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let's face it nobody likes writing Sops no business owner has ever said man you know what I can't wait to spend 3 hours writing down this one process in my business but that being said you do need Sops or standard operating procedures if you want your business or your agency to function without you creating Sops is one of the most important things you need to do to get back your time build leverage and ultimately scale your business to multi seven or eight figures so in this video I'm going to show you how to create an sop in half the time that it would normally take you and later in the video I'm also going to give access to my template for writing Sops to make it even easier for you but before we get into the actual how-to section of this video I do need to clarify something Sops seem to have suddenly become this go-to thing for scaling agencies everyone's talking about them everyone's working on them and everyone's telling you they are the essential thing to scaling your business and they'll free up a bunch of your time and to be honest those things they are true but it's also true that too many people dedicate way too much of your time to Sops way too early into your journey if you only have a couple clients and your revenues are under like 10K a month the last thing you should be thinking about is Sops in a previous video I talked about the different tools we use at hey digital which is my seven figure performance marketing agency one of these tools that we touched on in the video was called slab which is what we use for housing all of our information documentation other things like this however if you are first getting started you don't need a tool like slab just use something free like Google Docs notion air table but this is slab so this is the central hub for all of our content at my agency hey digital and so we really heavily rely on documentation Sops processes as you can see here all our different teams we have a bunch of different pieces of content so first of all don't get Sops confused with training these are two different items within a business if you're watching this video you're more interested in Sops which is step-by-step guidelines or documentation a typical sop should be structured a little something like this so we'll have an overview explaining what thisp is for we'll often have a video walkr we'll have definitions of any important things any prerequisites so logins that you need Etc and then the steps to take now if you're doing this in a basic Google doc this is an example of what this could look like this was a basic sop for AI powered blog content creation for my SAS company post strips which is a LinkedIn AI tour so you see overview explains what it is definitions prerequisites and then we get into the actual step by step now this kind of sop is all that you need at your stage when you're trying to write out clear documentation for your team members so they know exactly what to follow now as your agency grows as your team grows you're going to need a better structure for how you present this information this is another example of an actual sop for our Design Team how to apply custom fonts Source from a client's website you see we explain what this means we give the clear step by steps with images and we then link to additional Sops for what to do next in this section how to apply to the whole page so as your agency grows you can become more complex with how you write your Sops often people say when they're writing Sops the overview is easy the video is easy the definitions is easy the prerequisites is easy but the steps people say this can take hours or hey I don't have two hours to sit down and walk through absolutely every step by step that I take on how to do a task or a deliverable so I'm going to show you a couple tips for how to speed this up you you can of course use like sop tools if you literally search like sop building tools on Google you'll find the most popular one is scribe how with this you can use their Chrome extension it will document what you're doing on your screen very easily but something that I was experimenting with in preparation for this video actually is if you record a video walk through of something that you're doing so for example if I go to my previous Loom videos I just recorded yesterday a video explaining some ideas on how to generate content for a LinkedIn profile for one of our Consulting clients and so what I did was I went to the video I went to the transcript I copied the transcript and then I went to chat GPT and I put this prompt I created this so I said you are sop GPT an expert at highly detailed Sops I've recorded a video I'm going to provide you with a transcript and your job is to outline the step-by-step instructions and then I pasted the transcript here and the output within like 30 seconds was sop for generating content ideas for posting covers the objective covers the tools that are required and then even covered the step-by-step procedures this in itself is enough for you to quickly create Sops and cover the step-by-step section that normally takes a little bit longer now a couple things I want to mention when you are creating Sops is too many people focus too much on Sops they make everything detailed every single tiny step and this is why it takes so long in my opinion you don't need to do that unless it's a very small task like something that takes 10 15 minutes but if it's a task that could be up to 30 minutes don't go into that level of like every single step by step instead cover the core points or the key areas that you need to cover this video is kind of more tailored towards people at the early stage I guess of their business or the agency when you're first drafting Sops but as your business grows as you have more team members come on board there is less of a requirement for you to be the one personally writing all of these Sops you delegate this to your team members in different divisions and that's why you can then get to a place of having a clear structure for how to write documentation how to share documentation all these kind of things we have processes for how to do processes for example and then as your documentation evolves you will start to take some of this you'll see we're using slab like I've shared we have our content map this will be things like how to do naming conventions how to do design abbreviations ways of working core values all this kind of stuff but then within your project management software whether you use clickup assana something like this this is where you then have your checklists so you can take information from your Sops add them to checklists in your project management software and this will make it much much easier for team members to clearly follow step-by-step instructions as well so personally I haven't written an sop in a very very long time now because our team handles that for us but you can see from how we have these things structured what's important for an sop what you should cover how to outline it and also some tips for how to write these faster as well and you could even have like to know when completed for example so then you know when to move on or your team member knows when to move on to the next step now something else that I want to highlight is Sops are really important but just because you've written an sop that doesn't qualify fully as training Sops are step-by-step guides for larger projects or larger areas within your business you will still need to provide training you can't just give someone an sop and assume that they know how to do everything perfectly so that's how you can write Sops fast and efficiently for your agency but having said that writing Sops is only only one part of the equation there are several other key elements to running your agency things like clarifying your offer nailing your onboarding streamlining your delivery knowing when and how to hire setting clear client expectations getting your data right without having any guidance on how to navigate them all it can be super frustrating and honestly it can take you so much time it took us 5 years to get hey digital to the point where it is today with over 1 and a half million in an your recurring Revenue not only that it also means that those that do have guidance will ly get ahead of you faster ultimately leaving you with a smaller piece of the pie that's why for those who are serious about growing and scaling their agency and reaching some level of freedom without having to be stuck in their day-to-day work every single day we've decided to put together a coaching and Consulting program we are working onetoone directly with agency owners who are doing over 10K a month and helping you scale to the 1 and a half million AR run rate whilst removing yourself from the day-to-day operations something that we've been able to do very successfully at hey digital we're actually only working with two other agencies right now and we have space to onboard two more agencies within the next month it will be completely custom done with you work covering our eight core pillars for scaling your agency and working really closely with you on any of the challenges that you might be facing also if you want to learn a little bit more about me and my journey you can click this video here and learn how I started my agency from scratch and grew it to $1.5 million a year I really hope you found this video Val Bo if you did be sure to give it a like subscribe and I will see you in the next one