Best Practice Series: How to Customize Best Practices for Small Business Success

In Part 1, we discussed why customizing best practices is essential for small business success. Now, let’s talk about how to do it. Customization is not about reinventing the wheel. It’s about asking better questions: What is this practice trying to achieve? Does it work for how we operate? What would make it fit us better? 

Here’s how to approach it with clarity, confidence, and staying power.

1. Start with Strategic Alignment, Not Imitation

Before you adopt any best practice, anchor it to a clear business objective.

Is it solving a real problem for your business? Does it support your current goals? Be tactical: is it meant to improve speed, reduce cost, increase quality, or strengthen consistency? Industry leaders often publish what works for them, but copying these practices without context can create more drag than lift. What works for a 500-person SaaS company may actively hinder a 10-person professional services firm.

Ask yourself:

• What are we trying to solve or improve?

• Is this practice designed for a company like ours - size, industry, stage, culture?

• Will it help us deliver on our strategic goals?

Customization doesn’t begin with editing a process; it begins by defining its purpose in your world. Know what you're trying to improve. Be clear on whether this practice actually moves the needle for you, not in theory, but in context.

2. Filter Best Practices Through Operational Reality

This is where a lot of good ideas go wrong. A process might make sense on paper but break down under the weight of your actual workflows, team structure, or tech stack. Your business model has built-in priorities: speed over perfection or depth over scale or customization over automation. A best practice that doesn’t respect these priorities will create tension. Let your model determine how a practice is expressed.

Ask yourself:

• What are the constraints we can't ignore—speed, budget, compliance, capacity?

• Can our team realistically support this without extra strain?

• Are we adapting the practice to fit our business—or stretching ourselves to fit it?

The goal is to make the practice usable, not idealized. Customize the structure, scope, and intensity of each practice to match your model’s economics and expectations. That’s how you avoid unnecessary overhead and reinforce your core strengths.

3. Design with (and for) the Front Line

No one has a clearer view of what works in practice than the people doing the work. Yet many best practices fail because they’re imposed from the top down. Instead of rolling out new processes and hoping for compliance, bring frontline teams into the design phase.

Ask them:

• Where do you see inefficiencies or inconsistencies?

• What do you already do that’s working better than what’s on paper?

• What would make this easier to use in your daily work?

What you learn can be the difference between a practice that sticks and one that becomes shelfware. Customization isn’t just more effective when it’s collaborative, it’s more durable.

4. Build in Space to Pilot and Adapt

One of the biggest mistakes small businesses make is treating best practice adoption as a one-time launch. Instead, treat it like a pilot program. By running pilots, you preserve agility and avoid investing too heavily in something that may not scale well across your entire business. Start with one function, one location, or one team. Give yourself room to:

• Test the practice in a real setting

• Collect honest feedback

• Refine the process based on usage, not theory

Customization is best done in layers—not leaps.

5. Bake Culture Into the Practice Itself

This is where many “plug-and-play” best practices fail. If the process contradicts how your team works, thinks, or communicates, it will quietly die. Your company’s values, tone, and norms should shape how a process is expressed. Instead of bolting a process onto your company, let your culture shape its expression.

• If your team values independence, create frameworks rather than rigid scripts.

• If your leadership style is collaborative, make room for shared decision-making.

The more a practice reflects your company’s personality, the more naturally it will take root.

6. Don’t Just Document What, Capture Why

When you refine a best practice to fit your business, make the thinking behind it visible. Instead of just listing steps, explain:

• What challenge this is solving

• Why you chose this specific version

• What trade-offs you accepted in the customization

This kind of context:

• Helps new team members onboard faster

• Reduces the chance of unintentional drift

• Creates internal consistency as you scale

Great documentation isn’t just procedural, it’s strategic. Good documentation supports execution. Great documentation supports evolution.

7. Make Customization a Standing Discipline

Customization is not a one-time project, it’s an operational muscle. As your business evolves, the practices that once served you may begin to constrain you.

Build in moments; quarterly reviews, team retrospectives, process audits, to ask:

• Is this still serving us well?

• Where are we working around this practice instead of through it?

• What have we learned that we can apply to improve it?

The most resilient companies don’t have the most best practices - they have the most relevant ones. And they keep them that way through consistent reflection and refinement.

Up Next: Are Your Practices Working?

In Part 3 of this series, we’ll explore how to evaluate your customized practices: what success looks like, how to measure impact, and when to evolve versus hold the line.