An SOP to Go to the Bathroom?!

Many successful business owners will tell you the best way to scale a business is to have a standard operating procedure or a SOP. But what processes should have a SOP and what can you skip?

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!  

Video Transcript: 

Business Advice Video: 

Person 1: My business did 149 million last year and we should do double that this year. 

Person 2: So you’re on track to do about 300 million, correct? What’s been your secret to scaling your business to where it’s now a nine-figure company?

Person 1: To get to nine figures is one of the hardest things to do. You not only need a really good product, you need really great marketing, you need really great sales, you need a really great team, but most importantly you need systems. You need SOPs, standard operating procedures. In my company, there’s a standard operating procedure for everything we do. And this is a little bit of a joke and exaggerated but there’s legitimately a standard operating procedure if you wanna go to the bathroom or if you wanna make coffee. The whole point of that is for every system and function in the business, it has to be documented because if it is documented that means that if I get sick today I can pass my colleague that document and they can actually do my work function. So therefore you are no longer relying on me. When you are an eight-figure business owner a lot of times people are still relying on the CEO but when you become a nine-figure business owner people aren’t just relying on the CEO anymore, they’re relying on the machine in the system. So the CEO could die but the machine in the system will continue to scale.

Matt’s Review: 

Yeah I mean, I think that’s good advice even if you’re a six-figure business or a seven-figure business and certainly as you get into 8 and 9. You need everything to be documented. You need processes, you need this is the way we do this, this is the way this works, this is how it should be done, this is who’s responsible for it, these are the steps, this is how you know it’s done. Otherwise, you are just always putting out the today fires, right? Today this happened, this client called in and was angry, this thing happened this thing broke. And you by the end of the day you maybe hopefully put out most of those fires, but you haven’t made any progress and tomorrow is gonna be a new set of fires and you’re gonna have to jump right back in and keep firefighting yourself. So having procedures having a way that things are done means you can delegate, you can offload things, you can know that they’re gonna get resolved the right way without having to worry that the person hasn’t had the training or they might do it a different way or they’re you know not gonna do it the way that the company would have expected. So it’s definitely good to have SOPs and procedures.

I think he was joking about you know procedures for going to the bathroom and making coffee. Seems like that would be maybe an HR violation if you told people how to do that. I think he was joking though. But certainly, you do wanna have SOPs for anything that the company does, that it you know interacts with customers or vendors or charges for or is just a critical component to the business. Those are should all be documented and have steps and then as you get through the big things then you can document down the chain into the simpler more straightforward things. Still just to have a process and a consistent way of doing it, it makes it much easier to spot problems and fix things than if each person does things a little bit differently. So totally agree, SOPs and procedures and processes is key to growing any business.