It’s always easy to just carry on performing the activities without documenting it or educating someone

else to do it. Especially founders and senior managers thought process will be something down the lines

of
1.  “I know better than anyone else, no one can perform this task”
2. “I can quickly perform this activity within 10-15 minutes rather than spending 2 to 4 hours
documenting/explaining the process to someone.”
3. “I wouldn’t ask my people to do anything that I wouldn’t do.”

If you want to scale your business and make it into a process-oriented organization, you need to come

out of the above thought process.

Any complicated tasks need to be split into smaller tasks so it can be performed by anyone without

knowing too many dependant systems. The tasks that might look small 10-15 minutes will all quickly add

up and eat your day.

Example: a real cost of a 15 minutes task will be over 45 mins, time allocation on both sides of the task,

and the cost of context switching. Soon you’ll be bombarded with too many such 10-15 minutes tasks.

It’s always better to create the SOP, train, and empower your team and then to step back.

SOPs first identify and summarize a task, describe its purpose, and specify when and by whom it is to be

performed while simultaneously defining uncommon or specialized terms and addressing potential

concerns (e.g., necessary equipment, health, and safety, etc.).

They then describe the sequential procedures to be followed, often utilizing activity checklists and graphic

illustrations (e.g., charts, tables, photographs, diagrams, etc.) to help ensure that the procedures are

being performed accurately and in order.

Also Read: 10 Top Standard Operating Procedure Software (SOP) for 2023

Bring SOPs as Organisation culture

Any business should build the culture of running the business in a more systematic and process-driven

way despite the size of the organization. The sooner you bring this culture into your organization your

business will get streamlined and scale.

It’s easier said than done, but you can take baby steps and gradually improve the culture of constantly

transforming the activities into processes.

Imagine every quarter you pick up a set of repeated activities you wanted to document and convert it into

Standard Operating Procedures. Bring this culture across all of your departments Admin Operations,

Recruitment, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Engineering.

Let’s imagine you don’t have any SOPs, this could be your first quarter initiative, just start with 2-3 SOP’s

for each department and bring it as a culture in the organization to continuously look at what activities

people are doing in each department and document it.