Making your first hires is a major milestone for most small business owners. Whether you decide to hire a VA, a part-time or full-time employee, or a contractor, the goal is to take things off your plate.
The problem is that they don’t always take things off your plate.
They’re obviously capable because you hired them. They seem to be trying, but without a small-business SOP (a documented process that tells people what to do, in what order, and to what standard) to work from, they aren’t set up for success. Instead, you get a lot of inefficiencies.
Maybe they come back to you for approval on every step, to answer every question, and make every decision before anything moves forward.
Perhaps they get defensive, pushing back on your direction and insisting on their own way of doing things because no one ever explained how to do their tasks.
Maybe they stay busy with everything except the thing you actually need because they’re avoiding what feels uncertain.
Or perhaps they go still and leave the task untouched for days because every option feels wrong to them.
Maybe you’ve recognized the 4 reactions as fight, flight, freeze, and appease. When people feel stressed, they resort to these 4 reactions. And believe me, for many capable people, dropping them into a new job without any guidelines is a constant low-level stress that can elicit this stuff.
Without SOPs, you’ve created a vacuum that’s preventing well-meaning and capable people from doing their best work, which is exactly what you hired them to do.
And what most owners assume is that it must be the wrong hires, or that there just isn’t anyone out there who can do the work you need done.
This is why so many never hire help in the first place. They’ve decided no one can do it the way they do, so why bother trying? Others go through the hire/fire cycle again and again, blaming the talent pool for what they experience.
I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly. The absence of small business SOPs should be the first place the owner looks to fix this issue.
And until the SOPs are created, you will struggle getting things off your plate.
What’s Getting in Your Way?
You and your time.
You’ve probably heard you need SOPs before. After all, there’s plenty of information out there about them. But why don’t more small businesses have SOPs?
Because they’re tedious to create.
Creating them means you have to slow down and think about the exact steps you take to do the things you can do in your sleep. This is work that isn’t fun and doesn’t have an immediately obvious link to revenue. So it gets lower priority than the 50 million other things on your to-do list.
And because this friction is all too real, your mind will start looking for reasons to justify its never getting done. Which of these sounds familiar to you?
This work is too simple to be documented. It’s common sense.
I don’t really know how to write an SOP and don’t have the time to figure it out.
I already know what to do, so it’s just faster if I do it myself.
My business is too small to warrant any kind of documentation.
I’ll get to it once things slow down.
My business is too dynamic to document right now because things change too quickly to keep a written process up to date.
These are all excuses.
I know because I’ve used most of them at one time or another myself. But the last one? That’s serious because even though it sounds true, it’s not.
Your Strategy Should Be Dynamic, But Your Operations Don’t Have to Be
When I hear the “too dynamic” excuse, I know there’s confusion between business strategy and operations.
Strategy is how you compete. It includes things such as which clients you pursue, what you charge, what services you offer, and how you position yourself in the market. Strategy needs to evolve as your business grows and conditions change. It needs to be flexible so you can stay competitive.
Operations are how the work gets done. It includes things like how you onboard a new client or a patron is greeted, how your team handles a complaint, how a project gets closed out, and how an invoice gets processed. These aren’t strategic decisions. They’re each a series of repeatable steps that happen the same way, or close enough to it, every time.
When strategy changes, it would rarely cause your operations to change. For example, you can add a new service without changing how you onboard a client. Or you can raise your prices without changing how you handle a customer complaint. And you can pivot your target market without redesigning how your team closes out a project.
So, even though your strategy is dynamic, your operations likely aren’t and need to be documented.
When operations are only in your head, you’re the bottleneck. Nothing can move faster than you can move it. You’ve built a business that’s dependent on you. And that means it can’t scale.
What It Really Costs When Hires Can’t Help
This is one of those things I’ve learned the hard way several times over. Let me tell you about one of them.
I’ve hired virtual assistants because I knew I needed the support, but I skipped building any SOPs before bringing them on board. I told myself that I worked in ways that were hard to teach, that I wasn’t sure how to explain what I needed, and that it would be faster to let them figure out their own approach. (Do you hear the lies I was telling myself?)
So, I let them set the path.
The problem was that they weren’t comfortable setting the path. They wanted to please me, and they had no way of knowing what “right” looked like because I’d never defined it. So, they asked and asked and asked. They wanted to know what every step, output, and decision needed to be before they would take full action.
I was paying for help and still needed to review all the minutiae.
I went through 2 months of this before finally understanding what was happening.
My team was asking really thoughtful, great questions. They really wanted to do the right thing and didn’t have a frame of reference for what that was. This is what appease, the most agreeable looking of the 4 reactions, looks like.
Once I built the necessary SOPs with my VAs, things changed. Work moved off my plate! I could focus on what only I could do, simply because they finally had something they could work from.
I’m really lucky it only took me 2 months. So many business owners struggle with giving their hires guidelines for much, much longer before they recognize what’s missing.
I’m also really lucky that my VAs reacted with appease. Yours might react with fight, flight, freeze, or an unpredictable variety of them based on how stressed they are about not knowing what to do.
These reactions are also why owners can churn through people and wind up deciding that good help doesn’t exist. Which is really unfortunate, because it means the business will never grow to what it could.
The Reason That Most Won’t Admit To
The second reason some owners resist creating SOPs for their small business has to do with self-esteem.
When I was in corporate, I asked my team to document their processes. Initially, everyone pushed back. They thought it was a complete waste of time. When I reframed my request as being the only way we could cover for each other, most of them came around.
One person didn’t. He told me he wouldn’t create the documentation because it was his job security to be the only one who knew what he knew.
He eventually left that job, just like he had a couple before. He didn’t take the time to train anyone to take over his tasks. The next job he took was outside of the industry, which was probably good because, although he was excellent at what he did, he made things much more difficult than necessary.
This is the same pattern I see in business owners. On some level, they’re worried about what their value is if they train others to do what they currently do.
What’s important to know, if this resonates with you, is that being indispensable is a prison and not protection.
The owner who can’t be replaced can’t truly take a vacation, get sick, scale, sell, or any of a million other things that life can throw your way. (I know because I was this owner.)
There’s also research that makes this real. A Panopto study found that 42% of institutional knowledge is unique to the individual. When that person is unavailable or leaves, nearly half of what they did can’t be done by anyone else.
If you translate this to owners who’ve never documented their processes, they’re putting their entire business model at stake.
Keeping your processes to yourself keeps you imprisoned by the business, which means any growth you’re able to achieve could wind up costing you everything.
What Does a Small Business SOP Actually Need to Be?
There are a plethora of templates out there, and most of them are scary. They’ve got things like version control, sign-offs, and complicated formatting requirements.
That’s not what you need.
A small business SOP just needs to be clear enough that someone else can do the thing without asking you. That’s it.
So, it could be a written set of directions, but it could also be a quick Loom video. The point here is that we generally tend to make this whole thing about SOPs a lot more of a deal than it needs to be.
So keep it simple. You can even co-create SOPs with your team. They’ll help you see the places where you assume things, and they’ll get the answers they need quickly by picking your brain.
What Changes When Systems Exist?
Delegation becomes real instead of theoretical. Things leave your plate, and you get to focus on what only you can do. And team accountability becomes possible in a way it never could without the systems being there.
The owner who concludes that you can’t find good help these days may discover that they’re wrong. Or they may discover the truth of what they concluded after getting the SOPs in place. Either way, they’ve now got information they were missing before.
Small business SOPs, like so many things in life, cut both ways. It gives a capable person what they need to succeed. It also clearly identifies those who aren’t a good fit for their role.
An SOP won’t solve the issue of hiring the right people on its own, but it will give you and the person something you can both measure against. Sometimes this clarity is worth as much as the work that gets done.
The Absence of SOPs Is a Huge Constraint
Look, if you’re hiring and don’t have SOPs in place for your business, you’re really doing yourself and everyone you hire a disservice. Your small business SOPs don’t have to be perfect. They just need to be good enough for your team to know what they’re supposed to do to get started. Then, as you learn more about how well the SOPs provide guidance, you can revise them.
Being the bottleneck in your business is stressful. If you’re ready to make it easier for your team to meet your expectations and reduce your stress, let’s talk. Schedule a 15-minute call so we can figure out exactly where to start.
About the Author
Karen Finn, PhD is an author and business growth strategist. Download a copy of her book, The Business Growth Plan, to get insight into the low-cost and no-cost strategies she uses with her clients to 2x-3x their revenues.
