Documenting Your First SOPs
Turning what is in your head into something a team can actually follow.
Notes from Randall Harper. Thirty years working alongside owner-operators, executives and boards — companies of all types and sizes — across entertainment & media, hospitality, service based business, lifestyle businesses, financial services, retail and not-for-profit, in Australia, Asia, the United Kingdom and the United States. What follows is the thinking I keep returning to.
The cost of undocumented work
Every process that lives only in your head is a process that cannot scale, cannot be delegated, and cannot survive a sick day. Owners often resist documentation because it feels like over-engineering for a small team. It is the opposite. The smaller the team, the more expensive each undocumented process becomes — because the person carrying it in their head is usually you, and you are the bottleneck you cannot afford.
Start where the pain is
Do not try to document everything. Pick the process that, when it goes wrong, costs you the most time or money to fix. Usually it is onboarding a new customer, completing a job to standard, or handing work to a contractor. Document that one. The act of writing it down almost always reveals two or three improvements you can make immediately, which justifies the exercise before anyone else even reads it.
What a useful SOP looks like
- A clear title and a one-sentence purpose — what this process produces.
- Triggers — what makes someone start this process.
- Steps in numbered order, in plain language, with screenshots or photos where useful.
- Decision points — what to do when the situation is not standard.
- Done criteria — how you know the process is finished and correct.
Loom is your friend
Writing every SOP from scratch is slow. Recording yourself doing the task, narrating as you go, is fast. A five-minute Loom video plus a one-page checklist is, for most small businesses, a better SOP than a twenty-page Word document nobody opens. The video captures the nuance; the checklist captures the standard. Together they are enough.
Living documents, not stone tablets
An SOP that is not updated quietly becomes wrong, and a wrong SOP is worse than no SOP at all. Build a habit: any time the process changes, the person doing it updates the document. Make it part of the work, not a separate project. Over time, your documented processes become the operating system of the business — and the foundation everything else, including hiring, sits on.
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The contents of this paper are the opinion of Clear Point Advisory only. Readers should rely on their own judgement and obtain professional advice appropriate to their circumstances.