5 SOP Examples for Service Businesses

People who are just getting started with documenting the standard operating procedures in their business often struggle with a simple question. Where do I start? To make it easier, I'm going to give you five different SOPs today that I would suggest creating. If you are a service business looking to get started with documenting your processes. The number one process and probably the easiest process to start with if you are a service business is how to create a customer folder and or record. Odds are you have some way of tracking who is your client and what do you have to do with them. And if you don't have a way of tracking that, maybe start there and come back to this. But most likely you have, you know, say, a project in Asana. You have a listing ClickUp, maybe it's a folder in Google Drive. You have something that you create for every client to let you know, hey, we have a client. All you need to do here is write down the steps that you follow. When a new client says, yes, I want to work with you, what do you do? Where do you put it? Do you create a Google Drive folder? Do you create a task and ClickUp, do you create a new email address? What do you do to prepare for that client coming in? By writing down this process first, you, you're going to ensure that your client feels taken care of, that nothing ever gets missed, and that that first impression that a new client has is exactly up to par with what you want your experience to be. So that's SOP number one, how to create a client folder, slash record. The second SOP I would create is how to deliver a deliverable. Not how to create it, but how to deliver it. So most of the time when you're working with a client, they're paying you to do something. Whether it's to give them a haircut or, or to build them a website or to write them a blog post, they're paying you to do something. And writing down how you do that thing can actually be pretty difficult. How do you write up a blog post? How do you cut the hair? How do you mow the lawn? There's a lot that goes into that. And oftentimes when people are getting started with process, they try to write that down first, the service delivery. But because that requires the most skill, the most talent, the most knowledge is it can actually be a pretty hard process to start recording. So for my second recommendation, I would suggest you talk about how you actually deliver the deliverable. This might be as simple as when the website is finished, we give the user their passwords, we Send a screenshot, we post on social media saying, new website is built, we send them an invoice. Whatever you do, create that as a list of your deliverable finishing process. By focusing on the things that happen after the creative work, you don't have to worry about that. Oh, am I making my process less creative by writing it down? We don't have to worry about that discussion yet. Instead, all we need to focus on is once our creative work is done, once our expertise is delivered, what do we do right after that? That is what I want you to write down here. Just like the last example of onboarding, you know, making sure that first experience is great. Once you deliver the thing you're delivering, this kind of offboarding process will ensure that the final impression of your customer is also up to par with what you'd expect. The third example process for a business is kind of a zoom in on offboarding. It's focusing in on one essential step. So you might have a step in the other process saying send an invoice, but that itself can become quite complicated depending on your business. So my third process I would suggest documenting is another simple, mundane, repetitive one, which is how to create an invoice, how to bill your customers, whatever that might look like for you. So this could go about, you know, creating the product, putting in the person's information, sending it via QuickBooks, or it could be sending someone the link to your checkout cart, sending them a confirmation email after this could be using the stripe reader at the market and having them swipe their card and saying thank you when it's done. This could also be as simple as telling your customers, hey, I use Venmo. Here's how you send it to me. Here's the little barcode. Okay, you sent it. Great. Show me that screen. Good. That could be your whole process for collecting payments. It could just be explaining Venmo to your customers. However you actually bill your clients. I would suggest creating that SOP third. The fourth SOP to make sure you capture as a service business is how exactly you communicate with clients. Now, again, we're not going to get into the specifics of what exactly to say when, but more so where do you communicate with clients and how do you keep that centralized for other teammates to also be able to see. This could be as simple as creating an SOP that says when an email arrives, who's in charge of it, or how to send an email and CC the whole team, whatever that process is for you to make sure that all of your client communication is Centralized, I want you to make sure that is written down. A few examples of this might be every time a customer emails, it goes into our group inbox. When you are going to answer the email, assign it to yourself so it's not in the group inbox and then CC the whole team when you actually send that email. An alternative example might be every time the customer contacts you, or every time you contact the customer, you add a note into HubSpot, our CRM and we add that into the customer record so that everyone knows when we last talked to the client. This does not have to be a complex area, but I just want to make sure you have some, some process for it so it's not a bunch of people individually emailing customers and no one ever knows. What did Susie say to the customer? What did Jim say to the customer? I have no idea. We want to make sure that this gets centralized and this fourth process is all about writing out how you do that. The fifth and final process I want to recommend for service businesses, which really kind of applies to everybody, is how to collect a testimonial or request a testimonial from a customer. So whenever you're delivering an experience to a client and they're so happy, you, you always want to make sure you give them an opportunity to help you reach other people like them. And of course that comes down to asking, hey, would you mind writing a testimonial or writing a review for our business? And that can feel really awkward unless it becomes part of your process. And one way to make it part of your process is to write down when and how to do it. Something as simple as creating an SOP that says every time we reach milestone number two in the client engagement, send them an email saying, hey, we've been enjoying working with you so far. These are some specific wins we've seen so far. Could you please leave us a review on Google? Sending that templated email at Milestone 2 could be your entire process. This process could also look like something automated. Perhaps every time someone checks out, you send them an email after 30 days saying, hey, I'm so happy that you worked with us. Would you mind leaving us review? This could also look like a quarterly initiative, Maybe every single quarter. You pick three of your favorite clients over the past quarter, you send them a personal email and ask them to fill out a basic, basic form with some testimonial style information. So questions about what did they do before, what did they do after and what were the biggest takeaways. And in that form, you ask them for testimonial consent. So the process just looks like pick three clients, send them each three emails with these customizations, and wait for the response, because this is a very valuable one to ensure that your past clients help you find your next clients. Now, of course, these are just five processes in your business, and as you start to document, you're going to find that you're going to have hundreds of teeny tiny processes in your business that help things run. If you want to write down all of them, you need to have kind of an inventory of what exactly is it that we do, and then start working your way progressively through each of those things to make sure that they're all, you know, written down in some form. Nothing crazy, just lightweight and simple sops. If you're struggling with that, if you're trying to think about, I don't know, what do I do in my business? What are all the things I should create SOPs for? We actually have a free webinar on that in the description below, so it talks about how to define what your business does and then how to translate that into the tool that we prefer to use, which is ClickUp. So if you're curious about that, check out the link in the description below for our free webinar. However, if you already know where you want to start, maybe you want to start with these five processes here, head over to this video and go over the steps of creating a system, the steps of creating a process, what that SOP should actually include, and where you want to create it. And that'll help you through these next steps of the journey, wherever you head next. Thank you so much for watching this video here. If you enjoyed it, please like, subscribe. Leave me a comment to let me know if you had any questions. And until till next time, enjoy the process.