10 Signs You Need SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)

Hello, hello, hello everyone. This is Kuba from Zenpilot. And in today's video we'll be talking about 10 signs that you need SOPs. SOPs, or standard operating Procedures. These are the documents. It consists of the scope of work, the steps that need to be taken, who does them in what order, and what is the definition of done. So in this video I want to tell you about signs that you might need them. Signs that this is a good time for your business to actually look into SOPs to do the work, and it is work to put SOPs in place. And I've got 10 of those for you. All of this is based on our experience at Zenpilot. We've got over 2700 project management implementations under our belts. You can think of us as like a total makeover for your, for your operations, for your project management. So let's get into sign number one that you might need sops, number one. The same projects take wildly different amounts of time. What do I mean by that? You've got a certain deliverable. For many of these examples, I'll be sticking to an agency or service based business context because that's our bread and butter. So let's say you have a deliverable, like a blog post or a paid ads campaign, maybe homepage rewrite, and you're noticing that even though it's the same deliverable, and maybe you charge per that deliverable, depending on your billing model, you charge per that deliverable. But the amount of time that goes into actually delivering that work is very different each time. This might indicate that some team members are taking extra steps or taking extra time with certain, certain steps in the process. That might be because they don't know how to execute them well and efficiently, or it might be that certain steps are getting skipped and you don't know about this, which leads to, okay, it's getting delivered faster, but you don't exactly know whether it's getting delivered to the standards of quality that you're expecting. So if you're seeing that there's wild variants, then that might be something to look at. At zenpilot, our tool of choice that we implement for companies is ClickUp. So in ClickUp, that actually is quite easy to see if you're doing time estimates and time tracking, especially time tracking will show you that there's some discrepancies here that might mean that it's time to reel in those processes and actually write down for each blog post what do you do, in what order, who does it, and how long should it take how much of a time investment it should be. So that's number one. Number two, work grinds to a halt when team members pass it from one to another. This is an example of a lack of visibility problem. So if it happens that. Let's talk about copywriters and designers. For example, you know, your copywriter is done writing a blog post, or maybe it's copy for an ad campaign. They go to the designer and the designer says, I never thought that this would come my way this week. I'm swamped. You'll have to wait a few days for me to get on that. That is obviously a problem that can actually lead to extended timelines, right? So if you're dealing with some something like that, then that might be an indication that you never actually wrote down the way the baton gets passed for that particular project, Right? So the designers don't know that they've got upcoming copy to put, you know, to create a design for, or the copywriters don't know how long they have to wait for design to get done. Then you know, you're thinking of the content or growth strategist, and that in that process they also don't know how to think about the whole timeline. So this is where a standard operating procedure or for example, a good ClickUp template that has all of the time estimates and subtasks and everything that needs to be done, that can be a big help. Sign number three that you might need SOPs is there's no consistency. So sometimes you ship great stuff and sometimes it falls short of expectations. Sometimes what you ship is right on time, sometimes it's way late. If you're noticing these kinds of discrepancies, that is a clear sign that you need to talk about standardization, just to look at the standards of quality that you're expecting from your deliverables. I'm assuming you're at the head of the organization here, you're the agency owner, maybe you're leading a department within a larger structure. So you have certain expectations to meet that bar of quality and of course meet the deadline. Right? But if you never wrote down what you actually expect, or you never wrote down, you know, the additional steps that really make or break the quality, then it's no wonder that there's no consistency. For example, for a blog post, especially for writing for SEO, these might be additional steps that are a classic for blog SOPs because they often get missed. These are the meta descriptions, image alt texts, checking the headings, the that they include the right keyword, that the URL is optimized for the right keywords, that all that can make a big difference in the overall quality and the overall outcome. And you can reel that in if you implement standard operating procedures. Otherwise you run the risk of this lack of consistency. Number four, you might need SOPs if the quality of work is strongly dependent on the skills of the individual. What do you mean by that? I mean, if you have, again, sticking to a content context, if you have great writers on board, they produce great content, that's to be expected, and you're probably compensating them accordingly. But if you've got average writers, then they get an average result. Or maybe some of their blogs are awesome, while others are actually quite poor relative to your standards. And that's obviously a problem when you're doing client work. That is a clear indication that you might be looking at SOPs. And the reason why is a good SOP. Good standard operating procedures will allow you, even if you've got a team member of average skill, to get great results out of their work. And it feels great on both ends, really. They get guidance that can take their work to the next level while you get more of an assurance that more consistently they'll output great work. And this happens through a similar mechanism. You know, for writers, this might indicate that you have not just an SOP in terms of, like, the steps to be taken, but you can also think of this in terms of templates, right? You might have a good template for a blog or, you know, it might indicate, you know, in the, for the intro section, what to take into account. There needs to be a strong hook. It needs to speak to the pains and the gains of the audience. It needs to take into account the audience, right? So, for example, a blog SOP might include at a whole separate step of define the audience, actually write it down. Define their daily pains or what they want to achieve their goals. Actually write it down, right? Break it down into steps. When you break it down that way, again, for a writer of average skill, for example, or, you know, it might be somebody setting up ad campaigns, it might be a designer. Many other various roles are possible here. Of course, I just have a writer background, so I'm sticking to that. When you have that written down, it's so much easier for them to stick to what will be relevant for your audience. Sign number five that you might be looking at sops is this anytime that you see that onboarding new team members is a heavy lift, it's getting harder and harder possibly to get new team members on board, or if you don't pay enough attention to onboarding new team members, they start doing things wildly differently from the way the other team members do, which is obviously a problem. SOPs are a great fit for this kind of scenario, and especially, you know, they can save your team's time actually one to one or one to few training the new hires. What you can do instead is send them to your SOPs. If you want to get your first blog done, if you want to get your first paid campaign done, your first social media campaign done, we'll be there to support you. But first, you here are standard operating procedures for that kind of project and you can use that again. There's benefit on both ends here as well. On the one hand, it saves your team's time or your time onboarding new team members. On the other, imagine the sense of autonomy, the sense of independence that the new team members are entering the organization and they have something to go off of, a set of instructions to follow. It's clear enough and detailed enough that they can independent, independently, on their own, actually execute campaigns, maybe even from the first week that they're on board. That feels great and it really gives new team members this sense of momentum. So it's worth it to create the SOPs, to go in detail and to think from the perspective of somebody who's never done this. What do they need to know to give new hires that forward momentum from the word go sign number six that you might need sops is if your senior team members are overwhelmed with questions. This is very much related to the previous point, but think of it like this. You've got senior team members in your organization who are the big brains, okay? They are the ones who have the answers to most of the questions. Maybe they were involved in creating the processes, but some of the processes only live in their big brains. Okay, that's part of the problem. Problem. So put yourself in the shoes of that senior team member, especially as your organization scales. Maybe up until this point they got one question or two questions a week of how do I actually run this? How do I update the top navigation menu on our website? Because I need to add a CTA for a new event there and your senior team member is going to say, okay, here's how you do it. Let me record a loom for you maybe. Well, that loom in itself could turn into an sop, but I digress. So when it's a couple questions a week, no problem. But once you scale and you have more team members and do notice how often I mentioned once you scale here because very much scale is the catalyst at the end of the day for implementing SOPs. So that senior team member might be spending quite a big chunk of their week just answering basic questions from newbies. That's not what you want them to do. They are your smartest team members, probably the best compensated too. You need them on the high value tasks, high impact tasks. They should be talking, they should be thinking strategy, they should be thinking innovation. They should be probably looking at AI, to be honest, and the various ways that they can be used to maybe automated ways, some of the what they do. But I digress. You know, anything that actually utilizes, you know, 100% of their big brains, right? So when you have SOPs, somebody like that, your senior team member can send the newbies to the SOPs. Or maybe the question can be avoided altogether because you've got these standard operating procedures in place and that can save a lot of time both for your newbies and your senior team members just allowing you to, and this is a popular phrase right now, to do more with less, right? This is what allows you to do that because you've got that. I like to think of SOPs like the code base of your organization. You know, you have actually a safe point of, of something that you came up with or you can think of it as, as your organization's second brain. So you don't have to rely on the organic brains of your team members, right? You can rely on the documentation, the standard operating procedures that you've got in place. So the next sign that you might need SOPs number seven is reducing the risk of face palm moments. Again, we're talking about signs here, right? So hear me out. A great sign that you need SOPS is if you had, if you recently had like a big facepalm moment, you know, a client came back to you with some feedback that maybe wasn't the best because some, some T's didn't get get crossed and some I's didn't get dotted, okay? They weren't sent an update that they were supposed to be sent, not get asked the right questions at the right time about their level of satisfaction. You know, a good SOP for account management will definitely involve regular check ins with the client, right? And if you're leaving those to, you know, the individual skill of your account managers, to them being on top of it, as you, as you might say, then you're leaving yourself open to things getting missed. Or think about it like this, let's say, let's talk about a podcast Right. I don't know if, you know, you might be meeting me for the first time, but I love podcasts and I run the Agency Journey podcast here for Zenpilot. So one important part of our SOP is outreach to the guest after the episode is out. Because this might be a facepal moment. Imagine you spend so much time and effort grabbing a very good guest, you know, somebody who's got good reach, somebody who is popular, and you know they've got a strong network. You publish their podcast episode and you never reach out to them to let them know that the episode is out, or you never actually plan to create good shorts and clips from that episode, or you never let them know that the clips and shorts are out. You really got an important moment right after the episode is finished and published. An opportunity to reach out to that guest while they're still excited about being on your pod, hopefully. Right. And to get them to use that huge network to promote your episode. Right. It's a much better outcome if both you and them promoted at the same time. Time. But if you never have it in your procedure and you get lost in the daily work and all the other responsibilities that might get missed and you miss that opportunity, and in the end, you're not getting as much done, as much outcome as you might from this, all this effort that you put into recording and conceptualizing and editing this podcast episode sign number eight. When people leave, there's a drop in the quality of your processes. This is a very clear indication that that something is not getting saved, stored, documented along the way, and all the, the expertise that your, you know, your best team members brought in, it's not getting somehow, you know, codified into the know how of your organization. So, you know, a key team member leaves and you're left without knowledge on how to run a process. That's because you never wrote it down. You never created standard operating procedures. You never put it high enough on their priority list to actually write down the processes. And I know this is the type of work that never feels really urgent. Right. But it is extremely important because otherwise, when disaster strikes and one of your team members wins the lottery, for example, which is not a disaster for them, obviously, but it might be for you, you're left with nothing. You're left with a scramble to get as much out of their mind as possible, and they might give you a bare bones sop, they might give you a quick loom video on how to do something. Sometimes that's enough. In other cases, though, especially when there's a Lot of nuance and details to capture. You need to do a few passes actually at creating the right sop. And this senior team member is about to leave. They've got two weeks notice. They're trying to codify all of their processes. It's done, you know, in a half baked way. You're not getting as much as you might out of them and that leaves you with a drop in quality because it's no longer being done to that standard. Remember, when you've got the best person in your organization at doing something, then the way they do it needs to be somehow saved, codified, stored, documented. They should create an SOP or you should create it with them. Sign number nine. That you might need SOPs is when your processes are dependent on manual input from individuals. What do I mean by that? Let's again go to a writing example. A process is dependent on manual input from individuals. When you have a case where you have, let's say it's a small agency, you're running a small agency and you have three writers on board, okay, you're doing the sales, you're taking on the client, maybe you're doing account management, but the actual writing is done by three writers, okay? So they've got their tempo of work and you take it upon yourself. You know, you're in the seat of chief editor as well. So you get a blog post out of them, review it, send it back, they send it back with edits, you review it, and if it's approved by you, you send it over to the client. Great, you do that times three people plus sales plus account management, plus, you know, whatever you want to do, need to do. Working on the business, you can do that for a while. But that model of your individual input simply breaks when you go into having four writers, five writers, six writers, everybody's breaking point will be different. But the key is to actually implement standard operating procedures, some sorts of processes, templatize it somehow before the breaking point comes. Because that's when you start not only feeling the pain, but like hurting your business in general. So the way to do it is there should actually be an intermediary step between the writer writing the piece and then you getting it for review. And that step in the middle should be going through your SOPs. Well, think of it like that. The writer is free to write the first draft, but then they should check it against a checklist of your expectations, you know, your codified best practices. If you're in this chief editor seat, right, we're assuming you're the person in the organization that has the biggest knowledge in terms of writing, in terms of creating compelling content, right? So you need to have that somehow on paper, codified and documented for your writers to refer to. And that document should be doing part of the work for you before you do individual review. And you can actually create it in a kind of organic way right at the beginning. When you have small scale, it is okay to just do one to one reviews, but if you're noticing yourself at any point repeating the same type of feedback over and over, that should start going into some sort of document or some sort of template. So you start building up your secret sauce, if you will, for how to write good pieces of content. So if you're still, you know, if you're still the bottleneck, right, then you need to be looking at SOPs and delegating some of that work that you're doing, reviewing individually to your SOPs, especially as you get, you know, past six writers, eight writers, more and more. I mean, of course at some point you're going to have, you know, as your agency hopefully scales, you're going to have team leads or maybe the editor seat, somebody else will be sitting in that seat. But when you bring in that new editor, it will be great for them to have something to go off of in terms of your standards, because otherwise you'll have to train them painstakingly individually on your standards. That's 1 and 2. Having good SOPs in place allows you to delay the moment when you actually bring that editor on board, which from the perspective of an agency, it just means that you get more margin before you have to start paying that team leader's salary or that editor's salary, right? And finally, number 10, the last sign for today that you might need SOPS is when you look at the possibilities of AI automation and you're thinking, I wouldn't have anything to feed the AI. This one is a little bit looking into the future, so to speak, and who knows where the AI tools are going to be by the time you're watching this. But right now, AI needs really good input. I said earlier in the video that when you're dealing with team members, for example, writers of average skill, you need to break things down for them, right? To think about the target audience, to think about the pains and the gains, to think about the structure, to think about SEO details, SEO guidelines that you have, right? And if you have those things written down and you're looking at a tool like ChatGPT or Claude, right now, you're thinking Wow. I can just paste that into the AI and it's basically trained on the way that we write it will at the moment of recording, it's not likely to output something that you can just one to one use, but it can get a lot of the way there. Right. But if you're doing everything via meetings, via just, you know, talking things through, via review on individual Google Docs, for example, leaving comments on Google Docs and that's how you set standards and enforce them, then again, you're left with nothing to feed the AI in the future. That might really come back to haunt you as other agencies that are more SOP driven, more process driven, are getting things done and they have this great input, detailed instructions. AI thrives on that. Detailed instructions on how to get content done their way and leaving room for the secret sauce that's supposed to be provided by humans. They can save a lot of time and again, scale very efficiently without adding more unnecessary headcount because they've got that in place. So hopefully that gives you an overview and you're checking your situation against these signs that I just mentioned and you're thinking to yourself, you know, whether now is a good time to implement sops. I definitely wanted to mention if in your business you've seen anything or you're thinking about anything, that for you is another sign that SOPs might be necessary. Drop that in the comments and let's start the conversation there. On the other hand, if you're thinking, yes, the signs are there, I'm seeing them in the sky or anywhere else, probably on your computer screen, then I do recommend checking out Zenpilot's ultimate guide to SOPs created by yours truly. It's over 4,000 words and you can really dig into everything you need to do all of the benefits you stand to gain. It includes instructions on how to build both simple SOPs that will get you started quickly, as well as more complex, more fully fledged SOPs to ensure that you have really high standards of quality. And it even goes to how to deal with your team members in the sense of trying to get them to, well, not trying, succeeding to get them to follow the SOPs, to actually get engaged in creating the SOPs. There's a lot of work to do here, I'm not going to lie, but it is all worth it. On the other hand, if you're thinking about your operations in general, and you're thinking that you would like to have a comprehensive work management system with templates in place, processes in place, with the right daily habits for your team. You want to really set the foundation to scale at Zenpilot, we can help you do that. We are here to help you get through the last project management implementation you will ever need and finally get both the processes, the tools, and the habits in place so you can scale. So you can have a profitable business that's efficient, productive, and where you have happy team members. Because that's what this is all about. So you can grab a call with us and get a diagnosis of your operations right now. If you go to zempire.com call that ultimate guide to SOPs. I'll drop in the video description below. Thank you so much for watching today and I'll see you in the next one. Can I make no more? I can't replace it. Trying hardest not to waste it. It's about time. Yeah, it's about.