How Unkefer Sales Built the Operations Manual to Take One Dealership's Success and Turn It Into a Blueprint for Many
A single location, ready to become a blueprint for growth
Unkefer Sales is a tractor dealership run by Jacob Wilhite. After a positive experience building an operations manual for his other business, NW Property Management — which manages five mobile home and trailer park communities — Jacob brought us on for a second project: documenting Unkefer Sales.
The team at Unkefer Sales was loyal and long-standing, having developed their own effective ways of working over time — but little of it existed in writing. Whenever someone new joined, the existing team carried the full weight of getting them up to speed, which took time and pulled focus away from their own work.
Jacob's vision extended beyond this single location: he wanted to take everything that was working here and use it as the foundation for additional tractor dealerships he was planning to acquire or open. That meant the manual needed to do double duty — support the current team today, and travel with Jacob as the business grew to more locations.
Jacob's goal was to reduce the burden on his existing team and build something that could support the business not just at its current location, but as he expanded to additional dealership locations down the line.
A complete operations manual, built with scale in mind
We built Unkefer Sales' operations manual from scratch in Notion — a single source of truth designed to support the dealership today and serve as a blueprint as Jacob opens or acquires additional locations.
The manual includes:
The business overview and culture and values sections orient every new hire and current team member to how Unkefer Sales operates and what matters most to the business — giving the whole team a shared reference point for making decisions that reflect the company's values, not just the letter of a process.
The org chart and job descriptions document every team member's role, who they report to, and what they're accountable for — written so that job descriptions can also be pasted straight into job board postings when Unkefer Sales is ready to hire.
The all-staff SOPs hub covers the full customer journey we mapped out together end-to-end, along with team-wide guidelines that apply to everyone regardless of role — workplace conduct, inter-team communication, and practical day-to-day details like parking information.
From there, five dedicated hubs — Sales, Parts, Service, Office, and Management — give each team its own SOPs, guidelines, checklists, and workflows, developed down to the specifics of what that role actually requires. For the parts and service teams, that included field-based tutorials for hands-on work; for the office team, back-end processes like pulling reports and processing transactions; and for management, the broader documentation needed to oversee the business day-to-day. Every team also has its own training roadmap, so anyone onboarding new hires knows exactly where to start.
Rounding it out: a glossary of industry-specific terms so new hires get up to speed quickly, a full company directory, and a Wall of Love collecting positive customer reviews — giving the team a clear sense of how Unkefer Sales is viewed externally and reinforcing the standard they're upholding.
New hire onboarding quizzes were built for each team — sales, parts, service, and beyond — so new hires can confirm they've understood the manual before moving into hands-on training.
The culture and values section was built with particular attention, since it's what allows team members to make autonomous decisions in a way that reflects the business — especially important for a dealership expanding into new locations where direct oversight isn't always possible.
A repeatable model, and a team ready to grow with it
Unkefer Sales now has a documented, repeatable system that reflects how the business actually runs — culture, customer journey, and team-specific processes all included. New hires can look to the manual for guidance rather than leaning on their coworkers for every question, which means less time pulled away from the existing team's own work and fewer mistakes as new hires ramp up.
Even long-tenured staff use the manual as a reference point — when something slips their mind, they can look it up directly instead of interrupting a colleague, which keeps the whole team moving efficiently.
For Jacob, the work gave him a deep, structured understanding of how the business operates day to day — and the confidence that the standards behind Unkefer Sales' success are documented and ready to travel with him to future locations.
Ready to step back from the day-to-day?
We'll build the system that lets your team deliver — without you in the room for every decision.