Doctrine Before Headcount

An agency that hires faster than it writes down its methods ends up with as many methods as it has agents.

Each new agent arrives with the habits of the last office. One drafts offers with a generous period for bond approval and another with a tight one. One explains sole mandates carefully, while another works on open mandates and sorts out the paperwork later. None of them is necessarily wrong. The agency simply has no standard, only an average of everyone's previous employers.

Outsiders feel it before the principal does. Sellers get different service depending on who answers the phone, and the conveyancers receiving the agency's files learn that each one arrives in a different state. When something goes wrong there is no written procedure to point at, so every mistake turns into a debate about opinion.

A short written way of drafting an offer and explaining a mandate is easiest to set while the office is small, and new people then join something that already has a shape. Writing it after the hiring means asking a room of settled habits to agree on one, and settled habits rarely volunteer.