How to Use AI to Build SOPs Faster

Most business owners, they're still writing SOPs like it's 2019. That's got to be a hundred thousand dollar or a couple of hundred thousand dollar mistake right there. I've spent the past six years or more teaching business owners and their teams how to write SOPs. And then AIs come along and 90% of my advice is now obsolete. If we haven't met. My name is David Jennings. I'm the best selling author of two books, one called Systemology, another called Systems Champion. And I help business owners get off the tools out of operations and build businesses that give them true freedom. And for years I taught the same thing. You write SOPs out manually, you follow the framework, you document everything step by step. And it worked, but it was really slow. And then AI showed up and changed everything. Sop, if you don't know, stands for Standard Operating Procedure and, and it's just a complicated way of saying a set of instructions for how you do anything in your business, like how do you respond to a Facebook comment, or how do you onboard a client or process a refund. If someone on your team is doing a task more than once, you need an SOP for it, and you probably already know that. But if you're like most business owners, you probably haven't done it either. And I get it. The old way it took hours, but the new way, you can do it in under five minutes. By the end of this video, I'm going to show you how to write bulletproof SOPs that your team actually follows. And we're going to do it in less time than it takes to make a coffee now. For years, documenting it was the biggest friction point when it comes to systemization. People would get all pumped up about the idea of building a systemized business and then they would get stuck here. The business owner would sit down and try and write out everything themselves. They'd think through all of the details, they'd type it out. It was exhausting and only the rare few actually got it done. And then AI comes along. Now, I thought this was going to solve the problem, but raw ChatGPT outputs, they're vague and generic. You've probably experienced that as well. But I continued and persisted with it, testing obsessively. I've recorded so many processes, I've got the transcripts, fed it into AI, tweaked the prompts, tried the tools, and got real world people to then actually follow the processes. Eventually I figured out the formula. And like a lot of things in business, simple is best. Most people they over complicate things, they over bloat processes. But you want to make these processes so simple that anyone can follow it. And if you break it down into a small enough chunk, the AI can virtually instantly draft these processes up for you. So, so the friction's gone. This is something that anybody and everybody can do and should do. So let me walk you through how it works. Step number one is you just need to record the process getting done. You can use a screen recording tool if it's on your computer, or you can use your phone if it's something out on the factory floor or in the real world. You just hit record, do the task and narrate it out loud. So that just means talk it through as you're doing it, like you were teaching someone. Now the first few times you're going to do this, it's going to feel clunky and it's going to look a little bit awkward. And that's okay because once you get used to this, it just gets easier. And you'll find it's a great skill because it's far easier than writing something out from scratch. Then step number two is we take the transcript. Now that can be automatically generated in a lot of these tools, or you can search online to find one and you just copy that transcript. No typing, no formatting, nothing like that. And you, you feed it into your favorite AI tool that might be ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, whatever you're using, and you ask it to create an sop. Now you'll get something that's usable. It's not going to be amazing. It'll probably lack a little bit of structure and context. I'll put a prompt in the description that you can use. That'll get you a pretty good result. Or if you want, I created a tool called ProcessPal. It lives inside System Hub and I've trained the AI to know what a great SOP looks like. So it's going to fill in the gaps automatically and it'll produce the title, the overview, the trigger, the steps, the definition of done. And it's going to be formatted in a human friendly format. If you want, you can try it out. It's just over@systemhub.com processpal. Once you get the output, we move to step four, which is to review and refine. You'll take that SOP and you'll paste it into your SOP software. Just look through it, fix any obvious mistakes, add any links to different things you may have mentioned other systems and screenshots. If it's needed. It doesn't need to be perfect because really the more important thing is just to make sure that it's practical and it helps someone who hasn't done this task before. And then step number five, the last one, and the secret where most people go wrong is you then just need to link to it everywhere, wherever the task is getting done, make sure that you're never more than one click away from that process in the moment in which it's needed. So you'll add it to your project management software or your calendar invites. You'll print out QR codes and stick them in physical places where it'll guarantee that the person is going to not have the excuse of, oh, but I didn't know how to do that thing because you can say, well, the process was right there and next time I want to make sure that you've got that open. See, I told you it was easy. Anybody can follow this. Let me tell you about Gary McMahon from Ecosystem Solutions. He runs a bushfire management company based in Western Australia. And his problem wasn't so much finding the work. He had more work than he could do. The problem was getting it done. And everything lived inside his head. So. So he worked pretty much 100 to 110 hours a week, and he'd done that solidly with no vacations for five years. And then his health and his marriage started to suffer and he knew something needed to change. When we started working together, we documented his SOPs, then we trained up his staff and he took his first real holiday, three weeks off with his family. He told me that probably ended up saving his marriage. Now, Gary didn't do all this alone. He. He had someone on his team that owned the process of creating processes and we call that person the systems Champion. This ownership piece is critical to make sure it gets done because if it sits on your plate, chances are you're not going to find time. So more on that in a moment. But the takeaway here is if everything's living in your head, your team will be able to come up with excuses as to why they haven't done things to a particular standard. It's because you haven't shown them. They'll say, oh, but you didn't tell me that's how you wanted things done. I didn't know there was a way of doing things with great documentation. Those excuses disappear and now with AI, there's no reason not to get it done. It's incredibly easy. So if you've been avoiding documenting SOPs, comment below the video and tell me which process you're going to document first and then to recap. It's super simple. Just record yourself getting the task done and make sure that whatever tool you're using, you get access to a transcript. Take the transcript, feed that into AI or ProcessPal and have a look at the output, review it, refine it, get it just right, save it into your SOP management software, and then link to it wherever the task is getting done. So you're never more than one click away. Now the big question. Even though it's fast and easy to get done, should you, the business owner, still be doing it? The reality is the business owner is typically the worst person in a business to be doing that documentation. I know it only takes a few minutes, but if you do it once and you end up owning it, it becomes your job and you're already really busy. So then the question is, well, who should be doing that? That's what I want to cover in my next video. I want to show you who to hire or who to find inside your organization. Who can take on this responsibility, what to look for, and how to identify and turn them into your systems and AI champion. I'll pop a link to the video that you can click or you'll find it in the description and I'll see you in the next video.