SOPs and playbooks
If a process lives in one person's head, the business owns nothing. Standard operating procedures and playbooks turn how your best people work into documents, checklists and short videos that anyone can follow. We write them with your team, in your tools, and we build the habit of keeping them current. The result is a company that trains faster, makes fewer mistakes and does not depend on you.
What you leave with
A living operations manual your team actually uses, covering every workflow that matters to revenue and quality.
Who it is for
- Owners who retrain every new hire personally
- Companies where quality varies by who is on shift
- Owners preparing to sell or step back
What we deliver
- Written SOPs with steps, owners, tools and the standard for done
- Playbooks for recurring situations: a new client, a complaint, a new hire, a slow month
- Short screen or phone recorded training videos for each SOP
- Checklists built into the tools your team already uses
- An update rhythm so documents stay true as the work changes
How it runs
01Inventory
We list every recurring workflow with your team and rank them by frequency and the cost of a mistake.
02Capture
We watch the person who does it best, record it and write it in their words, then test it with someone who has never done it.
03Install
SOPs go into your tools as checklists and templates, with videos linked where the work happens.
04Maintain
Each SOP gets an owner and a review date. We run the first quarterly review with you.
Engagement and fees
A Workshop of two to four weeks ($30K to $80K) documents one department's core workflows. A whole company fits a 90 Day Sprint ($80K to $250K) or an Advisory Retainer ($8K to $25K per month) over two quarters. Outcome based, never hourly. Every engagement is scoped after a call and confirmed in writing. See consultations and fees.
Write what people do, not what the manual says
SOPs fail when they are written at a desk by someone who does not do the work. We capture the process from the person who does it best, on a real job, and we write it as that person would say it. Then we hand it to a new hire and watch where they get stuck. Only after that is it an SOP. Videos are short and linked from the step they explain.
Perfect formatting is not the goal. Being used is.
Playbooks for situations, SOPs for tasks
An SOP answers how to do one task: close a job, order materials, onboard a client. A playbook answers what to do in a situation: a key employee resigns, a big customer complains, a slow month arrives. Playbooks carry judgement as well as steps, and they are where an owner's experience gets captured so the manager on duty can act without a phone call.
Both live in the same manual, and both have an owner responsible for keeping them true.
What to prepare and common mistakes
A list of your recurring workflows, the names of your best people for each, and the tools you already use for scheduling, CRM and communication. We build into those tools rather than adding a new system.
The common mistake is documenting everything at once and reviewing nothing. We start with the ten workflows that matter most and we set review dates. The second mistake is writing an SOP as a punishment after a failure, which teaches the team to hide problems.
Industries where we run this most
Questions about this service
How many SOPs does a small company need?
Fewer than most owners think. Ten to twenty well kept procedures covering the workflows that touch revenue, safety and quality carry most companies under $30M. We rank and start at the top.
What tools do you use?
Yours, wherever possible. Checklists in your scheduling or CRM software, documents in your shared drive, videos linked from the step. A separate knowledge base is added only when the team will actually open it.
Will the team actually use them?
They will if the SOPs are written in their words, live where the work happens and are reviewed with them. We involve the people who do the work from the first day. Documents imposed from above get ignored.
Does this help when selling the business?
Yes. Buyers pay more for a business that runs on documented systems because the risk of the owner leaving is lower. Ali's BizSell.ca sees this in every sale, and the operations manual is among the first things a buyer asks for.
Tell us which seat is empty.
A 30-minute call with Ali about the business and the people running it. You leave knowing which role to fill first and whether fractional, outsourced or a hire is the right answer, whether or not we work together.