Write it the second time you do something, not the twentieth. It is also the only way to delegate without re-explaining.
A Standard Operating Procedure is a written description of how a recurring task is done: the steps, who does it, when, and what 'done' looks like.
It does not need to be a formal document. A numbered list in a shared doc is an SOP.
Because anything undocumented lives in one person's head, which makes that person a bottleneck and a risk. Every question about how something works routes back to them.
And because you cannot delegate what you cannot describe. The act of writing the SOP is usually what reveals that the process has three undocumented judgement calls in it.
Before: onboarding a new customer takes the founder about 90 minutes and involves eleven steps they hold in their head. Nobody else can do it. When they are ill, onboarding stops.
Writing it down takes 25 minutes and produces something surprising: of the eleven steps, six are mechanical, three are automatable, and only two require judgement.
So the SOP does three things at once. It lets someone else do the six mechanical steps. It identifies the three worth automating. And it isolates the two that genuinely need the founder — which turns 90 minutes into 15.
That is the pattern: writing the process down is usually how you discover that most of it does not need you.
First-time founders often postpone documentation until things 'settle down'. Things do not settle down, and the cost of not having it compounds — every new person costs the same repeated explanation.
The second mistake: writing SOPs nobody can find. A perfect document in someone's personal drive does not exist. One findable place, linked from where the work happens.
The third: writing them once and never updating. An SOP that describes a process you stopped following six months ago is worse than none, because someone will follow it.
While it is fresh and before you have optimised it into instinct you can no longer articulate.
Not from memory. Memory skips the steps that have become automatic — which are exactly the ones a new person needs.
The mechanical ones can be delegated or automated immediately. The judgement ones are what you keep.
Linked from where the work actually happens, not filed somewhere logical that nobody visits.
The person doing the work daily will improve it. A document only the founder can change goes stale immediately.
A wrong SOP is worse than no SOP, because people follow it.
From your second employee, and for any task you do more than monthly.
Do not document a process you are still figuring out. Write it once it is stable enough that you would do it the same way twice.
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