Welcome to We Make Systems Sexy! Hi there, Ashley here with We Make System Sexy. Today I want to talk to you more about SOP Manuals, but very specifically about something that ties into another subject that we talked about recently about how to run your business that doesn’t rely on your 24/7 oversight.
Today’s focus is specifically on how to run a business without you being in it all of the time and what that’s going to free you up to do.
Let’s talk a little bit about why we want that and how that’s actually possible. Instead of reading the blog, you can always go back and listen to the video that we did about that specific topic of having a business that’s not constantly reliant on you.
Why is that important and what does that actually looks like once you have it in place in your business?
At the beginning of 2022, my team and I actually did a really large SOP Manual project for a large and ever-growing mortgage brokerage. The brokerage had only been in business for two years, but they figured out a good model.
They started growing and it was one of those “we’re growing despite ourselves because we have good work and we have a good team” and once they got to the point of really hiring and hiring and hiring and hiring more and opening new branches, they were at this point where they didn’t have a good onboarding process for new team members.
It was a struggle. They were struggling to keep everyone trained and up to date.
There was a lot of going back and forth because they didn’t already have an onboarding system in place. They had a 70-page document in Google Drive where all of the information for their team and for their company as an overview lived.
Let me just ask you one question…
Realistically, who’s going to look at that? Let me repeat… a 70-page document. In Google Drive. Not me, and likely not their team, either.
Especially when it’s not organized. There wasn’t even a table of contents. Information was haphazardly thrown in there.
Some of the information was intended to be added to this document and never was. As you can see, they had good intentions. They were trying their best to keep track of all of these things, but they never actually took the time to sit down and break it down. Intentions don’t create outcomes.
What is an actual instructional SOP? Is it just a company policy? How do we structure this so that these things stay up to date and team members can easily find information, especially during the onboarding process?
They actually reached out to us for an SOP Manual. The first scope we did was a hundred SOPs for this company.
I know you’re probably thinking, “Oh my goodness, a hundred SOPs?!”
But we loved it because it’s what we do. SOPs are our jam.
It’s how we break down those humongous documents and we make them into this living breathing organism that’s at the heart of your organization. We love doing that.
Why is it so important that any business that is growing and having success goes back to this step of creating an SOP Manual?
As I mentioned, the company we are discussing had only been in business for basically two years. By the time that they approached us, they had grown to the point that they had 50 people under the main umbrella of their branch in different locations offering loans in different locations and others who were either trying to start mortgage brokerages were reaching out to them for a model to follow.
“Help us, we’ll pay you money to help us figure out how to do this”.
So they started thinking outside of the box, aside from just doing loans, how can we show other people to set up their brokerages in the way that we have and have had success with?
A) Do those owners need to be involved in the day-to-day of helping new loan officers being onboarded into their company so they can continue to grow their company?
B) Or do they need to be more forward-thinking as the visionaries of their business so they can see what’s the next step to keep growing in our business?
Obviously, the answer to that question is the second (B).
What is the next step so that we can keep growing? Because if you’re not growing, you’re getting stagnant and you’re not going to keep up with the demands of the market.
That’s just the way that it is. You will fall stagnant. You will fall backward. Very often that is the case.
And if you’re not prioritizing having these SOPs in place and that means keeping them updated and using them and encouraging your team members to use them and encouraging everyone to have the same company culture based on the SOPs…
…That’s when you start to backslide and lose all of the momentum that you’re gaining in growing your business.
This company has been able to grow and scale in this way. Also, asking “Okay, what processes did we have that are now actually out of date?” That was the second scope of this project for their team members that then go in and actually see, “Wow, we didn’t even know we had these SOPs in place. Now we have to audit and see what’s out of date and what needs to be brought back up to date”.
If you don’t, then somebody’s gonna be going in trying to search for some kind of process so they can actually have help in completing a task and using an out-of-date document or process that they happen to find in Google Drive somewhere.
Obviously, that’s dangerous. We need to keep these items up to date, organized, easy to find, easy to read, easy to follow, and easy to hand off to other people.
This discussion is not just about how to run a business that doesn’t rely on your oversight all the time, but how to stop being in your business and work on your growing your business.
We love talking about all things SOPs.
Are you still unsure about what you can delegate to other people, and what processes you should start documenting? Then feel free to download our delegation exercise which actually walks you through an exercise of how you can figure out what items to start documenting so that you can then delegate these to team members that you hire.
Maybe you need help with figuring out how and what needs to be created for your SOP Manual, for this we do offer the SOP Manual in a day VIP day.
If you have questions about that, always feel free to DM us.
Within the SOP Manual VIP Day, we get your top processes created, set up, and linked to your project management tool and show your team members how to continue to grow your SOP Manual and keep those items updated so that your business can grow.
Let’s do this.
