SOPs Suck! - Episode 203

 Have you ever spent hours mapping out processes only to have no one use them? Or worse, your team nods through your SOP meetings and still goes rogue? Today, let's fix that. Because process maps are only step one. What matters is building a playbook your team trusts and actually uses.

It's June 13th, 2025 and let's dig into episode 203 of the podcast. 

Good day and welcome to The Budding Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Randy Bridges. 

In each episode, we dive into practical business strategies that you can put to work in your business right away. We also focus on inspiring stories from leaders who are shaking and making things happen in their industry. It's all about giving you the tools and insights to take you and your business to the next level. 

So get comfortable and let's jump right in. 

All right, all right. Welcome to part three of our service best practices series.

Today, we're talking about something that will make or break your systemization. How to turn your map functions into a playbook that your team will use. Today, we're covering why SOPs fail, making documentation work, team-friendly playbook secrets, and a format you can use today. 

Now, if you missed episode 202, we covered how to map your core functions and identify your biggest bottlenecks. Today, we're building on that foundation and let's make it happen together.

So let's start with the elephant in the room. Why do SOPs often fail? You map things, you write it up, you share it with your team, and you get crickets. The problem is that most SOPs are written for the manager, not the person doing the work.

They're too long, too formal, too disconnected from the day-to-day reality of the business, and it feels like extra work, not a solution to anything. When people don't see the value, they're going to ignore it. It's as simple as that. 

It's not more complicated than that. They don't see the value, they're going to bypass it as quickly as they can. So we're not just creating documentation in the process of this four-part series.

We're designing tools for people that want to use them, and that's a key distinction. So let's define what makes a playbook actually usable. It's not about fancy formatting or a perfect SOP template. 

It's about three things. Clarity. Each task should have a clear title, clear purpose, and no jargon. 

It should answer the question, what's the task to be done? The second thing is about speed. It needs to be fast to read and fast to follow. Basically think GPS and not a textbook. 

It should tell someone, what does success look like when I reach the end? And the third thing is ownership. We want to name the owner every task, every time. It should spell out who owns it, so that everyone knows who to go to when something changes or if there's a problem. 

Now if your team ever says, wait, where do I find the latest version of that? Your playbook is not working yet. So let's dispel a false belief right off the bat. You don't need a new tool to build a playbook. 

Use what your team already knows, whether that's Google Docs, ClickUp, Notion, whatever. The tool doesn't matter. What matters is the access.

Now here's the format I recommend for most service businesses. We've kind of discussed this, but I'm going to go through it again. Title, owner, when it runs, is it daily, weekly, post-sale, whatever. 

Any checklists or steps that are associated with it, and links to assets, templates, or walkthroughs. For example, here's a simple one. For client onboarding.

Onboarding checklist, owned by Sarah, runs post-sale, links to onboarding email templates. That's it. Keep it short, one page max. 

If you're going over that, you're killing people with unnecessary information. We don't want to do that. We want people to enjoy using this.

It's got to be fast, quick, you know, all those parts of it. So let's take a quick mini case study that I want to bring. One of my clients runs a tax accounting agency, and he had SOPs in theory, but they were buried in old PDFs. 

He had them on his server and nobody really used them. And at the same time, when I came in, I noticed his team constantly asked him how to do things, especially around client onboarding and last minute tax filings. 

So one February, I worked with him to simplify everything. Together, we took the process out of his head and put it into a shared doc with seven simple pages. By the end of the April filing deadline, 90% of internal questions disappeared. 

His team ran onboarding and standard filings without him. And he had time to review complicated filings, the bread and butter of his specialty. Now that's what a usable playbook can do. 

It's not about telling everyone what to do. It's helping people think about the process through from start to finish and understand when finish occurs. So here's where most people mess this up. 

They try to launch the playbook in a big reveal. But I suggest you layer it into your day-to-day activities. Forget auto-generated templates. 

Your team's input makes all of this real. Use your team meetings to get the feedback that make your playbooks work. Walk through one page live, get the feedback, and let your team own it. 

Because the best playbooks aren't handed down, they're co-created. Assign the owners, encourage updates, and treat the playbook like a living document. As it grows with the team, they'll grow with it. 

Now for a little bit of homework, just like we did last week, we want to pick one process today, make it new, and test this kind of rollout. Invite the feedback and let the whole process breathe and grow. Your team will actually appreciate it and own more of it, thereby making it better for them. 

And at the same time, as they own it, they will believe in it more appropriately and actually probably use it. So let's quickly recap what we covered today. Most SOPs fail because they're written for managers, not the people doing the work.

A usable playbook is clear, simple, and built for speed. Format matters less than visibility. One shared dock beats a buried binder every day.

Build it, live it, layer it in, and let the team take ownership. Your systems only scale if your team trusts them. So next week, we're going to talk about turning your systems into momentum, not just documentation.

Think automation, feedback loops, and scalable execution. Until then, take one process, document it simply, and start building a business that works without you.

That's it for this episode. 

I hope you picked up some valuable insights and maybe even sparked a few new ideas. If you want to keep the conversation going or maybe even explore partnerships, don't hesitate to reach out. And hey, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who needs to hear it. 

The steps you take today could be the start of something big tomorrow. For the budding entrepreneur, I wish you the best in your health, your wealth, your business, your family, everything about you. Take care, and we'll see you back here next week.