How to Write Effective SOPs Without Stopping Work to Do It
Most small businesses don’t have written SOPs (standard operating procedures). More often than not, this is due to the fact that the standard way of writing SOPs means stopping the work that pays the bills.
So the process for paying bills, running payroll, or on boarding a new client stays in one person’s head. Usually the owner’s or the employee in charge of that specific task. Every question routes back to them, and every new hire gets trained from scratch.
There’s a faster way. Instead of sitting down to write SOPs, you record the work while you’re already doing it and turn that recording into a document. Here’s the exact process I use with clients.
Why SOPs never get written
The traditional approach goes like this: block off an afternoon, open a blank document, and try to remember every step of a task you do on autopilot. This approach takes hours and leads to you skipping steps without noticing. Inevitably something urgent comes up and the document sits half-finished for months.
The other problem is that people write SOPs for how a task should work, not how it actually works. The result reads fine but doesn’t match what your team does day to day, so nobody uses it.
Recording fixes both problems. It captures every click and every step, including the ones you’d forget to write down. And it shows the process as it really runs today, which is the starting point you need before you can improve it.
Step 1: Record the task while you do it
The next time you or someone on your team does a recurring task on the computer, record it. Payroll, invoicing, entering a new lead, depositing a check, setting up a project. Anything you do more than once.
The easiest way is to start a Zoom or Google Meet call with just yourself, share your screen, and hit record. Talk through what you’re doing as you go: “Now I’m opening QuickBooks, going to Sales, clicking New Invoice.” Mention the why when it matters: “We always check the retainer balance first because clients sometimes prepay.”
Don’t slow down or try to make it perfect. You’re doing the task anyway. The recording just rides along.
For tasks that happen away from a computer, like a site visit or a client walk through, a phone recording of someone explaining the steps works fine. They even have recorders that connect to your phone and record, transcribe and summarize everything for you away from your computer.
Pro tip: if you’re using one of these recording devices, make sure you check your state recording consent laws. If you are in a two-party state, make sure anyone that is with you knows you’re recording.
Step 2: Transcribe and summarize
Use a meeting recorder like Fathom, Otter, or Zoom’s built-in transcription. It turns what you said into text and gives you a summary automatically, so there’s nothing extra to do here.
Keep the video file. You’ll use it again in the final SOP.
Step 3: Let AI draft the SOP
Paste the transcript into an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to turn the transcript into a step-by-step procedure. A prompt like this works well:
Turn this transcript into a standard operating procedure. Include the purpose of the task, who does it, how often, the tools needed, and numbered steps. Flag any step that seems unclear or where a decision gets made.
In a couple of minutes you’ll have a clean first draft. It won’t be perfect, but editing a draft is much faster than writing from a blank page.
Pay attention to the flagged steps. Those are usually where the process depends on someone’s judgment, and they’re the parts a new employee is most likely to get wrong.
Step 4: Review it and fix the broken part
Sit down with the person who does the task and read through the draft together. For each step, ask two questions: does this part work, and does this part need to happen at all?
You’ll almost always find something. Either a step that exists because of a problem that got fixed two years ago or data entered into two systems when one would do. Oftentimes it’s a task that waits on the owner’s approval for no real reason.
Write the SOP the way the process should run after those fixes, not just the way it runs today. The recording gave you an honest starting point. Now you improve it.
Step 5: Test the changes for two weeks
Don’t assume your fix works. Have your team run the updated process for two weeks and check back in.
If it’s faster, cleaner, or takes something off the owner’s plate, keep it. If not, adjust one thing and run it for another week or two. Small tweaks with a short test period beat a big overhaul that nobody sticks with.
Once a process holds up, lock in that version of the SOP and move on to the next one.
Store every SOP as both text and video
People learn differently. Some want to read a step, do it, then read the next one. Others want to watch someone do the task first. Since you already have the recording, give them both.
Put every SOP in one place your team already uses, whether that’s Notion, Google Drive, or SharePoint. Link the written steps and the video together, and organize them by role or department so people can find what they need.
Make sure the collection is searchable. If someone has to ask where the invoicing SOP is, it might as well not exist. The goal is that a team member can answer their own question in under a minute without messaging you.
Which SOPs to record first
Start with the tasks that pull you back into the business most often. A quick way to find them: for one week, write down every time someone asks you how to do something or waits on you to do it.
For most owners, the list is heavy on office and admin work:
- Invoicing and collecting payments
- Paying bills and entering expenses
- Running payroll
- On boarding a new client
- On boarding a new employee
- Logging and following up on new leads
Many businesses already have some process for their core service, like a project checklist or a design workflow. The admin side is usually where nothing is written down, and it’s the part that keeps the owner stuck doing tasks someone else could handle.
What this looks like in practice
One of my clients owns multifamily and single-family rental properties: two apartment complexes and 60 to 70 homes. He was in the office every day at 7:30 a.m., answering the same questions from his team over and over.
We used this process to document every recurring task in the business. He and his staff recorded their work as they did it, and we turned those recordings into a full SOP library.
The results:
- He now goes into the office once every two weeks.
- When he replaced an employee who wasn’t a good fit, a team member who had only been there six months trained the new hire entirely from the SOPs.
- The office runs more efficiently than it ever has, even though no one on the team has been there longer than a year.
Start with one task this week
You don’t need to document the whole business at once. Pick the one task you get asked about most, record it the next time you do it, and run it through these five steps. That’s one less question coming to you next month.
If you want help building out a full SOP playbook, or figuring out which processes are costing you the most time, get in touch and we’ll start with a look at where your hours are actually going.
