Read time: 6 min, 24 secs
🚨 This one is IN DEPTH. Read if you want your new hires to succeed

Hey there - it's Brian 👋

I just got this text for the FOURTH time:

“Do you have an SOP on how to make SOPs? lol”

So today we solve this once and for all.

SOPs are just instructions for your team on how to do things.

A process.

If you onboard new talent without SOPs and they come to you every time they have a question.

Or worse…

They don’t deliver the quality you want.

Why do I keep getting asked this SOP question?

I spent 6 years as a management consultant at Deloitte and geez we love making SOPs.

I took those 6 years of learning into building my own SOPs for TalentHQ.

So today you get to peek behind the curtain. We won’t hold anything back.

I’ll show you how to make an SOP that:
• New hires use to answer their own questions (so you don’t have to hand hold them)
• Set expectations right (so talent is actually successful)
• Clarify HOW you work together

So I’ll tell we did it for TalentHQ.

Stay to the end and I’ll even include a template.

🚨 Fair warning: This is nerdy. It’s in-depth.

Read this if you want to onboard your talent correctly.

Not ready to hire?

Skip this issue and see you next Thurs.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

Quick caveat

When my clients say “help me make SOPs for my new hire” they actually need more than just processes written down.

They also need talent to understand THEIR way of working. Their culture. How they get / give performance.

This issue covers what people actually ask for when they need SOPs to onboard talent.

Not just the step-by-step process, but also setting expectations on how to do it.

Let’s get into it: 👇

So Brian… I need to hire. I want them to have SOPs to get their role done right. How do I do that?

We call this a welcome package or a guidebook.

It guides them through everything they need to be successful at TalentHQ.

Let’s our account manager guidebook as an example.

It has 7 parts:

1) What are we all working towards (mission / vision)?
2) What to expect during onboarding (timelines / activities)
3) TalentHQ Values
4) Our culture / ways of working
5) Training & Performance schedule (+ what happens if things go wrong)
6) What does success look like for your role?
7) How to do your job (SOPs)

NOTE: this may feel like A LOT. And it is.

But good news: 70% of it is never changes for all your hires:
➟ Mission / vision / values
➟ Onboarding process
➟ Culture / ways of working
➟ Training & performance

But you NEED these things clarified for your business to scale.

You’re the captain of the boat.

You need to get everyone rowing in the same direction.

So if you’re only here for SOPs, jump to part #7.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

You may not have this all figured out.

But this exercise gives your business direction and clarity.

It’s okay to be wrong.

It’s not okay to be unclear.

So here’s the outline for our Guidebook. Steal what works for you

1) What are we all working towards (mission / vision)?

Explain what your big picture vision is for your business.

And how their role is mission critical to that vision.

Your talent needs to understand that they are a key part to making a difference.

They’re much more motivated when they understand why (and don’t just feel like a mindless cog in a wheel).

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

You need your people clear on what makes their role so important to your mission.

In 1962, JFK visited NASA.

He asked the janitor what his job was.

The janitor said “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”

He is!

If the place was a mess, people wouldn’t be able to focus and deals wouldn’t get done.

Same idea for your people.

2) What to expect during onboarding (timeline / activities)

The goal for onboarding is to give them everything they need to succeed.

Then slowly slip off the training wheels.

We give our people support:

Shadowing
They watch us run client workshops and meetings

Virtual team room
Work live on Zoom so they can ask questions whenever they have them

Office hours
After the team room, set up time for them to jump in with questions

Training sessions
Specific targeting training on culture of your business or any topics they need to learn to succeed

Performance / feedback
Coaching on if how they’re operating within your culture, and in the role.

Start with heavy support then lean off the support as your talent gets more comfortable.

3) Your values

Everyone needs to know HOW we work together.

I spent 3 days on our values. It’s mission critical.

Here’s ours:

1. 📣 Communicate: Overcommunicate. Let us know how things are going. What the bottlenecks are. If there’s delays, what are the new deadlines. We don’t blame each other for mistakes. We’re excited when you’re living life. We blame for not telling each other.

2. 📚 Learn: We make mistakes! It’s okay. We need to learn from each one.

3. 🏎️ Speed: Reply fast. Move fast. If we don’t agree on a timeline assume end-of-day, not end-of-week.

4. 🧩 Solve: Always come to us with solutions not just problems. Solve client problems. Solve internal process problems. We’re resourceful.

Steal our values as a starting point.

But you need to make your own that fit with the culture YOU want to create.

4) Your ways of working / culture

Ways of working + culture is the more tactical version of values.

Culture = guiding principles on how people interact.

Ways of working = more specific rules on how to interact.

Examples:

Culture:

How we all work together:
➟ Do what you say (if you’re going to miss a deadline, tell us ahead of time)
➟ How to communicate (Speed? Style? Internal vs client?)
➟ How to document learnings (and build systems)
➟ No agenda? No meeting.

Ways of working:

Rules for our account managers:

➟ All daily client status reports in by 10:30AM EST
➟ All meeting notes live in Asana. With sub-tasks made out for each thing.
➟ All client emails with requests need an expected completion date

Also included in “ways of working” is what’s unique to your business about how you use tools.

Example for how we use Asana (task management):
➟ Task naming conventions?
➟ How do we distribute tasks?
➟ How do we propose deadlines to tasks?
➟ When do we chat about a task in Asana vs Slack?

Don’t include anything you can Google.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

It’s your job to design the culture AND hold everyone accountable to maintaining the culture.

YOU are solely in charge of keeping the culture in tact.

That means:
If you add a rule you HAVE to enforce it. If not, the legitimacy of all rules are in question.

If you realize the rule doesn’t make sense, change the rule.

But enforce what you change.

The hardest part is keeping track of what we ask for.

If leadership can’t track the rules in place, the team can’t either.

5) Training & Performance (+ what happens if things go wrong)

Your talent has a calendar of what to expect for meetings and responsibilities over time.

Responsibilities are BOTH what they need to deliver and what they need to learn.

If we see performance problems:
1) Give feedback on the spot
2) Review feedback on formal 1:1
3) Build plan to improve
4) If they don’t improve, we create a formal performance improvement plan

The formal performance plan is just a quantifiable goal and a timeline to improve the problem.

If your talent is not improving towards the goal, they’ve had clear warnings, and this person is not a fit for your business.

You need to part ways.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

Hire slow. Fire fast.

If you’ve been…

➟ Obnoxiously clear about the problem
➟ Made it obvious the problem is putting their job on the line
➟ And gave them clarity on what success looks like…

Then it’s not a fit.

Fire fast.

6) What does success look like for their role?

There’s two parts to success for the role:

Big picture + KPIs

1) Big picture success:

Imagine your talent only did one or two things and you’re ecstatic. What are those one or two things?

In our case:

The account manager finds amazing people for business owners. Clients love their talent.

So much that they come back for more.

2) KPIs (quantifying success):

What metrics does your talent need to hit to succeed?

I’ll share a few of ours to inspire you:
➢ Clients + talent will never go more than 2 days without communication
➢ At least 3 candidates delivered in 3 weeks
➢ All placements are a great fit (no requests for replacements)

7) How they do their job (SOPs)

So we break our SOPs into two parts:

1) Overview of each step they take (built into Notion)
2) Tactical tracking (built into Asana)

Note: The Asana portion has email templates that they copy paste with deadlines for each clients.

It’s our tactical checklist + templates.

Let’s use our Client Delivery SOP as an example.

We broke the process into 7 stages that our account managers go through for each client:

Each of the stages is a toggle in Notion that goes into more detail.

When you click the toggle for each stage, it opens up to show these 5 things:

1) Goal of the stage

What does success look like?

In other words - if they could only do one or two things to make you ecstatic, what would they be?

2) Steps they take

This is the actual SOP part.

I’m a visual thinker so I first like to make things in a process flow tool (I use Whimsical).

In each step we address a few questions:
➟ What action do they take?
➟ Who do they need to work with?
➟ How long should it take?
➟ What tools do they use to make it happen?

Example client delivery timeline below:

💡 Tip:
Don’t have time to write out the steps?

Record Looms of yourself doing the process.

Paste the Loom link to Notion and your team can train themselves on the process.

3) FAQs

Note: FAQs are just where we document learnings we’ve had along the way.
If one account manager solves a problem, we want that problem solved for everyone.

4) Resources / links

This is where they access the things they need to do that step.

Examples:
➟ Google slides to present to clients
➟ ChatGPT prompts they use to speed up the process
➟ YouTube videos that explain an idea better than I can

Etc.

5) Open items (opportunities for improvement)

I like to improve the process every day.

As we find things that could be better, we mark them here.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

People don’t read 1,000 SOPs.

So make 10 SOPs (15 AT MOST).

Use SOPs only for the most valuable parts of either client acquisition or client delivery.

😮‍💨 Phew. And that’s how we make our SOPs!

Get onboarding right and talent will know exactly what you need done.

Every day.

For years.

Now that’s leverage.

Want this template?

I made our guidebook into a template just reply to this email with the word “Template” and I’ll send it to you.

See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
[email protected]
Twitter
LinkedIn
TalentHQ

🙋 Vote: How did we do?