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Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
Create SOP's With AI (That Your Team Actually Uses) with Dr. Shannon Irvine
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Foreign. Welcome to the Epic Success Podcast. I AM your host, Dr. Shannon Ervin. On the Epic Success Podcast, we unpack the neuroscience of success and really help you become a hardwired CEO and also hardwire your business to scale. All right, this is what we're doing here on the Epic Success Podcast. So glad you're here. Have you ever spent hours writing beautiful SOPs or recording process videos for your team and then your team just doesn't use them right? You're still answering all the same questions that you put in the SOPs. You're still jumping on to the same tasks. You're still the person that people come to when something breaks, even though you know there's an SOP for it. So you think, okay, I'll use AI, problem solved. Except now you just have a longer, less accurate SOP that still lives in a folder that no one opens. Today I want to show you how to use AI to create SOPs fast from a simple loom or zoom recording. And even more important than that, how to structure them so your team actually uses them and work finally comes off of your plate. Can I get an amen to that if we haven't met before? My name is Dr. Shannon Irvin. I am a business owner for over 20 years. I'm the author of the best selling book the 67 Day Year and I help business owners like you build self scaling companies. This is businesses that hit their numbers and grow without the owner being glued to the day to day slack and email. I've seen both ends. I've seen clients with giant SOP binders and loom libraries that no one uses and clients who finally get their time back once SOPs are short, skimmable and built with their team. I've had seasons where I had tons of documentation and I still felt like the human brain of the business. The human SOP for everything. And it took 90% of my day. So by the end of this video you'll know a simple record once AI to SOP workflow you can use today for any repeatable process. Plus how to get your team to actually love using them. Let's go. Right, so let's start with the easy win. How to create a solid first draft SOP in one pass using AI without spending hours staring at a blank Google document. All right, here's the first step. Step number one is to pick the right process. Don't start with the most complex thing in the business. Start simple. Right? You're going to want to pick a repeatable procedural task that happens weekly or monthly that impacts revenue or delivery and that you want off your plate in the next 30 to 60 days. For example, maybe it's sending the weekly newsletter or prepping YouTube upload or processing refunds. Now, before I go into step number two, I'm going to be a full disclosure. I think the biggest myth in business is to create SOPs for everything. I think that's a colossal waste of your time. We want to create SOPs for any of the key outcomes that affect revenue, that affect delivery of what we say we're going to do and affect profit. If it's not touching one of those threes, like how to get up and go to the bathroom, please don't record it as an sop. Okay, I know I just jested a little bit, but the reality is I can tell you how many people I have heard that buy these operations programs or buy certain kinds of meeting structures and the stuff literally sits on their shelf. It's a heartbreak, right? So I'm going to ask you not to do that. Okay, on to step number two. So step number two, I want you to record yourself doing it with narration like narrate out loud. Use any tool that gives you a video plus a transcript, whether it's loom or Google Meet or Zoom. We use loom the business level. As you do this task for real, narrate like this. Step one, open X. Step two, check Y. Step three, if A happens, do B. If not, do C. The goal here is to capture what you actually do and why you do it and why you think that way or the all those little decisions that you take for granted. And then step number three, get the transcript. Once done, export or copy the transcript from your tool. If you're unsure how to do that, just Google how to export transcript from tool. Almost all have it built in now. Thank you, AI. Step number four is you're going to feed that transcript and instructions and into AI of choice like open chat, GPT, whatever you like. And then a high level prompt will detail that in the next segment is simple. We're going to ask it to create a short skimmable SOP for my team following these format rules and then paste that structure guidelines into the AI. And after that paste your transcript. And then step number five, you're just going to review and lightly edit. You're checking for obvious mistakes. I makes them missing links, steps that don't match how you actually want it done. 5 to 10 minutes max. Keep this editing tight and do not turn it into a novel. Those don't get used by your team. Okay, now this week I want you to pick one process that impacts revenue or delivery that you want off your plate. Record yourself doing it once with all the reasons and thinking behind it. Grab the transcript and save it somewhere. You've already done the hardest part right then and there. Next we'll tell AI how to turn that into an SOP your team will actually use. So now I want to talk about what to tell your AI so your SOPs don't really suck. Okay? If you just paste transcripts into ChatGPT or AI and say make an SOP, you'll probably get back a bureaucratic document that looks like, like it belongs in a 10,000 person company. Company or the government. Your team will never use it. Let's fix that. Okay, so the core principle here is your SOP should be built for the person doing it, not for impressing leaders and not for perfection. What makes an AI generated SOP usable is it's short, it's skimmable, clear sections with bold headers, numbered steps, not paragraphs. No one will read a paragraph role based like written for the person doing the work. For example, like as the marketing assistant, you will. And it keeps going from there. Right? The SOP starts with this. SOP is used when. And it ends with a you're done when checklist. There's a checklist, right? And links over long descriptions here I want you to link to tools, templates, to examples. Don't explain every little bit. And then you also want to have exceptions noted. Really simple language. If X happens, do Y. If not, skip to step Z. So here is a sample prompt skeleton. It's a simple structure that you can give AI before you paste in your transcript. You're helping me write a short clear SOP for my team. The audience is role and level, like marketing assistant with basic tech skills. The format here I want title, the purpose, so two to three sentences of when to use this. The inputs, what they will need before starting links, logins, info. A step by step numbered process that is short sentences here and no tables. Exceptions if then rules. So if you're done when, here's the three to five bullet points that you must check off. That's how they know they're done. And you want to write it in simple conversational language. Make it easy to skim, use headlines and bullets and numbers, avoid long paragraphs and and corporate jargon and no tables please. And then paste the transcript in after it. So take the transcript you've recorded or your team member or leader has Recorded and paste in a simple set of structured rules like this before it and let AI draft the SOP, then adjust 5 to 10% so it matches how you really want it run. Now you have an SOP and minutes instead of hours and it's what you actually want done versus perfection or concepts that don't make sense. So if you're thinking this is exactly what I need in my business, I need my team to actually own the outcomes. And you really want the prompted structure that I use. That's what I'm giving away in my live self scaling Business Diagnostic. When you register for the diagnostic and show up live, you'll get my AI SOP creator, the prompt and the format we use with clients so that you can drop in a transcript and get back the SOPs and the right structure for your team. The link for the self scaling Business Diagnostic is below this video. So now let's talk about why SOPs still get ignored even when they're written. Well, because we actually have to have the team use them for them to be valuable. That's why sometimes operations and operation systems don't work if we don't do what I'm about to talk about. So AI can help you create SOPs fast, but if you don't fix these issues, you'll just seriously have prettier documents that nobody looks at. And that's maddening. And you probably already experienced that because I did too before we created this operating system. So here are the three to four key reasons and the fixes for that. So the number one reason that people don't use SOPs is they're invisible or they're scattered in multiple locations. So the problem here is they live in random places. A drive and a loom, folders, buried tool. The team doesn't even either know they exist or they're way too complicated. So the fix Here is pick one spice cabinet, one place for SOPs, whether it's ClickUp notion drive folder Monday and in the short term link the SOP directory in the task. So if you're still giving them tasks over outcomes, which I'd like to help you with in building the right system to stop doing that. But what we want to do is link the SOP directly in that task. If there is a task to send the newsletter, that SOP link needs to live inside that tasks inside your project management system. If they can't find it in 10 seconds, they won't use it. That's what's been stopping it. Okay, reason number two, they don't use them is SOPs aren't actually helpful for the doer. The problem here is they're written at a wrong level. A lot of times we write them from this ivory tower. It's either too detailed or overwhelming, or it's so vague that you. They're like, read my mind and figure this out. Like reading a corporate policy, right? Often it's written by us as leaders who don't actually do the task daily. So the fix here, this is huge. Let the doers create or refine the SOPs. So have them, the person who's actually doing the doing, record themselves doing the task. Let AI draft and let them edit it for reality. What do we miss? What's confusing and make it clear. This is for you to make your job easier, not to micromanage you. It's for you to be able to have people underneath you, to be able to support you. Right? The effect here is that ownership of outcomes actually goes up and resistance actually goes down. The third reason the SOPs aren't trusted or updated, so they seem irrelevant. The team used an SOP once, but it was out of date, so they stopped using it and they stopped trusting it. Culture treats SOPs like sacred static documents instead of evolving living breathing tools. That's the shift, right? So the fix here is treat SOPs like a shared workbench, not a holy text wherever they live. Enable comments if something is wrong or unclear, comment right on the SOP and make the change yourself. Make updating part of the job. If a doer discovers a better way, they flag it and help become the person that updates the sop. So it's a workbench. It's always changing. It's not stagnant. So a good enough and current SOP beats a perfect but outdated one every time, hands down. All right, bonus. Reason number four, SOPs aren't used is SOPs are too long to reopen. Everything is memorized. So the problem here is an experienced team member memorizes the old SOP process and then stops opening the SOP so it miss. They miss changes and there's a slow drift to how they do it. The fix here is that sanity checklist, that skimmable format at the end. You want to design SOPs so they can be skimmed in under 30 seconds with those clear headings and the short numbered steps and bold key actions. Right? But you end with a you're done when checklist. Here's an example. So like for uploading a YouTube, the video is live and set to public or unlisted. This is the checklist right? The title and description match the template, the thumbnail is uploaded and cards and end screens are set. These would be part of the checklist. Result here is that even veterans will quickly pop the SOP open to run the final check. They will be used. That's the beauty of this team system that we talk about. So this week I just want you to pick one SOP and make sure it's linked inside the task where it's actually has clear headings and a you're done with checklist at the end. Your doer can leave comments when something is off or they can create it themselves which is even better. And you'll start to see usage of these things climb without having to nag anyone whatsoever, getting better results along the way. So so I want you to imagine a few months from now. You record a process one time, AI turns it into a clean skimmable SOP in minutes and your team actually uses it and improves it. New hires ramp up faster, onboarding takes less time, fewer got a minutes. Can you make this decisions task you've been holding on to quietly for years Move off of your plate finally and your SOPs stopping a pile of of documents in a binder and start being a part of a real operating system your team runs on without you. So if you're watching this and thinking to yourself that's exactly what I need. I want my team to run the day to day without me. But I need help choosing like which processes to document and how this all fits into the bigger picture of scaling my business. That's exactly what we do together in the Live Self Scaling Business Diagnostic. It's a free live diagnostic workshop where we score your three systems of scale, your CEO system, your team system and your profit scaling system. And we show you where your business is still overdependent upon you and map out what to focus on in the next 90 days to start building a self scaling company. And when you show up live, you'll get my AI SOP creator in the exact prompt and structure we use with clients to turn loom or zoom transcripts into sops. Your team will actually follow Amen and Hallelujah to that. So click the link below this video and save your seat for the next session of the self Scaling Business Diagnostic. And if you want to keep learning on how to build a business that runs more without you, you you can click on the video here and we'll keep building your scaled CEO operating system together until next week. Bye for now. Thanks again for listening to the Epic Success Podcast. If you loved the podcast this week, do me a favor, would you give us a five star review? And over in Instagram, please share with me in the DMs. What was it that you loved about it? How did it resonate? And I always say for podcasters, those reviews are our big warm hug. And of course, if you want to go deeper or see this on video, please follow my YouTube channel at Dr. Shannon Irvin on YouTube. I cannot wait to see you next week on the Epic Success Podcast. Bye for now.