Why ‘Standard Operating Procedures’ Suck

What's up everyone? Welcome back to Founders Journal. First off, if you didn't already hear the announcement from me, Founders Journal is back. I am incredibly excited for it. And for those of you that don't know, Founders Journal is my 5 to 20 minute personal diary made public for the world where I share my stories, my learnings, and my strategies around my journey as an entrepreneur. Second, I would love to chat with as many of you one-on-one as possible. So shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com. Say hi, hey, hola, what's up, or howdy, and I will respond with something to get the convo going. Now let's talk game plan for this episode. Today's episode is about one of the most important tools in an entrepreneur's toolkit to scale a business. And also I share some thoughts on why I believe this tool has the worst name on planet Earth. Let's hop into it. I was meeting with an early-stage founder this week, and she runs a content agency where she creates SEO blog posts for different brands. And she said something to me that I hear a lot of early-stage founders say. She said, I can't find someone as good at writing content as me, so I can't grow my business. This is a startup problem that is as old as time. And anytime I hear it, I think and say the same exact thing I said to this entrepreneur. There are 2 ways that you can look at this issue. First, you can say to yourself that there's no one on planet Earth that can do as good of a job as you. Or second, you can say to yourself, you're screwing up, you're screwing up recruiting, you're screwing up hiring, and you're screwing up training. Now, while that sounds harsh, I actually think it's wildly empowering because if the entrepreneur is right and she truly is the only one in the world that can do her job, then she should quit trying to scale her business today and she should just service clients for the rest of her career. That feels pretty depressing to me since the entrepreneur has no control over her own destiny or her ability to build a business that can scale beyond her. But if the other assumption is right, the one about her screwing up and not knowing how to bring on talent, then that's wildly motivating because she is now back in control of her own destiny. She can get better at recruiting, she can get better at hiring, and she can get better at training. Now, I'm using this entrepreneur as an example, but she is the rule, not the exception. Most founders think that they are world-class at what they do, And they fear that the business will stall if they delegate their job. I had this exact belief to a T in the early days of Morning Brew. I was our first salesman, and I was really good at it. And while there are several areas of startups where I lack confidence and I feel self-conscious about myself, selling advertisers was not one of those areas for me. If you put me in a room with the CMO of a Fortune 500 company, I had an irrational amount of confidence in the early days of our business that I would close them on a deal with Morning Brew before I left that room. Now, while that confidence was great for selling, it was actually horrible for delegating and growing because I continued to sell for Morning Brew probably 2 years longer than I needed to, which is why as I build another business, I am trying to fire myself as quickly as humanly possible From the roles that I'm doing, and one of the best ways to fire yourself, and one of the best tools in a builder's toolkit, is the standard operating procedure. Now, before we get into it, let's take a quick break. Before we went to break, I mentioned that one of the best toolkits for a builder is the standard operating procedure, or SOP. Let me start by setting the record straight: I hate. The phrase standard operating procedure. It sucks. It is the type of business jargon that makes me feel so incredibly douchey when I say it. That said, I find myself right now needing to build many SOPs to fire myself, train my CEO, and onboard employees to replace me for my ghostwriting agency. So let me give you some more context before I dive into standard operating procedures and how you can build them for yourself. I started this ghostwriting agency, StoryArb. Some of you may know that. And the goal is simple. We want to help executives own their niche on the internet. We capture knowledge that's inside their heads, we turn it into social content on Twitter and LinkedIn, and we help them drive their business goals. To make this business work, there are 2 key role players. There's the ghostwriter and the content strategist. The ghostwriter takes the content that we've captured from a client and they turn it into short and long posts on the 2 different platforms that I mentioned. The content strategist, the other role player, is like a creative account manager. Their goal is to be our client's personal content concierge, doing a variety of tasks, including content interviews, pulling ideas out of those interviews for the ghostwriter to use, creating customized Twitter lists, pulling performance reports, and many more things. So for StoryArb, I've brought on 2 ghostwriters that are currently creating the content for our clients, but I personally have been serving as this content strategist role. And my whole view has been that doing the job is the only way I'd be able to effectively hire for the job. And also, I'd love to get enough cash flow coming in the door from our current clients before hiring a full-time content strategist. But now we're at the point where I should be spending my time out of the weeds Which means recruiting, hiring, and training a great CS. That leads us back to SOP or standard operating procedure, the worst phrase on planet Earth. I need to make sure onboarding of this new content strategist goes well. These first few clients are paying for this agency because they believe in me and my ability to support them with content strategy. I want to transition this new person smoothly to running these accounts and giving them the right playbook to get up to speed is absolutely essential. So now I want to talk about a few things. First, how I plan to create a standard operating procedure for the content strategist I will bring on. Second, a suggested name change for SOP that I'll use moving forward because I can't take myself seriously anymore. And 3, a business idea related to building playbooks and processes for your employees that anyone listening to this podcast can steal if they like it. First, how did I create an SOP? Like most things in startups, I imitated and I remixed. I ended up Googling online for standard operating procedures, and I found a great article by Jasper Pollack that breaks down what SOPs are and how to make great ones for your business. Here's the simple way that I think about an SOP. You are a chef and you have an apprentice who went to culinary school, so they have a base level of skills, but they've never made your favorite dish before. You're going on vacation for 2 weeks and you need your apprentice to make your favorite dish. Now, the question is, how can you get to a place where you feel a high degree of confidence that they'll make a dish that is good enough such that customers won't notice a thing when they eat it while you're gone? That is your goal whenever you start delegating to an employee, and an SOP is one of your greatest tools to accomplish that goal. Now, to understand exactly how this works, I'm going to describe a standard operating procedure that I created for StoryArb, and then in the show notes, I'll link to the actual SOP so that you can use that as a template for your own business. The first playbook that I created is for Twitter list curation. Now, one of the things we do for all of our clients within StoryArb is to create a customized Twitter list for them so that they can get inspiration and find relevant tweets to engage with on a day-to-day basis. And I created this SOP so that any content strategist who I hire and who ultimately takes my place will quickly learn how to do this task just as well as I can. The first section of the SOP template has important questions and answers related to any process in your business. And you can think of this section as all of the foundation-setting information at the top of any recipe, going back to the analogy with the chef. So this top section has the ingredients, the time to cook, A picture of the final dish. And so what I actually answered on my SOP and what you'll do the same with as you end up filling out your own standard operating procedure are the following questions. What is the purpose of this task? What is the scope of this task? What is the time commitment related to this task? Whose responsibility is this? Where could things go wrong when doing the task? What documents or systems do you need to do the task? Who do you escalate questions to if you have an issue with the task? And do you have any examples of the completed task? And so I went through each of these questions, which again will be in the show notes, and I answered them specifically for curating our clients' Twitter lists. Once that's done, I then go to the second section of the SOP, which is completing a step-by-step guide, which you can think of as the actual recipe for the dish you're cooking. Do this, then do this, then do this. And what I found most helpful for me to build this standard operating procedure is actually doing the task as I type the steps out so that I know that I'm guiding the reader of my document at the most granular level. By the way, this whole standard operating procedure thing is also just a great accidental test for a manager or leader to see if you have mastery over the task that you're teaching and ultimately delegating. And so I went ahead and I typed out each step to curate the Twitter list. And then one final touch that I made, because people are different types of learners, is I actually recorded a Loom video of me going through all of the steps while sharing my screen on video. And so that is both the structure of a standard operating procedure document and how I specifically did it for my ghostwriting agency. Now, my hope here is that the example of the The Storyarb Twitter listing is just texture for you to understand how this works, and my hope is you'll be able to actually take this general structure and use the link in the show notes to create SOPs or standard operating procedures for yourself and your business in the future. Now I have a few final thoughts before we go. The first, as I mentioned earlier, is that the name sucks. Standard operating procedure—I really hate it. It's stuffy and it's jargony. and it honestly makes me lose a little bit of respect for myself each time I say it. So if you have a better name for an SOP that I can use in my business moving forward, shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com and let me know what it is. Now, the second thought is a little bit more serious, and it's a business idea that is based on this topic of training employees using SOPs. I truly believe that once I've finished all of the playbooks related to each task that I've been doing as a content strategist, It will be a massive asset to train new hires effectively without diminishing the quality of the service that we offer clients. But creating an SOP is an absolute pain in the ass. Putting together the one SOP doc for curating Twitter lists that I mentioned earlier in the episode, that took me about an hour and a half. I probably have another 10 hours to go on the rest of the activities that I need to document. It is both incredibly daunting And there has to be a better way to do this. So here's my free business idea that anyone listening should feel free to steal and run with, because I would love if you made this into a product. Instead of me documenting, why not have a piece of software that monitors all of the activities that I'm doing for StoryYard in the background? And when it notices that I'm doing certain tasks over and over, it starts creating a standard operating procedure. And every time I repeat an activity, the model updates the procedure. And at some point it's confident enough in the steps where it actually generates an SOP template for me to review and make adjustments to. And once it's done, I can share it with an employee who I'm training. Will this be 100% correct? Probably not. Maybe eventually when the software is good enough. But what a massive amount of leverage that would be created for me and other managers If the materials that we use to train our employees that typically take hours of manual effort to build are automatically created by technology, I would absolutely pay $100 a month for this product. And my guess is other managers and leaders would as well. Okay, that was a lot. And that is it for me today. We covered so much there from a classic entrepreneurial fear around delegating work to an incredibly powerful tool in standard operating procedures and how they work and how you can use this in your day-to-day life, a little jab at whoever named these things. We gotta come up with a better name. And finally, a free startup idea around automating SOP creation that I would love for one of you to steal. I hope you liked the episode. And as I said at the top, please shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com to say, hey, I would love to get to know my audience better. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.