It's Tuesday. Four people need four answers. And all four are in your head.
The estimate nobody else knows how to build. The client who always gets handled a certain way. The thing that only works because you remember to check it.
You didn't plan it this way. It just accumulated.
So you hire someone “good,” but they still struggle to take any of it off your plate.
The issue: None of it was ever written down. You learned it over years, one problem at a time, and it stayed where you learned it.
The fix isn't more people. Or “better” people.
It's getting five or six processes out of your head and onto paper, properly, so the answers stop coming back to you.
What an SOP Actually Is
An SOP is just written instructions for something you do more than once.
That's the whole idea. "Standard Operating Procedure" sounds like a three ring binder in a room nobody goes into. What it actually looks like is a page or two: here's how this gets done, here's where it usually goes wrong, here's who to ask when it does.
So why does almost every business that tries this end up with documents nobody opens?
Because they document everything. Every task, every variation, every edge case, in the name of being thorough. Two hundred documents later, nobody can find anything, so nobody looks, so the whole library quietly rots.
I've built the two hundred document version. It was audited by the FDA, so it had to exist. Your business is not the FDA.
Five good SOPs beat two hundred complete ones. The hard part is knowing which five.
Who This is For
Businesses with somewhere between one and twenty people, where the owner or founders are still the answer to most questions.
You'll recognize yourself it:
You've hired good people and still get interrupted all day.
You’ve recently expanded and had an “oh crap” moment when you realized just how much you do without thinking about it.
Onboarding a new employee means someone shadows you for two weeks and picks up what they can.
There's at least one job you won't hand off, because explaining it takes longer than doing it.
You've started documenting things before. There's a folder somewhere. It has four documents in it and none of them are finished.
This is probably not for you if you need a compliance-grade quality system for ISO, FDA, or a regulated industry. I've built those and they are a different animal, with a different price tag. What I do here is the small business version: the critical set of documents that actually gets used.
Start here: The SOP Priority Audit
$350 USD
Before anything gets written, you need to know what's worth writing. Most owners and founders guess wrong about this, and the guess is expensive: you spend a weekend documenting the thing you're proudest of, and it turns out your team already knew how to do that.
The audit sorts it out.
How It Works
You fill out a short intake form and send me whatever documentation already exists, however rough. Then we spend 60 to 90 minutes on a call while I ask you questions about how the business actually runs and where things break. That's the whole time commitment on your end.
What You Get
A written report, usually four or five pages:
A full inventory of your repeatable processes. Everything the business does more than once, laid out in one place. For most businesses this runs to thirty or forty items. Most owners have never seen it written down before.
The top three to five to document first, ranked, with the reasoning for each. Not just which ones matter, but why they beat the others.
The don't document list. What to leave alone, and why. This is usually the longest section and the one that saves you the most time.
A scope note for each priority process, so you know what a finished SOP would need to cover.
A straight recommendation: whether to write these yourself or hand them to me.
You can take that report and do all of it yourself. Plenty of people should. If you'd rather not, the $350 comes off the price of a Systems Sprint.
The Systems Sprint
$1,800 USD.
Three SOPs, two weeks.
You pick three processes. I write them. Two weeks later you have three documents your team can actually follow.
What It Takes From You
Less than most people expect, because you're not writing anything.
A short scoping call, about 30 minutes, to confirm the three processes hold together as a set
For each one, either a screen recording, a voice memo, or a 20 minute call while you talk me through it. Whichever is easiest. Messy is fine, that's my job.
One review call at the end to catch anything I got wrong
No weekly check-ins. No standing meeting. No project portal to log into. You have a business to run and this is supposed to reduce interruptions, not add three of them.
What You Get
Three finished SOPs, written to be used rather than filed. Each one covers the steps, the decision points where people usually go wrong, and what to do when it does. Delivered in Google Docs or Notion so you can edit them yourself as things change.
You also get the template they're built on, so the next one you write on your own has a format to follow.
One thing I'll do without being asked: if scoping turns up something more urgent than what you picked, I'll say so. You can swap it or keep your original three. Your call either way, no change in price.
If you did the audit first, it's $1,450.
Not sure which 3 SOPs to create?
Start with the Audit.
Why Me
For most of a decade I owned the SOP library for my team supporting complex medical device software for the US Department of Defense. It was audited by the FDA and the DoD, which means every document in it had to be correct, current, and provably followed. I wrote and revised over a hundred of those SOPs and took our audit findings to zero.
That’s a strange credential to bring to a twelve person business, and I want to be straight about why it matters.
It isn't that you need what they needed. You don't. It's that I've built the maximum version, the one with the change control and the review cycles and the two hundred documents, and I know exactly how much of it is load bearing and how much is theater. Most people selling SOP services have only ever seen the theater. So they sell you more documents, and you end up with that massive 3-ring binder nobody looks at.
Also worth knowing:
I was the sole project manager on a $6 million per year contract at the same company, so a two week fixed scope project is not something I need supervision to deliver.
I've built process documentation for startup and Fortune 500 companies, so this travels outside of regulated manufacturing.
I'm a Six Sigma Green Belt, which is mostly where I learned that measuring the wrong thing is worse than measuring nothing.
I run my own business on the same handful of SOPs I'd build for you, which is either reassuring or a red flag depending on your view of consultants
On samples: Client SOPs are covered by NDAs, so I can't show you those. What I can show you is documentation I've written for software companies, which is the same skill applied to a different audience: instructions a stranger can follow without calling anyone.
Still Tuesday…
Nothing about this gets better on its own. The stuff in your head stays in your head, and the interruptions keep arriving, and next year you'll have the same folder with the same four unfinished documents in it.
You live the same Tuesday over and over again.
Start with the audit. Ninety minutes and a form, and you'll know which handful of processes are actually holding you hostage, and which thirty five you can leave alone.
Or if you already know which three you want written, skip ahead to the Systems Sprint.
Not ready for either?
Send me a note or book a 20 minute call to talk about what's breaking.
I'll tell you straight whether this is worth your money.