Creating Standard Operating Procedures
Every recurring task in your business should be documented well enough that you could hire someone tomorrow and have them executing it by Friday.
Why SOPs matter (especially in service businesses)
If only you know how to quote a job, schedule a route, restock the truck, handle a customer complaint, or close out the books on Friday — your business can't function for a single day without you. That's not a business, that's a job with an LLC.
Good SOPs are how you turn the second into the first. They're what lets you take a vacation. They're what lets you hire someone and have them productive in days, not months. They're what makes your business sellable, if you ever want to exit.
The 50-page binder is a trap
Most SOP advice tells you to write everything down comprehensively. That gets you a 50-page binder that nobody opens. Your goal is the opposite: each SOP should be the shortest possible document that lets a competent person execute the task correctly.
For most tasks, that's 5–10 bullet points and a screenshot. Sometimes a 2-minute video. Almost never more than a page of text.
The SOP template that actually gets used
Each SOP gets these five fields, no more:
- Title — what task this covers, in plain English
- When to use this — the trigger that should make someone reach for this SOP
- What 'done' looks like — the specific output, with a screenshot or example
- Steps — numbered, action-verb-first, ideally under 10
- Common pitfalls — 2–3 things that go wrong with this task and how to avoid them
What to document first
Don't try to document everything at once. Make a list of every recurring task in your business — anything you or someone on your team does more than once a month. Order it by: most frequent, most error-prone, and most painful when done wrong.
Then document the top 5 from that list. That's usually enough to absorb 60–80% of the operational chaos. The rest can come over time.
Where to put them
Wherever your team will actually open them. If you live in Google Workspace, that's a shared Google Doc folder. If you're on Microsoft 365, it's SharePoint or OneDrive. If you use an FSM platform like Jobber or Housecall Pro, the customer-facing job descriptions inside the platform can double as SOPs. Don't buy a dedicated "SOP software." It's a wrapper around shared documents you're already paying for.
Whatever you pick, make sure: (1) people can find the SOP from their phone, (2) you can update it without re-printing, (3) the most recent version is always the version they see, and (4) they're searchable by task name.
Maintaining SOPs without it becoming a second job
Set a quarterly review on your calendar. Pull up each SOP, ask: "is this how we actually do this now?" If yes, leave it. If no, either update the SOP or fix the way it's being done. Don't let drift accumulate — outdated SOPs are worse than no SOPs, because they breed cynicism about the whole system.
Talk to UpEngine
Trying to systematize so the business can run without you? We help with marketing systems specifically — talk to us if that's the angle.