Are you built for the long haul or a specific person? Answer these questions to find out.

• Are you prepared when a team member is on vacation or home with a sick kiddo to complete any must do items?
• If you were having to step into a process that you don’t typically do, would you know how to do?  
• Does the entire team know how to do standard processes like reimbursement submissions or vendor payment requests?  
• Have you ever built a process around a single person and not for the longevity of the business?  

If you have any real pause on these items, then I highly suggest starting to think about how you would proceed and what standard processes you have in place that you need to communicate more broadly.  We hear a lot about Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) but what if we swapped a word and called it a Sustainable Operating Procedure?  Thinking about building a process, policy or a procedure for one person or a small team may look different than when you have five or more people.  

Documenting a standard operating procedure and thinking about a plan for the long term needs to involve a more strategic mindset.  For example, if you have allowed employees to purchase items on their personal credit cards and they need reimbursed, it is so easy to pay them via Zelle or Venmo but is that a process that is sustainable for you and anyone you may hire on your team to collaborate for operational items?   Probably not, thinking about a consistent, repeatable process is very important for building core building blocks that will allow you to scale your business.  

Think about it: if you must stop and Zelle an employee because you are the only one with banking access versus building a submission process and delivering that reimbursement on their next payroll allows another teammate to have ownership.  You may think “well this only takes me 5 minutes so it’s not that big of a deal.” However, if you repeat that process and multiply it with all the processes that have to involve you, then you probably are taking a chunk of the day just to these quick 5 minutes tasks and suddenly you are completely derailed from the work that only you can do.  🤯

So let’s talk about how we can create and document these processes.  

Creating a new Sustainable Operating Procedure

1. Who needs to be involved?  
2. Is this for a specific person or for the business and its growth?
3. How can I streamline the work and ensure it doesn’t touch many people or require unnecessary work for the team? 
4. Spell it out!  And talk about it with the entire team.  You can never over communicate!!  If you or a team member created a process that needs followed for the efficiency of the business, then shout it out!!!!  Or even better … use my favorite platform for teaching, communicating, and documenting processes.  Loom!

In fact, I love this platform so much that I made you a little video so you can see how it works.  I highly encourage you to pay for the additional AI service so it will document (AKA write) the SOP for you.  Yes, this is for real.  

Check this out and let me know what you think!

Here is the written SOP for this video so you can see what it looks like.  If you need help to implement new processes, please contact us.