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The Ops Experts Club Podcast
103. Operational Excellence: How SOPs Protect and Scale Your Business
00:19:13
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Ops Experts Club.
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B
If you're at all interested in anything we talk about here in this episode, go ahead and check out the description down below and click any of the links there. Or if you just want to know more about us, click the links below. Now on to the episode Ops Experts. Taren, you and I talk about some of the sickest stuff before people even get on the show. They don't even know how legit we are, dude. They don't even know how cool we are. Talking about such cool stuff. Yeah.
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A
Not only do we get to coordinate and figure out what we're going to talk about way ahead of time as we usually do, but we also get to debate canned queso versus glass queso.
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B
Here's the deal is, I mean, I don't know where you sit. Those of you listening today, welcome Ops Experts. Amazing to see you. Thank you for showing up. Listen, maybe amazing to have you hear us because I can't even hear you. So maybe it's amazing to have you hear us. I hope you're tuning in, having a good time, but let's just have you sound off. I mean, if you could push a button right now and just be like, that was easy. We, which one would you push? Would you push? Like you're thinking about queso, right? You're thinking about cheeses, you're thinking about Mexican food, you're thinking about nachos, you're thinking about like enchiladas. Like when you're thinking queso, are you thinking queso in a can do that. But I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna sway the vote. Or are you thinking like queso in a jar, like Tostitos? Is that what you're thinking?
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A
No, if you can get it at the Shell station, it's.
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B
I'm telling you what, here's the deal is Taren Tostitos is a very Latin brand. I think, I think that they are very Latin made, Latin based. Taren told me before we got on the show that I was too bougie, that my queso was too bougie if I'm buying Tostitos anyway. Okay, knock it off. All right, so Offset experts, great to see you. Today we are going to talk about a riveting like grab like edge of your seat and hold on for the topic we're going to talk about today. We are going to talk about Taren. What is the three letter acronym we're going to talk about today? Is, is it an acronym? Yeah, it is. What's the three letters? Yeah, what's the three letters?
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A
First one is an S. Yep.
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Second one? Yeah. Third T. So who Standard operating procedures. Boom shakalaka, man. You. You were thinking to yourself, you know, Terrence said, hey, I was thinking about going to watch a missing Mission Impossible episode. And I'm like, no, dude, just turn into Ops Experts Club. Because we're going to talk about some stuff. In fact, Taren, I think we have a URL we can give them for our free SOP template.
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A
Yes, we do. Do we give it now or do they have to sit for at least five minutes with us?
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B
Good, that creates some suspense. We are going to give you a link today on our show that's going to be to our SOP template. And there may be some informational video in there by, I don't know, maybe the most amazing dude on the Colab team Captain Turner. Taran Turner. You do, I think the SOP loom, which is amazing.
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A
I forgot.
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That's it. Okay, Taran, so Let's talk about SOPs. Why they're important, what you do with them once they're created, and how do you guarantee they're being used? End over.
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A
Yeah. Well, SOPs is not the most exciting thing to think about doing in your day job. Especially when.
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B
Don't talk them down. Don't talk them down. I dig them. Go ahead.
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A
Well, I'm gonna. I'm gonna talk it down to bring it up, you know.
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B
Okay, that's good. That's good. Okay.
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A
Because we're all pretty busy when we're working for the man or the woman. Sometimes it's hard enough just having to do all the things by the end of the day, you don't want to think about having to make a process to do all the things at the end of the day. You're ever in a situation where your coworker, Carla, maybe Carla was out in Texas for vacation and everything else.
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B
In Texas?
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A
Yeah. Got hit by a bus.
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B
Not you get hit by. Not you get hit by a bus, but your coworker Carla in Texas got hit by a bus.
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A
She's okay, but she's in a coma, so you can't talk to her. But now you have to do Carla's job.
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B
That's right.
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A
And guess what? Carla left no sops, and you're just scratching your head, having to figure it out.
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B
That's right. You're screwed at that point. Like, what are you going to do? Got to get in there, figure it all out. Like, chase down her emails. Like, look who she's been talking to. How Do I know how to pay this vendor? How do I know the logins to get there? How do I know what to do next? How do I know where that fits in the process? How do I know what's happening downstream from this? Right. It's not even just the urgency of today. What about downstream and the pain points downstream? You're going to want a standard operating procedure. So even though SOPs don't feel as riveting as MI, what was it? Is it Mission impossible? What was it? Was it mission. He had an abbreviation on his. Anyway, even though it doesn't feel as sexy as Tom Cruise doing his own stunts. I tell you what, like SOPs are super important for you to have for your business. And I'll also say this term is, you know, working with businesses that are trying to sell. Typically what will really tank your valuation is if you don't have established SOPs like you could be generating incredible top line revenue. But if somebody's going to come and buy your business, what they're going to want to know is that you have door to door SOPs. So the value of your business is sustainable even without your people. Ideally you would love your SOPs to be so stupid simple that a monkey could step in and do the job right. Like it's, I don't need to know all the intel, I don't need all the background. I just need your SOP and to do step by step process and I can know that it's going to get done and it's going to be tied off.
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A
Well, yeah, yeah. So we do have a template. You know, it's been five minutes. So it's, it's a pretty simple template.
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B
Five minutes has been five. Oh, it has five. 58. Okay, go ahead. I guess we're okay, go ahead.
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A
Yeah, so it's, it's meant to be just a starting point so that you're not just staring at a blank piece of paper being like, what do I even put to an sop? I've never made an sop. There's no SOP requirement essay in high school. So you can get it at SOP. That's sop.opsexperts academy.
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B
That's it. Sop.opsexpertsacademy.com Some good stuff there. If you're interested in SOP template. Taran, what would you say goes into a good sop? What if you had to just like, I mean, man, let's just like paint the picture of this beautiful work of art that you put together. You built this sop template. It's an amazing piece of work, incredible piece of artistry. Just tell em maybe what goes into it from your perspective.
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A
You know like all good things we work on should have a goal or a definition of done. In this situation we just call it a goal. What should be happening at the end of this process? Are you just a middle cog? Does it need to go somewhere else? Are you the end result? Is it just updating a report and then it's done? So what is the goal? What should be accomplished by the time this process you're about to duplicate is over? Most also importantly these are all most important steps would be I like to call it resources or requirements or prerequisites. Link to anything they need to complete it. It can be internal documents, it can be a Google Sheets report. If it is reporting. It could be apps which apps you need to log into. Just have the links right there so it's easy to use. If they need logins, say where those can be found. You probably don't want to put the logins actually in the document but if you have a. You can say, you know you can find These logins in LastPass but here's the apps they're going to have to get into. Or there could be a preceding sop. So that's kind of a prerequisite. You can't do this one until you get this other thing from this person who's going to be doing their process first.
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B
Yeah, that's good. Also like probably a little, a little loomable. What do you. What are your thoughts on that? Some sort of tutorial video?
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A
Yeah, if it's tutorialable. Which to me everything's loomable. I loom it all. I like to have a video in there with a video too. You can also have a quick checklist so you can do that manually. I like to take my loom transcript, put it in a little chatty and say give me a quick checklist. And so that's just if somebody's doing this maybe their third time, they don't need to watch the whole video but they do want to just like have some reference steps. They know how to do it but you still just want to see the checklist. And so the loom is like an actual second by second walkthrough. A checklist is like oh yeah, I know how to do it but I just need to know the order.
- [07:55]
B
Yeah, I love it. So I think that's where the standalone document is, is something that's great. Right? Something that you can Put into then some sort of repository. Right? This is where all of our SOPs are held. Broke out by rules and responsibilities, broken out by department, however you choose to organize them. I've seen people do that by a master sheet, you know, I mean where they're all hyperlinked into a master sheet, kind of like a table of contents. I think that's a great thing to do for a repository. That way they can kind of live on whatever drive they're living on, but they're all being coordinated by some sort of master doc that takes you back to where they all are seated, or you can have them all seated on the drive in one particular folder. Like I said. In broken out sub drives, I would say like SOP 2.0, SOP 2.0, boom, boom, boom, boom, Boom. Right. 2.0, I would say, is putting them in some sort of task management software where you can actually take that checklist like you just mentioned and put that into some sort of task and subtask cadence of hey, as you take each One of these 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 steps, that's actually subtasks that you go down that when you hit complete, I know, hey, every time you come to this, whether it's a weekly SOP or a monthly sop, a daily SOP that every time you completed it, checks it off and then kicks off the new one that's due again in a week from now, seven days from now, 14 days from now, 30 days from now. If we're doing payroll, hey, these are the steps in payroll. For me personally, that's what I do with payroll to make sure that I don't miss anybody. Like, I make sure everybody's listed in my sop. I go through, I make sure I'm pulling up all the sheets based upon what's on my task, my project within Asana, and then I go down, click, click, click, click, click, click. Because I'm paying everybody. There's one final step where I send that report off to Faith and Tabitha so that they have what they need on our side from the collab team side. But every single time it just happens like clockwork. And then when I go on vacation, I'm able just to assign that task out in asana to Faith, to Tabby, whoever it is that's going to take over payroll for me on this particular, and they can operate from it. And that way it doesn't always have to be only Faith or only Tabby. If I want them to start cross training, then I can just assign it to somebody different. And I can make a collaborator the other person to say, hey, if you get stuck, ask Tabby, Faith. Hey, Tabby, if you get stuck, ask Faith. Because they both have done it. So I think it's awesome when you can create an sop, have a video that walks you through the sop, a checklist that's associated there, but then you can just drop that checklist straight into asana and have all those be or whatever the project management tool is that you have that you can walk through and click, click, click, and have it done. And then tie the whole thing off as complete and have it kick off the next iteration once it's complete. And that way I can go in on vacation and see did Faith finish up payroll. And I don't have to ask her. I can just look at the asana test, Cash. It was completed an hour ago. Awesome. I can sleep with confidence knowing she executed my SOP and all the sub steps were taken.
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A
Man, you always take it to the next level. That's great, dude.
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B
I mean, I. I try. Taran, you may. You're a hard act to follow. So. I mean, it's tricky. It's a tricky one.
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A
Well, you know what I always get caught up in is creating an SOP and then not doing anything with it for five years. Do you have any thoughts about that?
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B
And SOP not used for five years.
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A
Yeah, I would say if you don't want. If you don't have thoughts. It was a trick question.
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B
Yeah, I mean, you kind of backed me into that one, and I feel like you kind of. I'm a little bit stumped. What do I do on an SOP that's been stagnant for five years?
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A
I mean, I always like to encourage people as part of your annual planning review of it's Q1. You know, maybe it's. Maybe it's the end of Q4. Things tend to slow down a little bit in December. Just review all your SOPs. Take a quick glance, see if things are still accurate. You could have switched tools by now. You could be in a different process. It could be irrelevant, some steps of it. So just quick review once a year of the ones you've created for your job and your role. See if they still apply.
- [11:35]
B
Oh, that's good, man. Not many people audit their SOPs, so that's a good suggestion. You know what else I think is a really cool little ninja trick Besides auditing your SOPs? Like, a lot of people get really overwhelmed. Maybe they're like, aaron, we don't have any of our Stuff documented here. People have worked for us for a long time, or, you know, we just kind of wing it around here. I would encourage you to assign to your people. You know, we really tout eos, which is the entrepreneur's operating system. From the book Traction by Gino Wickman. In that book, it talks about a weekly level 10 meeting. And part of your weekly level 10 meeting should be rocks. Right? We're talking about what are the big projects that we're all working on this quarter to get us to our annual goal, right? Like, our annual goal is this big, hairy, audacious goal that we're going after, right? We want to reach the top of the crest of this mountain. We're starting down here in the lowlands. How do I climb this hill? Well, you climb it one plateau at a time, right? How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So breaking those big annual plans down to quarterly rocks, and I would always suggest as part of your quarterly rocks that you're assigning out to everybody, have them document one to three processes and create SOPs. Because if you just have them do one to three for four quarters, depending on how many people, let's say there's seven or eight people on your leadership team. If you just have each one of Those people document one to three, and let's say they do get three, that means from each person, you've got 24 rocks that you are SOPs done by the end of the year. Whereas if you don't, you're just left kind of stalemated or you just are stalled in frustration. And if those leaders then task that same thing down to sub people underneath them, then that just becomes a multiplier. One to three, Anybody can do one. Let's be ambitious and try and get to three. And then by the end of the year, how much further downstream would you be to getting your recipes collected and documented?
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A
Yeah, that's great, you know, Next, a next level ninja move. 2. Something I like to offer is if you happen to be like a subject matter expert in a certain app, you know, a certain program, maybe you handle kajabi. Maybe you're the person inside kajabi all the time doing things. Sometimes it's helpful to not think of it as an entire sop of how what do we do? Like, what is kajabi? Kind of break it up into little chunks and make it more of a library on how to do things in kajabi that anybody can access. It's. It's a lot easier than going through their support documents. And trying to figure it out yourself. If somebody needs help and you know how to do it, but yet they don't need to come to you. If customer support is approved to give somebody a refund, they don't need to come to you every time to do a refund. You could just show them how to do a refund document that somewhere and have a whole running list of. This is how you do a refund in Kajabi. This is how you update an email in Kajabi. This is how you do that. So it's almost like a little library of an SOP for a specific app or platform that you use constantly.
- [14:22]
B
And if I would, I think that's brilliant, Taren. If, if people are out there and maybe they're. They don't have an internal team member that's a subject matter expert, but they're working with a freelancer, they're working with somebody that's a 1099 to contractors working with them. I think, I think it is well within your right as whoever's paying to say, hey, will you do me a favor? Will you create me an SOP on how you did that and give them the template and have them sop it out for you and then you have a document in case you lose that person. Right. Because I think that most people listening maybe that you don't have a full internal team built out of subject matter experts yet. Right. And so you're contracting with people. The danger of losing a contractor, or even worse, being held hostage by a contractor is when you yourself don't have the documented process of how they're doing what they're doing. And I think that if you are paying somebody's bill, you, you are within your right to ask for, hey, I don't want to be beholden to you. I don't want you to hold the key to the kingdom. I need you to show me exactly what you're doing so that in case downstream you ever become inaccessible to me. I haven't just lost control of my CRM. I haven't just lost control of my finance program. I haven't just lost control over whatever it is you were doing for me. I want to understand how my, my customer service portal is working, you know, so show me exactly what it is you're doing in SOPs. And I think the cool thing about that is, is that if you can build those things out, whether it's your internal team or external team, those resources become part of your business. And that is actually what adds value to your company. Like Terence said, sure, you can point somebody at a knowledge resource library, but man, I don't know how many of those that you played with, but, man, it, it very rarely straightly lines up with what you're trying to do, as much as when somebody's doing exactly what you need them to do and sops out that step. That's like gold. You know, for all of us, we should be striving for greatest efficiency, right? Best bang for the buck. Last thing you want is to pay somebody to go dick around while searching in some knowledge resource library for some random tool that might be the application that you're using it for. No, no, put them straight on the trail, man. No, no. This is what you do in this scenario. So, Taryn, I think that's so smart. And whether it's your internal team that's a subject matter expert or it's somebody that you're paying externally and be building those SOP libraries up just one SOP at a time. I know it may feel like you're making just small incremental growth, but I, I was listening to this gentleman talking about investing just this past week on a podcast, and he was talking about, we get so wound up about what we don't have for retirement. But if you would just realize just small percentage of growth is how compound interest works. And if you don't have something now, invest in something, even if it feels small, even if you feel late, even if you feel whatever it is, because whatever you're investing right now is going to be more than if you just don't. If you just get frozen in what you're not doing, what you don't have, how bad you feel about yourself for being too late to the game. Maybe some of you have a business and you're like, we should be so much further than we are now. There's nothing you can do about the past, no matter how much power, money, no matter what it is, that you can't affect that. What you can affect is today. So use your authority today to drive down on your people and say, hey, by the end of this quarter, I want at least one SOP for one of your critical rules, or up to three. And the benefit of that will be at the end of this quarter, what I would say is have your people start with the most critical roles they do. At the end of this quarter, I would say come into your quarterly evals. EOS advocates for a 5, 5, 5. A quarterly eval, and have that be one of the five things that you're checking in on them. Have you been doing that consistently? Show me how visually I can see. Have you been doing that consistently? And it puts the onus on them. And you as a business owner feel like, you know, I'm starting to check off boxes. Even if it's small incremental growth, it's worthwhile.
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A
Yeah, for sure. I love that. And I think a final thing to think about and have on your mind as you're thinking through this and building it out is we call a collection of SOPs a playbook because that does ultimately become your company's playbook.
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B
Taryn, you just blew mind right now. Do you remember, like, what was that? Like Mission Impossible 3, when he's running down the bridge and falling, the bomb blows up and he gets thrown up against the car. That's what I just felt right now. Like Tom Cruise thrown against the car with my mind blown about a playbook.
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A
That's impressive. Nobody can recite Mission Impossibles as well as you can.
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B
I did make my wife watch all eight or all seven before we tied off with the final eighth one. That was so good. Taran. If you haven't seen the final one, boy, oh, boy, I've got Taran. Is that the truth? Hey, Ops Experts, we're going to have to go right now because Taran and I are going to go do a joint play session and we're going to go watch the final Mission Impossible.
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A
Yeah. So don't forget to go to sop. That's sop. Opsexpertsacademy. Com.
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B
Yes. Taryn, thank you for an amazing show talking about a riveting subject like SOPs and OPS experts. Thanks for tuning in. We appreciate you joining us every week here on the Ops Experts Academy. We'll see you next week. Have a great day.