Five Signs Your Business Needs an SOP (and Doesn't Have One Yet)

Most small businesses don't decide to skip documentation. It just never gets prioritized until something forces the issue. Here are five signs that moment might be closer than you think.

You're the only one who knows how to do something. Not because you're hoarding the knowledge, just because nobody ever needed to write it down before now.

You've caught yourself explaining the same task to a new hire more than once, almost word for word. At that point you've basically already written the SOP out loud. It just hasn't made it to paper yet.

Someone made a reasonable guess, and it turned out wrong. Usually this isn't a carelessness problem. It's a "nobody ever told me the actual rule" problem.

One employee calls out sick and something falls apart, the schedule, the register, a client request, whatever it is. That's usually a sign the process is living in a person instead of a document.

You've thought "we really need to write this down" about the same task more than once. If that thought keeps coming back and nothing changes, the task is probably important enough to matter and annoying enough that nobody wants to be the one to sit down and do it.

None of this means anything is broken. It just means the knowledge is already there. It hasn't been captured yet, that's the part we help with.