When to Build Business Systems or SOPs

If you've stumbled upon the word business systems or standard operating procedures or SOPs or policies and procedures, you've probably asked yourself, am I supposed to be doing this? Is this something that's appropriate for the stage of business? Am I in? And maybe I'm too early to think about business systems, if that's kind of where you're at in your business. Or maybe you're even more mature of a business and you're thinking, wow, was I supposed to be doing this this whole time? This video is for you. I'm going to answer the question of when you should start building business systems. And. And I'm even going to talk a little bit about a reframe we can take on that question to help it make more sense from a business and kind of a practical perspective. But before I do, there's two things you're going to want to know about this video. First of all, this is a clip of the client office hours I hold. So it's kind of a piece of a much broader conversation where I answer a bunch of questions for clients of ProcessDriven on a weekly basis. So if you have questions like this and you'd like to see the full length and kind of be involved in this, maybe you want to become a client. The second thing you're going to want to know in order to get the most out of this conversation is what we mean by simple systems. Because I gave you all those synonyms at the onset. They're not exactly synonyms, but they're pretty close. Let's not get into semantics here. The way that I'm referring to systems, building them or capturing them, you'll hear more about that verb soon is if we think about systems as the how of your business, how do you do things? How do you answer the mail? How do you name your files? How do you onboard somebody? All of that stuff is a type of process that you can track when you start capturing these things. And they're not just a habit that you just kind of do, but we can start referring to those as systems because one way or another, that's the way that you do things. So in this video, you're going to want to keep that in mind that if you hear the word business systems and that's not familiar to you, just replace it with the how of your business and it should make more sense. Also, if you're more of a term snob and you want to understand the difference between process, procedure, policy, all that stuff, I have a video on that actually over on this Side where you can go up and watch that video. As we go through this video, if you're enjoying the content, please do give it a thumbs up. And if you like seeing videos about ClickUp, workflows, standard operating procedure, and documentation like this one, this, be sure to subscribe because I release videos like this about two to three times a week and I would love to have you join me along that video journey. All right, let's get to today's question. At what point should I start building systems in my business? My opinion is that you should be building systems in the sense of capturing your systems as soon as possible. Really, as soon as things become a habit, they should be written down. A lot of the times I see building systems. So like right here, building systems. Building systems is really the wrong verb choice there. I'm guilty of it, as many of us, because that's just how we speak about it. We are building business systems, but building is not what we're doing most of the time. The first step of building out, see, I did it myself. The first step of system creation, that's even the wrong word is. Let's just say the word is capture. Because the systems we are creating are generally not new. We have kind of instinctually created the systems in our business almost from day one. After about one month of operating your business, you've probably created most of the systems that you will need for the next year of your business. There's like a very steep curve of creation, true creation of systems, and then it pretty much levels off to be a slight increase as you go through milestones like hiring for the first time or paying taxes for the first time, or whatever those pieces are for you, where you might have to introduce a new system into your flow, where you're truly creating it. But most of the time we are building out systems. We're actually just capturing things that we're already doing. And I things that are observed and measured are what's improved and worked on. So I believe that if you are serious about a thing that you are doing, any activity that you are regularly performing and you're serious about making that procedure or that process you go through better, that is the moment that you should write it down. This could be the first week of your business. This could be after the 50th time you've done the thing. But let me just give you a tangible example here. Invoicing. Here's a good one. When you're first starting your business and you need to send off an invoice, you are truly Creating system. You're like, where do I send this from? What do I write in the item line, the description line? Do I use zeros? Do I use four zeros or two zeros after the decimal point or the comma? If you're in your, like, what do you go ahead and use in your invoice? Do you have a little note or a memo at the bottom? All of these things you're kind of making up on the fly, and that is truly system creation or process creation at that point, because you're just like, I don't know, let's throw things at the wall and see what sticks after you do it the first time, the second time you do it, you're going to take some things as given. You're going to take what you did last time, probably duplicate it, maybe tweak some things. There you go. Then the third time, we're going to tweak some more things. There you go. And after a certain point, you'll find that your innovation starts leveling off a little bit. You're like, yeah, you know, this is my invoice. I'm not panicked about this. I'm not making a lot of new decisions when it comes time to make an invoice. I have a process for how I write this invoice. But when we're talking about building systems, what we then do is take that whatever we're doing and write it down. I think you should do this as soon as possible, because once you write it down, you'll be able to make changes a lot more accurately and with better perspective than if you just keep doing it and iterating that way. Iterating while doing is fantastic, but you are biased by your feelings in the moment and your time you have available. So, again, taking the invoicing example, if I were to say, all right, I just want to make my invoices more on brand. So each time I look at it, I'm sitting there and I'm like, all right, I'm just gonna, little by little, add better stuff into my memo. So every time I go and create my invoice, I start playing around with this a little bit each time. Well, the problem is when I'm sitting down to write an invoice, my brain space, my calendar is not saying, layla, take some time to really be creative about this invoice memo. No, my calendar is saying, get this invoice out so you can get paid asap or the business is going under or whatever the situation is for you. And you're not really giving yourself the space to really think about it. As soon as we start writing things down outside of the actual system, we write down our invoicing process, we create, we sit down, we, we go into whatever our system is, QuickBooks, let's say, and we start editing our invoice default template. When we actually take the time to do that, we are dedicating time to make those decisions for the future. And I think you can do that on the first day of your business for invoicing. If we're using that as an example, you can use that at year two, year three. It's whenever you're ready to start setting aside time to be intentional. Something I used to say about a year or two ago when I was doing talks about business system building very early on is that everyone has systems. You just don't know it yet. If you don't know you have systems, they're just habits. And habits are great. Habits are how we avoid decision fatigue. Because we just say, all right, this is what I did last time, I'm just going to do it again. Don't need to waste the brain power on it. But when we take a habit and we write it down and we start really thinking about it, we dedicate our willpower to, or our brain power to making that habit more intentional. Then we have a system. And once we write down that system, we have really captured that system and it's a system that we can look at and share with others. So you're habit building at any point. You don't have a choice about that. Your system building, when you start really just doing things intentionally and then you have captured that system when you write it down or put it into the default templates in QuickBooks or you create that automation sequence, that's when you've really created the, the piece of the puzzle. So I hope this helps. When should I start building systems? As soon as possible. When should you start paying for help building systems? When it has more of a benefit, like a significantly greater benefit than it does cost. I think a lot of the times I have new businesses come to work with me and I'm like, you're not quite there yet. You need to explore a little bit. There's a lot of the process improvement and system capturing that you can do by yourself and get you 80% of the way there. When you're looking to go to the next level, that's when you should pull in outside help. So, yeah, that's my thoughts on at what point should I start building systems in my business, you don't get to choose, you do it automatically. Kind of. It's just when do you start being intentional about truly improving systems? That is your choice and that should be soon and often and repeated on a weekly, daily, monthly basis. So in a NutShell, that's my two cents on when you should start building your business systems. Or more properly, when you should start capturing and improving those business systems. If you have any comments or questions, please do leave them in the comments. Personally, I would love to know how you've approached this. When did you start capturing systems? Are you thinking about them in terms of capturing, or do you take a different perspective? I'd love to have your conversation in the comments below, but otherwise I think that's just about it for this video and I will see you in the next one. Creating documentation is like the gym workout of business. We all know it's good for us, but some of us could use a little bit of accountability and support to make sure we get things done. If that sounds like you consider reaching out every quarter, I work with a group of small businesses who are looking for accountability and support to build their business instruction manual in ClickUp. Find out more at ProcessDriven co.