for the senior team.

"My best people were spending 30% of their time explaining things," Sarah said. "Now they spend that time on the work that actually grows the business. The playbooks handle the rest."

What Made It Stick

Sarah had tried wikis before. They all went stale. Three things made this different:

1. Low effort to create. Nobody had to write anything. They just talked about their work — which people are naturally good at — and Understudy did the structuring.

2. Easy to update. When a process changed, the team lead had a quick conversation about what was different. The playbook updated. No hunting through pages of documentation to find and fix the right paragraph.

3. New hires actually used it. Previous documentation was either too sparse to be useful or too dense to be readable. The playbooks from Understudy hit the middle ground — enough detail to follow, enough context to understand why.

The Compounding Effect

Six months in, the agency had playbooks covering about 80% of their recurring processes. New hires started contributing to playbooks within their first month — sharing what they learned as newcomers, filling in the "obvious" steps that experienced people skip over.

The knowledge base became self-reinforcing. The more people used it, the better it got. The better it got, the more people used it.

"We used to lose institutional knowledge every time someone left," Sarah said. "Last quarter, our most senior project manager took another job. We were nervous. But her replacement was up to speed in three weeks instead of three months. Everything she knew was already captured."

The Math

For a 12-person agency hiring 4-5 people per year:

Before: 12 weeks onboarding × 5 hires = 60 weeks of reduced productivity
After: 5 weeks onboarding × 5 hires = 25 weeks of reduced productivity
Saved: 35 person-weeks per year

At an average fully-loaded cost of $1,500/week, that's $52,500/year in recovered productivity.

Plus the senior team got back roughly 6 hours per week each — time that went directly to billable client work.

The tool cost less than one week of a single employee's salary. The ROI wasn't close.

Related Resources

Use Cases:

Integrations:

Slack integration — Surface playbooks in Slack

How It Works:

Related Posts:

Understudy turns conversations into structured playbooks. No blank pages. No stale wikis. Just the knowledge your team already has, captured and organized. Get early access →