Creating SOPs

Clear Standard Operating Procedures are so difficult to come by, even more difficult to enforce, and get really screwy in terms of updating. Yet, they are some of the most valuable documents upon which to stake your company. Learn how to create them correctly.

Video Transcript

" Hi, my name is Rex Frank, founder and CEO of C level operations. I'm here to talk today about creating standard operating procedures. The first step is really to understand the basics when you're when you're writing or creating an SRP. Well, the first things is you have to think about it like a recipe. Right? you're you're you're not trying to say every exact step that that you want somebody to do when following the process. But you want to get somebody that has a basic knowledge about how to do whatever it is to be able to make sure that they're doing all of the key points. So it doesn't need to be an every individual step in every screenshot, one of the things to keep in mind there is the more detail that you put in the process, the more constant revisions and updates you have to do, so don't get too detailed with it. And you know, with that recipe, if you leave out an important ingredient, it's a fail, right. And it's the same thing, if you leave out from your process any key or important steps, likely the use of this process is going to fail. Another another key part in you know, the basics is leverage, leverage the team leverage the people that are doing this process. They're, they're the ones that know what they do, and what they have to do to make it really work in the long run. And it also creates a sense of ownership. If so if you're creating a dispatch process, make sure your dispatcher comes in and helps you create that process. Because they're part of creating it, they're going to feel that sense of ownership, and do it and execute with that consistency equality that you're looking for Section two, in writing so pieces, well what do we write about. And at sea level, we advocate that you break it into one of 10 categories. The first category we call it, you know, get your PSA configured, whether it's connect wires or autotask. We got to get your boards, your cues, your work roles, your work types agreement or contract types, we got to kind of get all those figured out standardized, documented. And always remember to keep it simple principle. Less is more, right if there's that concept that every option that you give, is going to create more potential for air. Right, when you have two options, you've got four potentials for air, when you have three options, you've got nine potentials for air. For options, there's 16 potentials for air, it's an exponential increase in the likelihood that the process won't be followed correctly. So you want to keep it simple, as much as you can pare it down. The second section is what we kind of consider is the life of the ticket. The policies procedures around managing the ticket, ticket triage ticket dispatched engineer time entry, closing completed tickets, timesheet approval, those are all processes you need to document around the life of the ticket. Section three is what we refer to as measure your KPIs. You need your your financial metrics, your engineer ticket metrics, your agreement, profitability metrics, these things all need to be documented. This is how we measure them and what we're looking for. Because what you measure improves. The fourth section is what we call the service team HR, we're looking for bonus plans, organizational charts, job descriptions, defining how you do your one on one, employee reviews. So the next is what we call leverage your tools. You have an RMM tool? Are you using it to all the capabilities that you should be getting from it, you have a standard way of documenting your client passwords, do you have a standard way of doing your minimum documentation? Typically, you're buying tools? Are we leveraging them in a consistent way. And we need to document what our consistent way is. Section six is get your accounting systems in order, right that's lining up with service leadership, standardized solution provider Chart of Accounts. It's figuring out how we do credit memos and doing those properly figuring out how we do our month end accounting processes for time and materials billing and agreement billing. Section seven is what we call get your client facing systems in order, which is kind of turn your perspective of view working in your own company to what if I was a client working with us, right and that's where we start working on assessments for client prospects or new client onboarding processes. That's where we work on project management. That's where we work on our account management processes, our vcio processes, our quarterly business review processes, those all need to get documented. In Section seven, section eight is what we call get ready to grow. And that's where we're saying, boy, if we got this machine, this service delivery machine running really well, we're going to need more staff because we're going to get more clients. So we need hiring processes, employee onboarding processes, employee training plans, employee goal setting processes, that's all stuff that we need to figure out how we do it in our business, and get it documented around, bringing more employees onto our team. So the next is processes around marketing, right, we need to get our website, we need to get our mission vision values figured out, we need to get our newsletter system going. And there's processes around doing all of these things. And section 10 is the sales processes, we need to take the leads that were generated by our marketing processes, and convert them into revenue. And in there, we have sales commission plans, we have a processes for getting our engineering team involved in working with creating scopes of work for our sales team. So those are the kind of the key processes that you need to get developed for how you do business, what's your way. So any new process that you introduce introduced into your organization is inherently going to lower your employee satisfaction, because nobody likes change? Anytime you bring change, people are going to get frustrated. So how do we mitigate that? Well, we mitigate that by using the C level five phases. Phase One is understand the best practice. Other people, other companies have already figured some of this stuff out, or reach out to them and ask char Tech has amazing resources. C level has resources. connectwise University has resources. There's lots of options out there for understanding best practice. So that's phase one. Phase Two is make it yours. Take those templates and document the way you do business. Say this is how we do business, get it clear, get it documented. Phase Three is take those documents and train your team. Right. And that should be Hey, guys, this is how we're going to start do it, start doing it starting next Monday. phase four is actually make the operational change, change the setup of your systems to start doing things the new way. And then phase five is what I call inspect what you expect. We need to measure our people following those processes. So always, always, always understand how other people are already successful. document your way of doing business. Phase Three is train your team phase four, implement it and start doing it the new way. Phase five is inspect what you expect. And I gotta warn ya, phase one through four. They're the easy ones. nearly any manager can do those phase five, the inspect what you expect them making sure your processes are followed by all that's going to test every ounce of leadership ability that you have. And that is the hardest one and the longest one is making sure everybody's following your new processes. So it looks like we come to the end of this video. Make sure you look for part two "