How Calem Medical Turned Decades of Team Expertise Into a 160 SOPs Operations Manual — and a Business Ready to Scale
A newly acquired business — with long-tenured staff, no documented processes, and a new owner trying to understand it all
Calem Medical provides field service for medical and laboratory equipment — calibration, annual and biannual inspections, and ongoing maintenance for a wide range of medical businesses. Nick Baum had recently acquired the company from its previous owner and inherited a team of experienced field service technicians and office staff, many of whom had been there for a long time.
The challenge of acquiring an established small business is that knowledge tends to reside in people — not in documents. Long-tenured staff had developed their own ways of carrying out the work, and those ways were often good, but they weren't written down. If someone left, retired, or was absent, there was no way to transfer their knowledge. And for Nick as the new owner, there was no clear picture of what everyone was actually doing or how the business operated day-to-day.
The team also wore a lot of hats. In a small business where field technicians and office staff overlap, everyone needs to understand more than just their own role. Communication within the team and with clients was inconsistent. New hires had no standard to onboard from. And Nick was absorbing more of the day-to-day than he wanted to — answering questions, handling emails, and filling gaps that a well-documented operation would have handled.
The goal was to standardize how the work was done, preserve the institutional knowledge that the experienced team had built up, and give everyone — new hires and existing staff alike — a common set of standards to work from.
A full operations manual covering field technicians, office staff, bookkeeping — and OS components built directly into it
We built Calem Medical's complete operations manual from scratch in Notion, structured around every team in the business. Given the size and nature of the company, we also built several operating system components — trackers, forms, and lists — directly into the manual rather than as a separate OS, keeping everything in one place.
The manual covers:
The All-Employees Hub documents the full customer journey — how service is carried out from the client's first contact through to completion — so every team member understands how the business serves its clients. It also covers internal and client communication guidelines with templates, office role and organization standards, and employee relations.
The Front Office Hub was built for the customer service rep, service report processors, and trip logistics coordinator. Much of what these roles involved had never been written down — it was just how things had always been done. We extracted that knowledge and documented it properly, so that if any of these team members were absent or left, the process wouldn't leave with them.
The Technician Hub documents everything the field service technicians need to do their jobs confidently and consistently — on-site and in the field. This was particularly important given the technical and regulatory nature of the work: calibration procedures, inspection standards, and field service processes that need to be carried out the same way every time, regardless of which technician is on the job.
The Bookkeeper Hub addressed one of the more complex areas of the business: service billing. The billing process at Calem Medical is involved, and getting it right matters. We documented the full bookkeeping workflow alongside the HR procedures that fell under the same function.
The Glossary was built with particular care given the technical nature of the industry. A lot of the terminology is field-specific — acronyms, equipment names, regulatory standards — and new hires need to know it quickly to operate effectively. The glossary gives them that foundation without having to ask someone.
The OS components built into the manual include a customer list tracker, an equipment parts order tracker, a fixed request form, and related tools — practical assets the team uses day to day, integrated directly into the manual so everything is in one place.
Institutional knowledge preserved, a new hire onboarded fast, and Nick finally able to step back from the day-to-day
Going through the knowledge extraction process gave Nick a deep dive into his own business — a structured understanding of what everyone was actually doing and how service was being carried out. That alone was valuable for a new owner still building their picture of the operation they'd acquired.
A new customer service representative was hired during the project and was able to get up to speed quickly using the manual — without overloading other team members who would otherwise have had to carry the training themselves. That's the practical test of whether an operations manual works, and Calem Medical's passed it immediately.
The institutional knowledge held by the long-tenured team — the gold standard of how things were done — is now documented. It can be passed on to anyone who joins. The risk that it walks out the door when someone retires or leaves is gone.
The team can now move across roles more easily. Because every function is documented, helping a colleague or covering a different area doesn't require extensive hand-holding — the manual bridges the gap. That flexibility has always been important to how Calem Medical operates, and now the documentation supports it.
Nick can step back from the day-to-day. Questions that used to come to him now have a place to go. His focus has shifted to where it belongs for a business owner: service quality, growth, and the bigger picture — not answering emails and filling operational gaps.
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