SOP DocumenTation
Get it out of their head and onto paper.
The business runs on things nobody wrote down
Every small business has a handful of people who just know how things work. How to close out the month. What to do when a particular vendor is late. Which steps in the ordering process actually matter and which ones are leftover from three years ago.
That's fine until one of them takes a vacation, or gets sick, or leaves. Then you find out how much of your business was running on one person's memory.
It's also why hiring feels harder than it should. You can't hand someone a job that only exists in your head, so training becomes months of shadowing and correcting, and the new person learns a slightly different version than the last one did.
Nobody plans for this. Writing it down is never the most urgent thing, until suddenly it is.
Somebody else has to do the writing
The reason your SOPs don't exist isn't that you don't know how the work gets done. It's that the people who know are busy doing it, and documenting a process you perform automatically is genuinely hard. You skip steps without realizing, because they've stopped being steps to you.
So I do the writing. I sit with the people doing the job, watch the work, and ask the questions that surface the parts they've stopped noticing. Then I walk it back through them to catch what I missed, and hand you something usable.
Sometimes the writing turns up the real problem: there isn't one process, there are three, and nobody's ever decided which is right. When that happens we stop and sort it out, because documenting three versions of the same task just makes the confusion official.
The shortest thing that works
Most SOPs fail because they're too long to use. A forty-page binder isn't documentation, it's a filing problem, and everyone goes back to asking the person who knows.
What you want is the shortest thing that actually works. A checklist. A one-pager. A short sequence with the decisions called out and the exceptions noted. Something a new hire can follow on their second day, and something your most experienced person can glance at when they're covering a task that isn't usually theirs.
That means being disciplined about what goes in. Every step that doesn't need to be there makes the document less likely to get opened, and a document nobody opens is the same as no document at all.
What this Usually Includes
Sitting with the people who do the work
Documenting the process as it actually happens
Writing checklists, one-pagers, and step sequences
Flagging the decision points and who makes them
Noting the exceptions and what to do about them
Vendor and contact details attached to the steps that need them
Reviewing it with the team to catch what's missing
Setting it up somewhere findable, in a format you can update
Why me
I spent three and a half years at a marketing and PR agency and finished as Director of Traffic and Operations. A good chunk of that job was exactly this. Everyone was using the same tools in their own way, which held up fine until it didn't, usually three months later when nobody could reconstruct what had happened or why. I wrote the SOPs that got people working the same way, and built the onboarding system we used for new hires.
The skill isn't the writing. It's asking the right questions of someone who's stopped seeing their own process.
Before that I spent years in hotels and restaurants, where processes get written for people working a double on a Saturday night. That's a good standard to hold onto. If it isn't clear enough to follow when you're busy and tired, it isn't clear enough.
What Comes Next
Who Owns What
Writing down how the work happens usually surfaces a second question: who's actually responsible for each piece. That's its own conversation.
What would be hard to hand off?
Tell me which part of your business would stall if one specific person were out for two weeks. That's usually the right place to start.