Why Documenting Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) Matters for Businesses of ALL Sizes

When running a small business, it’s easy to overlook the value of documenting your day-to-day processes. You’re busy, everyone else is busy, so it just never feels like the most important task to tackle. Even if you want to, there’s always something more pressing in the moment.

I’ve been there.

I also get that one of the main benefits of running a small business is the lack of strict processes and red tape. It keeps you agile and fluid. Let’s just get it done! But trust me – coming from a background of working in startup environments – documenting what you do isn’t busy work, and it isn’t red tape. It can actually help you eliminate it.

Think about it.

There are a lot of procedures you (and potentially your team) do every day — things you may not even think about. Things that would make it hard to bring someone new in, because they’d have to spend a lot of time picking each person’s brain to put it all together. Even once they feel like they have a handle on it, the trial and error process continues, because they don’t know what they don’t know.

So let’s talk about making documentation easy, and why I recommend it for small businesses (even solopreneurs!).

Documentation for Growth

Why would you want to spend time documenting small processes? Let’s imagine a day comes when you realize you need help ASAP:

• A team member suddenly requires a leave of absence, and you have to find last-minute temporary help.
• A great opportunity for a new client or project pops up and you find yourself crunched for time, not sure how or what to delegate without letting balls drop left and right.
• You finally decide to bring someone in, but they feel like more of a burden than a help because of how much work you’ll have to do to get them up to speed. This causes you to hold onto tasks and underutilize their talent (in other words, you’re wasting the money you pay them, and make them less likely to stick around).

It takes a lot of time to identify, recruit and onboard the right person, so imagine you finally find them and realize that your processes – the ones that exist within the heads of you and your team – are not easy to explain to someone else.

Documentation for Efficiency

And hiring isn’t the only reason you should more seriously consider documentation. I’ve avoided many mistakes by creating process flows for tasks I handle alone, because it allowed me to:

• Identify redundancies and unnecessary steps.
• Create a paper trail for the things I do less often (on a monthly or annual basis, for example) so I don't have to ‘relearn’ it every time.
• Recall that one tool I used to help me automate a process, but I couldn’t remember what I created that one field for when I tried to retrace my steps a few weeks later…

By solidifying the things you do each day, you can identify unnecessary back-and-forth and make processes more efficient. The more you habitualize, the less effort you need to put in. Don’t let a lack of preparation set you back, when the preparation work takes so little time in the first place.

SOP Basics

Let’s explore the basics of a useful SOP — what to include, how to document efficiently, and how to use that documentation to your advantage.

• Task Overview: Give a quick definition/overview of the process. Keep it to a sentence or two, like: “Onboarding a new client in our CRM” or “Writing an SEO-friendly article”
• Objective: If it wasn’t clear in the overview, add a quick objective. What is the purpose of this task? Why is it important to the business?
• Key Steps: The step-by-step instructions to get from the beginning of this task to the end. Make it simple by using bullet points or a numbered list.
• Cautionary Notes: What mistakes have you made doing this task? Let someone else benefit from this knowledge, even if it’s something simple like, “Don’t answer the popup question, or it will open a slow-to-load window. Just click the ‘X’ in the corner.” Or, “Don’t forget to change the ‘From’ email to [email protected] instead of your personal email.”
• Tips for Efficiency: Is there anything you’ve found that makes the work better or easier? Like a checklist to help them review their work on this process.
• Consider Screen Recording: For online tasks, like a process walkthrough on? your CRM, it’s a good practice to record yourself doing the process with brief narration. This can be a really efficient way to make sure you don’t leave anything out. Try a free recording software like Loom to make it easy.

Once you have your processes outlined like this, you’ll need a way to organize them.?

In my experience, it’s best to use a tool that lets you tag multiple attributes to each document (like a CRM or Notion, for example). That way, you don’t lose an SOP by having it under a folder that doesn’t always make sense (for example, saving a “Customer Onboarding” procedure under the “Sales” folder instead of the “CRM” folder, even though that process touches both categories).?

Document to Complement

I get it – it seems unnecessary to document processes that you and your team handle from start to finish, especially if you only see yourself handling them moving forward too. But trust me when I tell you that there’s a lot of freedom in documentation. Creating an effective library of procedures will ease the onboarding of new employees, ensure a consistent approach, assure regulatory compliance, provide a standard against which employees can be measured and complement your overall efficiency.??

Now that you know what to include, how to save it, and why it’s important, consider setting aside some time to catalog aspects of your business process.? The benefits are real and the time it takes is well spent.?