Why Your Business Needs SOPs
Disclaimer: I love SOPs and they are one of my favorite things to create. Having a “bible” for your business is key to its efficiency and consistency.
If you’re a solopreneur or a small business with 1-2 employees, you may not have considered documenting your processes or creating standard operating procedures. In fact, maybe you’re so fresh in your business that you don’t even know your standard operating procedures yet.
Let me give you five reasons why you need them, no matter what stage of your business you’re in:
Create consistency. No matter what part of your business we’re talking about, you want to do the same task the same way every time. This will create a unified look and feel to your business for both you and your customers. You probably have a brand guide which guides all of your decisions for your website, social media, communications, and collateral, so why wouldn’t you have something similar for your internal processes? When there are tasks or projects that don’t need to be done every single day, it’s easy to do them slightly differently every time or feel like you have to relearn the process each time, but if you have an SOP to reference then you’ll skip this feeling.
Provides a path towards improvement and innovation within your business. How can you improve a process that you don’t even have? Every time I’ve had an idea to change a process and create more efficiency, it’s because I was following a process already in place. You need to have a starting point in order to build.
To know what needs to be done and when. There are some things within your business that happen at a set time of day, week, or month on a regular basis. Think about invoicing, statement creation, client check-ins, bank account reconciliation, blog posts, social media posts, just to name a few. When you have your processes set and know the schedule, you don’t have to wonder how and when these things will happen. You already know.
Know who is doing what. This won’t apply until you’ve hired an employee or outsourced some work, but when you do that you will want to be very clear on who is responsible for what within your business. Who is writing posts? Who is paying bills? Who is depositing checks? Who is updating your internal client tracker? Who is archiving communications? Whatever the task or project, you need to know exactly who is responsible so that you don’t spend mental energy or time figuring it out every time.
Cut down on training and ramp up time. Nothing will ever replace human interaction and collaboration, particularly during an onboarding process (whether with an employee or a contractor). But, picture a world where you hire someone and you can say “here are our SOPs, please take whatever time you need to review them and then we’ll go over everything together.” This immediately gives this person the understanding that you have a handle on your business and processes and provides them with a reference point.
Have I converted you to the idea of needing SOPs in your business now?
Want to have a clear picture of all of the pieces of running your business, but aren’t sure where to start? Do you have a few employees and want to make sure that you have all of the necessary things in place for your business operations? Take a look at my free Operations Audit Workbook to give you a starting point. PS - filling this out in its entirety will get you started on creating your own SOPs for your business.
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