Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This is Season six, we're talking about management consulting. And today, specifically, I wanted to talk about Standard Operating Procedures.

It's a topic that people think is boring. But when you really know what SOPs are, you're going to find them empowering. I feel like some people will be attracted to listening to this out of curiosity, please stay with it. You will not believe how important these are. And some people are going to have seen the title Standard Operating Procedures and be like, “I'm out.” You will not imagine how would a big difference this can make in your business if you're not aware of what a big difference it can make in your business.

So that's what I'm going be talking about. Why we need them, what exactly SOPs are, what you can use SOPs for and how to get started with them. So first I became aware that there was such a thing as SOPs. I had a client several years ago and he had a thing he called the desk book. And it was basically this just gigantic tome of how to do every single thing in the business, like all of the things that we do. This is a recording of how to do each of those, you know, on different sheets of paper. So it was this gigantic thing desk book. And I loved this idea. And so with my team, I put together one. We kept the whole thing on Google Drive, but it was the same idea. It's like absolutely anything that you do in your business, write down how to do it.

Now, I've spoken before that I have a cooking background. And so for me, a lot of things will take the form of a recipe, like gather these ingredients. And then here's the step by step thing to follow. You may have more of like an IKEA furniture paradigm where you're like, this is how we put together this thing, gather these tools and then follow these steps and outcomes, a shelf or something. So whatever is your way of thinking about things, I'm going to share some ideas of what this could look like. That's the way you're going to create SOPs in your business.

SOPs can cover all kinds of stuff. And so the reasons why we do them are pretty specific.

The first thing is you create unbelievable leverage in your business with an S.O.P. This document, which just shows how something is done, takes information out of your head usually, usually you're the first person who is doing this, takes it out of your head and makes it something that you can delegate to a team member. You can also come back and reference it yourself. But the cool thing is somebody else can be doing that who isn't you.

Now, if you have somebody like a tech person or a finance person who came in and did something for you that needs to be done repeatedly, they too can make an S.O.P that people can follow. So you are leveraging the people on your team by pulling information out of them.

And that's the second cool thing that happens, is that you have centralized knowledge base of how things are done in your business. This can be a really big deal in certain organizations because like I've heard of my clients going into organizations where everybody is held hostage by this one bookkeeper who is the only person who knows how to close the books at the end of the month or something. And so and that person dies or gets hit by a bus. Then the whole organization is screwed. And imagine how powerful that person is right now. You don't want that situation in your business. And you might think, well, in my little business, it's just you can have a tech person who's the only person who knows how to do things on your website or a billing person who's the only person who knows how to do whatever. There should be nobody in your business, including you, who is the only person who knows how to do anything. So get all of that information out of yourselves and onto paper.

And the reason we do that is the third reason why we have a SOPs, and that is for consistent results. Things go wrong and we forget things all the time because we're trying to hold them in our head. Or maybe there's like a little piece of paper somewhere where some things have been scribbled down on it. Don't rely on any individual's memory because even things that you do day after day after day, you can forget just like a really big chunk of or a step from. And so having this piece of paper or Google doc that has got the steps on it is going to allow anybody in the organization to be able to do the thing. And that gets you those consistent results so we don't go, oops, forgot to send the client the gift for signing on because that's part of the procedures.

So that's that takes me into the next thing that I wanted to talk about, which is for what would we have SOPs. So everything is the short answer. But I where I really like to put them first is in places where you've ever forgotten what to do, left out of step or had to come back to it, or when you've been like, what do we do every time? So I mentioned client gifts. This is a really good example is client onboarding. When you sign on a new client, what happens? So in our situation, we set up billing, we send a client gift, we add them to a client portal, we might set up some milestones and meetings and recurring meetings and things like that, so there is a process that happens that is triggered by signing up of a new client. So I can write down the trigger for this thing and then I can write all of the stuff that needs to happen. Sometimes it needs to be sequential, and sometimes it's just like whoever does this, whenever this is, it needs to be done in this particular amount of time. So client onboarding is a good example.

Hiring person, when you bring on a new person, whether it's a full time employee or whether it's somebody that you've hired off of one of the job boards, you can have, you know, you're going to have a procedure for that. So, again, in our business, they sign an agreement with us. We set up their billing if it's not already done through Upwork or somewhere, we put them in our project management portal, we have them familiarize themselves with certain client work, etc.. Right.

So you hear that there are just these things, these processes that happen related to these things. Another one that you might identify with as well is events. So whether it's an actual live and in-person event, which, believe me, would have a lot of SOPs associated with it or some pretty voluminous ones even before a webinar or assume you might have an S.O.P, the reason that you would have that is if there's certain things that you need to do before you get on it. So I found that I was constantly and this is back in the day getting interrupted by a phone call. And I was like, OK, so we have a thing before the Zoom happens, which is a checklist of things that need to happen. So I've told family and animals that they need to be out of the room so all the critters are out of the room, family knows I'm on the phone or in this case on a video call. I've turned off the phone. I've put Do Not Disturb on the computer. So I don't have all these background calendar notification things happening, et cetera. Oh, also, by the way, run to the restroom, make sure you have a glass of water, check the front door. You know, there are certain things that you just want to have done before. I feel like a lot of people either wing that stuff or, you know, maybe they have like a little notepad thing or a sticky note on the computer. Go ahead and do a proper S.O.P for every single one of these. And then when you have team members or clients or invited guests. So, for example, if I had a guest who was attending today and we were doing an interview show then I could share that S.O.P with them and just say, hey, in case you don't have something like this, please, you know, run through these to make sure that we're not disturbed during the interview. Right. So events are a really big one. When I did this years ago, because whenever I traveled, I would forget my phone chargers. And so guess what? I made just a big checklist of things that needed to go into the suitcase. And when I'm returning, I can go through it and make sure I put a blank copy in there. I could fill that out on the way back. Now, that might be just a little too crazy for you, but I just got exhausted forgetting things like phone chargers and umbrellas. Just, you know, the dumbest stuff. Hotel socks. Don't you wear special socks in hotels? So you'd have to walk around barefoot and get those things on an S.O.P.

OK, so back to business client management. When you start working with a client, what are the first things that you do? So we've on boarded them right there in the CRM and stuff like that. But now we're doing the work. Now this is going to segway into your signature system, but nevertheless, you're going to have like how we set up the meetings and how we plan the travel and things like that. So make sure all of that is accounted for.

As you hear, every aspect of your business will have SOPs in it. From operations to finance to sales and marketing and all of the things. And so think comprehensively about it, but start with and this is where I start. Start with the pain, the things that are annoying you, where you have things that you forget or you're like, oh, my gosh, that person is leaving and when you just need to suck all of the information out of their brain before they go. So focus on the areas of urgency first and then you'll begin to build the habit of like every time you do something, you're like us. You know, we've just begun doing LinkedIn events and we're building an S.O.P for LinkedIn events. We've been onboarding clients for a long time. So we use that thing in the background. But mostly we have it memorized, but it's still running in the background.

So the three most common SOPs, like they can take all kinds of shapes, but really the most common ones that you're probably going to have and you've heard me refer to the recipe kind of thing. This is a step by step process that you do. It usually needs to be done in a sequential order. So that's, for example, I had I was saved by this desk book years ago because we had captured the process for sending an email through the email system that we used. You know, one of those CRM companies. Well, my team was away and I ended up having to be the one to send the thing. And I thought, oh, my gosh. Well, either we just don't send it all or I need to go figure this out. So to my credit, I can follow a list. I can follow a recipe. At least the first time I logged into the desk book, I logged into the CRM and I just followed the steps and it was perfect. It was like, do this step. I was like, did that step, came back, do this step, make sure this is unchecked, unchecked, like everything. It was just super simple to go step by step through the whole thing. That was because we had documented the processes and also we had gone back and tested the thing to make sure that when somebody else who isn't the person who wrote the stuff, he does it, that it can be followed. So I was able to follow it, send out the email, save the day. And it really saved my tushy that day as well. So a recipe style or IKEA instructions step by step is your first kind of S.O.P that you can write.

The second kind, as I mentioned, is a checklist, and I'm a huge fan of checklists because it bugs me when I forget things and it's so easy to remember them. One of my favorite examples from this from the book The Checklist Manifesto, which I'll put a link to it in the show notes, I loved this book. But they talked about how they created checklists for doctors in a hospital in Boston in order to prevent medical mistakes, which seems like such a great thing to do. Right. But the doctors were too arrogant to follow the checklist. So the nurses had to come in and be sure, like make sure you did the thing and go through the steps with them. So what I love about that is doctors don't even take a checklist when I do love about it is have a checklist and also follow the checklists. It seems like it goes without saying and apparently it doesn't. I had checklists for pre calls I mentioned before you get on a call, or webinar, packing when I mentioned, but we also use them for articles and emails. So what are all of the things that this email has to have? And it has to have a certain kind of, it has to have subject line, make sure that it has a salutation, make sure that the heading is in the thing. And then as you go through it, make sure that none of the paragraphs are less than or longer than this. It has the call to action stated no less than three times. It has a do you hear all of those elements? So we just wrote it in a checklist. It wasn't step by step like they didn't need to be in the order. I mean, they did need to be in the order in the email, but we could check it off in any order so we could just go through the checklist to make sure it had all of those things. And it was like, oh, it's forgetting the, you know, the hit reply or it's the footer at the bottom is missing or something. We could assess that and then send it back. But there was a checklist even for an artsy thing like an email.

And then the last thing, the last kind of S.O.P you can have is like a flowchart or a process model. And I think these are really good. And and I bring them up. For those of you in the audience who are like, I'm not that kind of a thinker. I don't think in those things, I think in visuals. So this is your place to come in and be like, here's how this thing needs to happen, is as a process that you lay out and you'll see process maps like this, particularly in our kinds of businesses for like a sales funnel. So it goes from like here's the website, the opt in on the website, and then that goes over to it puts them on this list. If they take this action, then this email is sent and then this thing happens from there. So that whole process map of how we follow up, it can also be like, for example, a webinar funnel and or a book funnel where, you know, they sign up for this thing here and then they get, et cetera. So that process map can work for that's an example of one for a sales and marketing process, you can also have a process map for work with your clients, organizing your team, making anything happen. So in our business, we have process maps for example, by the time something arrives on social media, it will have had it will have gone through a really long process through other people. So it starts with me originating content like this podcast. And then from there, it's going to go to my editors who will edit the podcast, create graphics. Someone on my team will do show notes, they'll do descriptions and call outs. And then it's you know, you hear that this goes back and forth among people until it goes out into the world. There is a process map that is followed for that and as things bounce between people. So that's something that you can have in your business, and it's nice to have a visual of that, if you're the kind of person who thinks in terms of visuals and that kind of thing in front of you would really help you to track it.

So that is pretty much everything you need to know about standard operating procedures to get started or go a little further and using them in your business. So your three steps I would have you take our first of all, identify processes that need SOPs. I would start with the ones that are, you know, maybe there's something that you keep forgetting to do. And if you just would remember that your life would be easier and better or something that you're like, I am tired of doing this task or this job or this project, and I really want to let it go and give it to someone else. Those would be things to create SOPs around a really easy way to create enough space to hire that person who's going to do that job and have them interview out of you what that process is. That way, you're not writing it. You're kind of teaching it as you go and they're writing down the steps as you do it. Then you can prove the process, meaning you test it over and over again and you refine it and go, we forgot to step here, or actually we don't really need to do this. And that way you end up with a wonderful final result. So first, identify what those processes would be. Second, write the S.O.P and then third, store it somewhere in a collected place. So like in Google Drive, where you have all of them, or maybe in Dropbox, somewhere in a shared location where everybody can access it.

As I mentioned on our hacking episode, important documents sometimes deserve to be printed out. So you might want to have an actual physical copy of some of those SOPs and maybe the whole thing, like once a quarter you might print the whole thing out. But in general, that is the beginning of having your own desk book, the guide to how to do anything and everything in your business.

So I would be super interested in hearing from you about your SOPs. And if you'd like to see an example of one, then contact me through any of my social channels, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, and just request an example of a Standard Operating Procedure and maybe what you want might want that one to look like. And I'll be happy to share one with you.

So with that, I am wishing you that you would make life lighter for yourself by getting this knowledge out of your head, out of the heads of the people, on your team and onto paper, whether it's virtual or physical. And I'm wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business.