SOPs are Your Small Business Cookbook
A Predictable Outcome for Your Business Tasks
Standard operating procedures or SOP‘s are the recipes for the business world. I’m pretty sure everyone reading this blog knows what a recipe is. My wife has a shelf full of them. Some our our favorites like her cucumber slaw or her black jo cake (chocolate cake with a hint of coffee). While we know the steps if I asked you to make it you would need the recipe. Then with the instructions in hand, you use the list of ingredients, baking instructions, and steps to complete the operation. If you do the steps in order every time you get a predictable result. Delicious!
What happens when you don’t follow the recipe or you do the steps out of order? What if you substitute ingredients? You can still do the process but the end results are going to vary greatly. Maybe you make a happy accident and people love your chocolate chip cookies with extra peanut butter. But when are asked to make them again you forget how much peanut butter and they are gross.
Standard Operating Procedures Simplifies Repeated Tasks
In the same way standard operating procedures provide the recipe for success for the tasks in your business. Here’s an example of a common standard operating procedure: reminding clients of to sign their contract. I often have clients that ask for a contract through email and then will let it sit on their desk for days or weeks. When this happens it delays our ability to onboard new clients since we’re waiting for this client to finally make the decision to sign up with our company. The decision to work with our company starts a whole host of activity. Delayed decisions means waste.
The amount of time spent on waiting for contracts to be signed greatly diminished when I instituted a standard operating procedure for reminding clients to complete the contract. I used a simple automation program to send me reminders at set intervals. I also had a template made that for each interval where I could send the same template every time tweaking it with the contract terms details and the manager of the contract. This way the clients did not fall through the cracks and we were able to close more contracts quickly allowing our company to realize the funds of the contract weeks or sometimes even months sooner than previously.
Without this process you can see what a mess it would be for getting contract signed. With multiple contracts going out weekly and managing a portfolio of 60 other contracts with their needs and demands without a standard reminder process clients could feel like they were missed or not important. If a client was waiting for me to follow up with them and I was waiting for the client to follow up with me and I didn’t want to bug them then there could be a time when we are both not doing any taking any action waiting for the other person to take action.
Small Business Owners Need to Delegate Tasks
As your business grows and as you learn what you what you do that gives your company the most benefit you’re going to have to give away some tasks. This means people will need to be able to follow your instructions and direction to get similar or better results than you are already getting. This demands the necessity of communicating the steps in process for accomplishing those tasks and goals. Since you can’t do everything in your business all the time and you probably don’t even want to do everything in your business that you’re already doing, you must start developing standard operating procedures for your employees or future employees. Why not start developing SOP’s early so you can not only create a predictable path for task completion, but also easily delegate the tasks when you reach the point where time is scarce?
Standard operating procedure provide stability for the workers doing the assignment. It clarifies the decisions they have to make the role they play and the outcome of the activity. Another benefit is once the process is standardized it can be approved upon. Or adapted. Just like recipes standard operating procedures are always being tweaked and improved. For example, in our house we use essentially the same “recipe“ for tacos for chicken tacos or beef tacos we just switch out some spices and the main ingredient and “Wala” you have a whole new item using a similar process. We’ve also improved it learning we like mild spices more than medium or hot spices in our tacos. If I was a worker and I asked you to make me tacos I would be able to share with you my process and you would be able to duplicate it almost exactly. If I didn’t have a recipe for tacos and just said make me tacos I would probably end up with something that is similar but not exact and maybe not to my exact specifications.
Standard Operating Procedures create predictable outcomes you can depend on
The Master SOP Template is the Cookbook for Your Business
Over the last several years I have enjoyed greatly making standard operating procedures and documents to delegate tasks to our employees. I have delegated things like the initial hiring interview, on boarding new clients, training new staff, and dealing with customer service complaints. Previously these instructions lived in emails and in a cluttered G-drive folder. If you knew where they were or you had saved it as a favorite you were good. However, as new employees were hired and old employees left the “search for it on the G-Drive” system stopped working. New employees did not know we had established procedures and they were hard to find. So they would either make it up for themselves or remain stuck, wasting precious time that could have been productive.
In the last year I learned to keep a master SOP document. This document allows me to update SOP’s quickly and distribute them seamlessly to the people who need it. It also became an automatic bookmark on the employee’s Chrome bookmark bar. Everyone can see the SOPs, review them anytime, and update them if they have permission. I used the ACDC outline from Run Like Clockwork to organize the various SOPs.
I would like to offer this SOP Master Sheet for you and a quick video on how to use it. It’s my gift to you for signing up for our business newsletter. Click the link below sign up for the newsletter and you will get our SOP master sheet as well as a video for some instructions on how to use it.
Keep dreaming keep doing.
MASTER SOP Template Instructions
