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Hey there - it's Brian 👋

FINALLY.

I went through all 430 applicants. FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY.

We needed an account manager. We’ve had 5 clients a week asking us to place Latin American marketers into their business.

And last night she accepted our offer.

Really excited that we can help more businesses.

So while we’ve been interviewing I’ve been building SOPs for the account manager.

Btw, SOPs are just a fancy word for processes ("Standard Operating Procedures”).

SOPs are just a way to clone myself and have someone else do the work I’ve been doing.

But if you start writing SOPs too early it’s a complete waste of time.

You pivot so frequently it becomes useless.

So at what point does it make sense to write down everything you do so others can follow it?

Start too early and it’s a waste of time. Start too late and your business can’t scale.

So today we’ll cover:
➟ Common mistakes people make with SOPs
➟ How you know when it makes sense to build SOPs
➟ A behind the scenes look at our own SOPs

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

“Employees work hard to make themselves irreplaceable. Business owners work hard to make themselves replaceable.”

For my friends: What’s going on with Brian?

I’m in Cuenca, Ecuador.

Meeting marketing talent + building partnerships to reach latino marketers to place in businesses in the US.

So last night I met with a YouTuber with a following of 300k latino marketers.

Really cool hearing his story.

This marketing professor in Colombia wanted to help more people.

He saw he was only helping 20 students in his classroom. He wanted to help thousands.

So he recorded his lessons on YouTube. And his channel exploded.

I love meeting people like that on my travels.

Okay on to SOPs: 👇

This travel company was too early for SOPs

I’m sitting in this co-working next to this woman who built a travel company.

She’s telling me about the SOPs she built and comparing to the SOPs I’m building.

But there’s one problem.

She’s still trying to find Product Market Fit.

In other words, she can’t standardize her processes until she’s found the business model that works AND is running a repeatable process.

So when do SOPs make sense for you?

Well if you’re hiring talent (that is not strategic leadership talent) you’ll want them to follow a set of steps.

At the point that you’ve proven those steps are repeatable? You’re ready for SOPs.

If you’re still pivoting those steps, wait. Keep adjusting until you find what’s repeatable.

THEN it’s time for SOPs.

You can’t scale your business without it.

We help clients build SOPs for the talent they onboard. So I’ve seen 100s of SOPs.

So here’s two of the most common mistakes I’ve found:

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

Hot take:
Comparison is NOT the thief of joy.

Judgement of that comparison is the thief of joy.

Because we compared our situations we were able to figure out what’s the nuance that makes SOPs make sense for my business but not hers. Learn. And grow.

2 Common mistakes

1) OVER-SOPing

If you have TOO many detailed rules and instructions, there’s a point where it gets overwhelming and your talent can’t remember all of them.

There’s also situations that you don’t imagine coming and aren’t covered by the SOP!

In that case - you need strong values and culture.

Values are your directional compass. If your talent gets your values and culture they’ll know what to do when SOPs don’t cover it.

Get it right during onboarding. I’ll share some details on how we do it later on.

2) SOPing too early

If you build processes before you’ve found Product Market Fit it’s a waste of time.

You’ll be building processes that change weekly. At the early stage, you’re finding out what works.

Stay lean. Iterate. Move fast.

Once you find yourself doing repeatable processes for weeks, then it’s time to clone yourself. Build SOPs. Hire talent to run the SOP.

Doesn’t it feel like there should be 3 common mistakes? Lists always have 3.

But I refuse to give you obvious tips. So 2 it is.

How do I do my SOPs?

🚨 Nerd alert! 🚨 

This section is for you if you need to build SOPs for your business. It’s detailed. It’s tactical.

Not ready to get this nerdy yet? Bookmark for later and jump to the end to vote!

A friend of mine, Ayman Al-Abdullah (ex-CEO of AppSumo), he likes his SOPs incredibly structured. Here’s an example from his SOP template:

Ayman ran a $100M business so that level of structure is useful.

My SOPs have more flexibility. I’ll share some screenshots so you can see behind the curtain.

I build all my SOPs in Notion.

You can embed Loom videos. Process flows. And organize all your SOPs in a database that’s easy to find.

Btw the alternative to Notion is Coda.

I have a friend who runs a $30M ecomm business out of Coda and he prefers it over Notion because it’s highly automated.

He’s a tech nerd so he has an AI flow that automatically creates SOPs for him.

That’s not me yet*, so Notion it is.

*YET. Our next hire is a tech guy to automate our business so stay tuned.

Anyway. I’m very animated so I love to build my SOPs in Notion so I can include Loom videos and process flows.

I’ll take a few screenshots for our processes for our Account Manager Guidebook (aka processes):

This is the guidebook for our account managers. How we work together, expectations, and the processes (SOPs) to follow.

We start the guidebook with expectations. What success looks like. And how we do performance reviews.

Then we dive into how to succeed at our business (TalentHQ):

1) We start the guidebook with our values.
Wildly overlooked yet SO important.

2) Then make sure talent understands our culture
In other words how we work together. It’s critical to get this right at onboarding!

3) Finally we give them the steps to complete their job (aka SOPs)
Each item has a toggle with step-by-step instructions and a Loom video explaining how to do it.

SOPs are amazing

You can’t scale your business without SOPs.

Creating systems that your talent can follow are HOW you clone yourself.

You can’t scale your business without systems.

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See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
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