The One-Page Best Practice System
Document every process as if you'll franchise it — even if you never do.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 90%
Scudamore read Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited and took its central instruction literally: build your business out like a franchise even if you don't anticipate choosing that model. He documented everything as a one-page best practice — how do we answer the phone, how do we price jobs, how do we market the business when things are slow. Each activity got a single page describing exactly how it's done. The compounding effect was that the business started to look, feel, and act like a franchise long before it was one: consistency in branding, look, feel, and the personality of the people. When Oprah and other publicity hit and prospective owners came knocking, the recipe already existed — so the franchise engine could roar immediately.
Origin
Scudamore admired Ray Kroc's McDonald's model — systematising everything and bringing in owners with skin in the game — and then read The E-Myth Revisited, which told him to build like a franchise regardless of intent. He turned every activity in 1-800-GOT-JUNK into a one-page best practice before the company franchised anything.
Core principles
- 01Build the business like a franchise even if you never franchise it.
- 02Every recurring activity gets exactly one page of best practice.
- 03Documentation is what turns a business into a proven recipe.
- 04Systems produce consistency; consistency produces brand.
- 05The recipe is the product you sell to franchise partners.
How to run it
- 1
Adopt the E-Myth premise
Commit to building as if you'll franchise, whether or not you will. Scudamore: 'he says build your business out like a franchise even if you don't anticipate you'll choose that model — have all the best practices documented.'
Pro tip The Gerber book (The E-Myth Revisited) is Scudamore's explicit source and recommendation.
- 2
Inventory every recurring activity
Sweep the business for anything done more than once. Scudamore's examples are deliberately mundane: how do we answer the phone, how do we price jobs, how do we market the business when things are slow.
Watch out The unglamorous processes are the ones that break consistency — don't skip them because they feel obvious.
- 3
Write exactly one page per activity
'Everything had a one-page best practice of here's exactly how we do things.' The single-page constraint forces clarity and keeps the document usable rather than shelfware.
Pro tip If a process genuinely needs more than a page, it's probably two processes.
- 4
Train new people from the pages
The pages are the onboarding path. Hala Taha applies it live in the episode — assigning three new interns to map every area of the podcast and agency and produce processes, 'because it's so important to train new team members.'
Pro tip Interns and new hires are the ideal authors — they see the undocumented gaps you're blind to.
- 5
Check that the business now looks and acts like a franchise
The output signal is consistency: 'it started to look, feel, and act so much like a franchise — the consistency and the branding and the look and feel and personality of our people.' That's the readiness test.
- 6
Package the pages as the proven recipe
Once documented, the system becomes the thing you sell. 'What we offer is this proven recipe' — franchise partners buy the documented best practices, not the paint or the truck.
In the wild
Long before franchising, Scudamore documented every activity in the business as a one-page best practice — phone answering, job pricing, marketing during slow periods. The company began to look, feel, and act like a franchise: consistent branding, consistent look and feel, consistent personality across its people.
→ When Oprah and other publicity brought a flood of prospective owners, the proven recipe already existed — the franchise engine 'started to roar' with no scramble to invent systems under pressure.
Hearing the one-pager method mid-interview, Hala immediately assigned her three new interns to audit every area of the podcast and her agency and write up the processes behind each.
→ She frames it as the only way to train new team members and gain efficiencies — the prerequisite to scaling the operation at all.
Common mistakes
Only documenting once you decide to franchise
The whole point of the E-Myth premise is that documentation precedes the decision. Scudamore had the recipe ready when the demand arrived; building it reactively under publicity pressure would have wasted the moment.
Skipping the mundane processes
Phone answering and job pricing sound too trivial to write down, but they're exactly where consistency — and therefore brand — is won or lost across many locations and many people.
Writing manuals instead of one-pagers
The one-page constraint is what keeps the system alive and trainable. A twenty-page process document is a document nobody reads and nobody follows.
Is it for you?
Best for
Service businesses with repeatable operations that want consistency, faster onboarding, or an eventual franchise/exit path.
Not ideal for
Early-stage ventures still discovering what the process even is, or highly bespoke creative work with no repeatable recipe.
From the transcript
“I read a book called The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. He says build your business out like a franchise even if you don't anticipate…”
“How do we answer the phone, how do we price jobs, how do we market the business when things are slow — everything had a…”
“It started to look, feel and act so much like a franchise, and the consistency and the branding and the look and feel and personality…”
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