- Repeatable, scalable, document.
(upbeat music)
How to create a procedures manual for your business.
Some people call 'em SOPs, standard operating procedures,
I like to call 'em playbooks.
But in today's video, I wanna share
with you guys how to do this the right way,
'cause maybe you're frustrated that you've tried
this in the past and nobody was following the procedures.
Or you sat down, documented everything,
and the documents are now stale,
so they're not even relevant, or you actually did the work,
never distribute it to your team
'cause it never got finished, or you just feel like
you spent all your time creating procedures,
versus having somebody else support you.
Here's what I think the future could look like for you,
is literally having your team in a very structured,
simplified, iterative process creating these beautiful,
repeatable, scalable documents and checklists
so that your customers get the promise
that you made, they get delivered on.
So as a business, you make a promise.
That's what these procedures are gonna allow you to do
and really get free from the day to day
of the firefighting in your business
so that you can spend more time
being creative and building out the business.
Now, I really had to learn this lesson
over the years because I used to be the person
that wanted to do everything, and I realized
that I needed to start building a team
and having other people support me,
and that started with my company, Spheric.
And in the early days,
we used a Wiki tool called Confluence.
So it was a Wiki software, if you ever use
or been to Wikipedia, that was the tool we used.
And then my next company, we decided to migrate
off Confluence 'cause it was a little too geeky
and use something like Google Sites.
And that kind of worked, but there were still the challenges
of keeping it updated, having documents in there
that were started that were never finished,
and really just not having anybody
having the procedures open while they were doing the work.
And it wasn't 'til my last company
that I really found the way, you know,
I've literally scaled remote teams
from zero to dozens of employees,
have been involved helping set this up
for a lot of my portfolio companies as an investor.
And what I'm gonna teach you today
is the 80/20 to get something going today
and have it stick and have it continuously updated
and really get you the freedom back in your business.
So the first step that you need to understand
is start by defining a program.
A program is for every department in your business.
It could be sales, could be marketing,
it could be operations, it could be the delivery aspect
of how you actually give the customer the value,
either a service business or a technology product,
is document the high-level steps
from the beginning, the input to that department,
to the output and the expected result.
And it doesn't have to be detailed.
Most people make the mistakes of feeling like every step,
checklist, screenshot, procedure, detailed labels,
and naming and everything needs to be defined,
and that's not the way to start.
Starting is really creating what I call
a program overview document to make sure that you
at least capture all the things that people do.
And it's really great if you have a team,
'cause you can just say, hey,
can you make a list that if you were
to hire somebody to do your job for two months
'cause you were gonna go away on vacation,
what are all the different areas,
either things you monitor, things you create,
collaborations you have within our business,
input/outputs, what would you want to review?
So not, like, writing out exactly how to do it,
but what's the conversation topics
that you would want to have with those people?
That is the first step in creating a playbook.
In my world that's what I call it,
a playbook, for your business.
Start off by creating a review.
Number two is set up in your weekly meeting,
hopefully you're having weekly meeting.
Every week, you actually add an agenda item
to review the new or updated plays
or procedures or SOPs in your business.
So every week, you have people creating things,
updating it, because there's, and I'm gonna talk about this
in step four, but you want to have the ability to review
and communicate the new documents within your team.
That's why you could literally
start with one, which I recommend.
The number one, if you wanna know
which one should I start with, your recruiting process.
Your people, at the end of the day,
is what's gonna allow you to scale the business.
If you don't have a predictable way
to track and convert and retain incredible talent,
start by creating your program there.
But number two is really getting the weekly review
dialed in so that as it's updated,
the rest of the team understands it,
it's communicated,
and you can have feedback and collaboration around it.
Third thing you need to get right is the team culture.
You need to be in a business
where if there is a procedure, that it is a must.
Not a nice to have, not a suggestion, not a maybe,
it is a must that they have the procedure open, okay?
So the third area that you need to make sure to,
even if you sat down and you hired somebody,
I've seen people hire really expensive consultants
to come in and create a business manual
or a procedure or playbook, and the challenge
is that nobody referenced it, nobody had it open
when they were doing their work.
So the biggest challenge is making sure that people
integrate it into the culture of how they do business.
So one of the rules within all my companies
is that if there's a procedure that exists
for the work you're about to do, you must have it open.
It has to be sitting there and you gotta reference it
so that you can actually insure that each step
of the work gets done, and if there's an issue
where you say go to this screen and all the sudden
that screen changes in the software,
you can actually update it in real time, 'kay?
So this is super key.
And people are always asking me, what tools do you use?
Below in the comments, or actually in the description
of the video, I'm gonna put all the tools that I use
because it might change over time,
and that's where it's gonna be updated.
So if you have questions around the technical
implementation, do it there, or check out there.
Number four is the structure.
The way I create it, and this is the tool
that I'll probably use for the near future,
is I use a spreadsheet.
And I use Google Docs online, use Google Sheets,
because it's a super lightweight of having a list
of the procedures in my business.
Now I have three tabs in that spreadsheet.
I have procedures, I have references,
and I have templates.
Because in a business, that's kind of the three
different things you're gonna have.
You're gonna have the procedure, which is the checklist,
or the how-to of getting the work done.
You're gonna have the references,
which is content or information
that you need to do the work, so those things
might be referenced in the document.
So if you have, like, an employee onboarding procedure,
you might have a spreadsheet which is all
the employee contact information,
and one of the steps is to add or edit
or update that reference document.
And then the third is the templates,
which might be, you know, an email that you send
afterwards to the new employee, the new hire,
or if you're terminating somebody,
the email or the documents that you need to produce,
all the templates are linked to in this spreadsheet.
So they don't live in there, but they're linked to it.
And the beauty of this is that
you're not managing a folder structure.
A lot of people, you know, they create
these folder structures on network drives,
and then they've got all these documents.
I literally would much rather have one reference,
one single point to go and say here are all the documents
in my business that help us accomplish the business,
and where are the documents and references and templates
that exist, even if they're in subsystems
in your project management software, in your Dropbox,
wherever they exist, but they're referenced in one place.
And that is the structure of setting up and creating
an incredible procedures manual,
or what I like to call a playbook.
So the number one tip that I want to share with you,
the last thing that I think if you don't get this,
it will change the game for you
in building out your own playbook,
is when you hire somebody and you're training them,
you can literally have them read
all the different documents that they have access to,
all the procedures, and you give 'em a test.
And the test is their understanding of the work.
So you might have a question in there
like how much vacation does somebody get
after three years of working with us?
Those answers will tell you if they read the procedures.
So if you wanna onboard and train somebody,
you can have everything sit in your documents
and then have them go in, consume everything
for the first two days of working with you,
and then have a test to be able
to see if they understand it.
So your training becomes super simple.
Hope you understand how cool that is,
'cause a lot of people are like,
well now I gotta hire all these people,
I gotta train them and make effective.
Let them self-study, train, come to you with questions,
and then give them a test at the end
so that you know that they've done it properly.
Hopefully this video finds you incredibly well.
If you want my templates for the structure I use,
click the link below in the description.
I'll give you access to my templates for my playbook
that'll walk you through the Google Drive
on the folder structure for the sheets,
as well as several different procedures
like the how to create a procedures template
to get you going fast today.
As per usual, I'm gonna challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
and I'll see you next Monday.
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