EP 218 SOP Magic: The Secret Sauce to Streamlining Your Business!

Do you dread creating SOPs?

Not just writing them, but also there's this SOP graveyard of all the past SOPs that you've written that no one ever looks at and now your processes have changed and it doesn't really matter that you spent all this time creating all those SOPs.

Well, if that sounds like something that you've struggled with in the past, I have new magic wand that I'm going to wait for you to show you how that won't happen in your business again.

This is great for business owners if you are building your own SOPs, but especially for my friends that are operations professionals, that you are in charge of making sure that a business's SOPs are up to date and are also not sucking all of your time.

You're in the right place.

We're going to be talking about all of this and you want to make sure you stay to the end because I have a nifty little trick that's going to show you how to make sure your SOP is always stay up to date.

If you are new to our channel, my name is Brooke Elder.

I run a community called the Ops Yacht Club where we help operations professionals go from doing to leading.

So if you are interested in becoming a member free member of our community, you can join us@theopsyachtclub.com the link is in the description.

Before we dive into the exact process of creating an sop, first let's talk about what needs to be inside an sop.

The first thing is we need to know the purpose.

It's so important to know why you have to do this process.

And this is something that has really, really been like just engraving into the way that I create SOPs.

Because if you don't let people know why they're doing something, they're not going to know why it actually is important.

I was working with a company and we were creating all the SOPs and there was one of the coaches that was supposed to fill out a form once they were done with one of their one on one coaching.

Sounds pretty simple.

Wrote an SOP for it, gave it to her, and then after about 14 calls that she had, I went back and looked at and she had not filled out any of the forms.

So I talked with her and I said, hey, why aren't these forms filled out?

And she's like, I didn't know that it was really that important.

Well, that form was the key to trigger all the other deliverables in this offer.

And so because she didn't understand the Purpose of filling out a form.

She didn't know that it was the thing that was now holding up all of the clients from getting all the deliverables that the company had promised.

So when I let her know how important this really was, she was like, oh my gosh, I am so sorry.

I will make sure that I won't miss this again.

So understanding the purpose is so key to make sure that not just you, but anyone that you're hiring, anyone on your team, they understand the importance of doing this role.

It also helps them to feel like they have more buy in.

They really own this task and it they know the reason why they need to be doing it.

So purpose is really important.

That's the first part.

Second part is the procedure, what actually is you're supposed to be doing on this task.

So this is where you're going to have the step one, step two, all the way through all, all the different things that need to be done.

That seems pretty self explanatory.

The third thing that we want to have is a list of resources.

So is there anything else that they need in order to accomplish this task?

What things do they need to have access to?

This is also where I will include a loom video of the exact process.

So that way you have it written two ways.

You have it where it's all written down step by step of exactly what to do.

You, you have a video that they can watch and see how it's actually done and they also have a transcript.

So you have lots of different ways.

So you're hitting all the different learning styles.

This is going to help your team be able to actually accomplish this task that you're giving them by creating an SOP like that.

So your resources has the things they need access to.

It has your loom video.

Then we get into our fourth piece.

This is the frequently asked questions.

This is a great section for what if something doesn't work the way that you think that it does?

Because we all know not every system works exactly the same exactly every single time.

So frequently asked questions are a good place to come up with what are some alternatives?

What if this doesn't work?

What if you don't have a piece of the puzzle that you need in order to accomplish this task?

All of those things are going to be there.

I'm going to show you how you can create a very thorough but very quickly made sop.

So let's dive right in.

First up we have our loom video.

So this is a process that I recorded how to get on Podcasts.

So this is.

We're creating an SOP for this inside Loom.

I recorded this.

And then we have.

Here we have our transcripts.

So here is the transcript of that process.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to go into Claude and inside Claude, this is what we're going to use to write our SOPs.

You can use ChatGPT or if you like, Gemini.

I find that Claude just does writing a lot better.

So I use cloud for a lot of what I'm doing.

You could also test this out in cloud and also in Chat, GPT or Perplexity, whatever one you want to use and see what results you like best.

But for me in testing, I like Claude.

So that's the one that I'm using.

Now we have a prompt of how to craft this sop.

This prompt, if you want it, it's going to be inside the Ops Yacht Club, so it's free to join.

You just go to OPS Yacht Club.com, become a member.

And then you're going to go to the Resources tab and then there is a section called AI Prompts, and that's where this is going to be.

So I'm going to put the prompt in here.

Then once we have our prompt, we need to have our transcript.

So I'm going to come here to transcript, hit copy and then I'm just going to paste our transcript.

Now, this is taking everything that we just talked about and it is creating our SOP right here.

So it tells us our purpose, so we don't have to think of a purpose.

A lot of the times when I am creating an sop, I think about that.

When I'm recording the loom video, I will say, this is why this is important.

So that way it lets Claude know what the purpose is.

But we have the purpose created here.

Now we have the procedure, so it's walking through all the steps.

Then it also gives us our expected outcome.

So this is also good to like to make sure that you're doing it right.

This is what good looks like.

So I like having that in at the very bottom of the procedures.

Here's the resources that you're going to need.

And then it automatically comes up with frequently asked questions.

This is the only part that you.

Well, I mean, read through all of it to make sure that it's correct.

But this is the part where you want to look through and make sure whatever the frequently asked questions that it comes up with, that answers is actually correct.

That is the thing that you want Someone to do.

So this is the only part where sometimes Claude comes up with ideas and I'm like, no, that is not what we're going to do.

But I didn't think about that question.

So it's good to have that question in there, but it may not be the exact answer that you would do for your business.

So once we have that, we can grab all of this and then I'm going to show you where we are going to have this SOP live for this.

I love ClickUp.

ClickUp is a great place to store all of your SOPs, and I use tasks to create my SOPs.

Now, I know that you can do documents and there's lots of different things.

You can create wikis and everything inside ClickUp.

But I'm going to show you why I like tasks the best.

So here under sops, I have a list that will list out all the sops of how to do things.

Then when I'm creating a task for someone on my team to do that, I can link it back to this SOP task.

So here is, we're going to put the name of our sop.

So this is how to get on podcasts.

There's our SOP here.

I'm going to open up this task, and then here in the description right here, it says add a description.

I'm just going to paste everything that we just talked about.

So again, if there's anything in the Frequently asked Questions that you need to change, this is what you would do to change that up.

But we have our nice SOP all written in here.

That tells us our purpose.

If you want to change the formatting up a little bit, you can do that.

Here's the procedure of what to do.

Then the last thing under Resources, what I would do is I would come back to my loom, grab the link to that and just do a paste here, and it will automatically add it as a preview.

So the resource, the video is the resource that we want to put here and then whatever we need access to.

All right, now that is done.

We have our sop.

It's all written.

Everything is good to go.

But let me show you the secret.

This is how you're going to make sure that all of your SOPs always stay up to date.

There are two things that we still need to do with this SOP.

One is we need to give it an assignee.

So who are we going to assign this to?

This is going to be the person who's doing the task.

So whoever that is, we're going to assign them.

So I'm going to go ahead and assign it to me that I am doing the task so I have it assigned to me.

The next thing is we need to give it a due date.

The due date is going to tell us.

All right?

Remember this SOP that we just created?

I want you to go back and look at it and make sure that is still the process that you are following.

So every single person on your team should know this process of how to create an sop, because they are going to be in charge of keeping their sops up to date.

This way, it's not just one person that's sitting in a room by themselves just writing SOPs, and that's all they do.

You are going to have your whole team is creating SOPs so your processes are documented and everything is working the way that it's supposed to.

Then there's no questions.

If there is questions, there's the frequently asked questions.

They can go to and go and see what the answers are there.

But it's going to help the business run so much smoother because everyone knows what it is that they're doing.

So for a due date, I'm just going to grab this and if it is a.

A task that, like, this is a new thing, we haven't really done this this much.

I'm going to look and say, you know what, let's put this out like maybe three months.

So maybe the beginning of November, that's when we're going to look at this.

If this is a process that we've been doing for a long time, and I don't think it's going to change that much, then you can push it out six months even.

Sometimes some of my processes that I know are really not going to change.

I will set them out a year in advance.

So it just depends on how much you've been doing that and how.

How much you think that that process is going to be changing.

If it's something that's brand new and you're just barely creating something new.

If you have worked with any business owners or entrepreneurs who are visionary, you know that within three months, the business could look totally different because they have all these different ideas, or maybe they're not going to be doing that anymore.

If it's one of those types of tasks, then you want to make sure that you are putting the due date pretty close to where you are now.

So maybe 30 days out, 60 days out, so you can be checking that process and making sure nothing has changed.

This also makes it so when you have a new hire there's not like oh well we actually don't do it like that anymore.

You have a process that is set up that has been proven and that people are updating whenever things change and they are in charge of those SOPs and this also is going to help them really feel valued as a member of your team because they are in charge of making sure that the processors are working to keep the business flowing.

This is a quick way that you can get SOPs done very fast inside your business.

You can start systematizing all the things that you're doing and your team is gonna go know exactly what it is that they need to do in order to get their jobs done.

I'd love to hear in the comments what kind of SOPs you are working on right now.

What are some of the things that you could see yourself using in your own business.

Let me know in the comments below and keep thinking strategically.