Jumpstart Your SOP Bank - Sammy Bohannon

Website: www.bohannonvirtualsolutions.com 

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Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/sammybohannon

00:01 Hello, today I'm going to be talking about jump starting your systems with SOPS and we are going to talk about how to build SO PS to support your business. I am Sammy Bohannon if we have not met yet, I'm the founder of Bohannon Virtual Solutions. I am an OBM and I have a team of VASI do the OBM work, my VAS do the VA work, so we're able to take on people who need a variety of types of support.  

00:33 I was an ESL teacher for six years in the public school setting, and then I taught several years online before transitioning. Well, even as I transitioned into virtual support. And I'm also a home schooling mom. So Bohemian Virtual Solutions, it is our mission and our, our goal to, to help values driven business owners do business their way through collaborative solutions oriented virtual support. So we do offer different types of virtual support and we, we prefer to work with people who are very strong in their values and they know what they want and why they want to do their business and they're very passionate about that.  

01:16 So what we're here for, our takeaways today are going to be why you need an SOP for everything, what should be in every SOP and how to create your own SOP template for your business. And I'll talk about this more later, but my business is all about making sure that you do your business how you want to do your business, not how I want to, not how fancy pants McGee does their business, how you want to do your business and if you want it to look like theirs, that's fine but if you want it to look like yours, that's also fine.  

01:52 And this is kind of going to be, there's going to be like a little bit of teaching and then a little bit of pretend collaboration. So we're going to get started up here this is actually from my click up and it it, this is what my SOP template looks like. So just as an obligatory like introduction, what is an SOP? An SOP? Sop stands for standard operating procedure. It is basically a document that tells you how to do a task or tells you how to do an activity that you need to do for your business. Basic I I like to think of them. I was saying that they were like a science experiment or a procedure for a science experiment or how to paper.  

02:43 But I think people are connecting more with the analogy that they're like recipes for your business. And one thing that's that's important to remember with them is if you think about, I know we've all if, if you didn't experience it in elementary school or middle school, I'm sure you've seen the videos of the parents or the teachers making a peanut butter and Jelly sandwich, showing their, their kids how or why your how to paper must be incredibly detailed.  

03:17 And they will put the butter, the peanut butter on one side or they'll flip it upside down and the peanut butter's all over the table or whatever. And it, that's something I like to think about when creating my own sO PS or SO PS for clients, because you want to make sure it's very detailed, almost overly detailed. No detail is too small. And we'll talk about that more in a minute but that is why I brought that up because we're kind of talking about why they're recipes. All right? Do you really need an SOP? Yes. Short answer, yes. Long answer, yes. You need an SOP for everything. You even need an SOP for how to make an SOP.  

04:05 When I tell people they need that, they look at me like I have lost my mind. I have not. If you do not have an SOP for how to make an SOP, some of these things might happen and I've seen them happen. I have seen teams that have SO PS written by multiple different people. On small teams, usually one person writes SO PS. But as teams grow and grow, especially if that's your goal, as teams grow and grow, more people are making SO PS because they're the ones who are actually doing the processes and know the processes and can best document them.  

04:45 So if you have multiple people making an SOP and somebody's SOP includes visuals and someone else's doesn't, or someone's includes links to everything you need and someone else doesn't, it, it's very confusing it's not cohesive. And then when someone else goes in and tries to replicate the process, it can make it extremely difficult. So there's my spiel for why you need an SOP for an SOP. And yes, my team does have one, but here's why you need SO pS For everything in general, cuts down on time training new team members. If you don't have any new team members right now, not a big deal. Let's go to the next one.  

05:28 You don't forget what you have to do yourself. So I will give you a prime example of how even I, as an experienced online business manager, should have had an SOP for something. So one example of something I did not have an SOP for but do now was paying my taxes. So I forgot completely what my PIN number was. I forgot what the right login was. I forgot, you know, just, I just forgot because you pay taxes once a year And and I'm not talking about the estimated taxes, like the overall taxes for my business.  

06:04 And I had forgotten my logins i had forgotten what my PIN number was to submit something. I had forgotten where I put my paper that has my, what is it called EIN, my employee or employer identification number or whatever. Just the important stuff I needed that I use once a year. And even though I do that every year and I have been doing it for, I don't know, five ish years now, at the time of this video, I still forgot. And it's because it's something I don't do frequently but if I had written it down in an SOP that said first go to this website, then go to this website, then look in the file folder behind your desk, Mark, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,  

06:53 I would have, I would have had everything in there. So that's another reason, even if you don't have a team. And then if you ever plan on growing or hiring support, even if you're just thinking about social media manager or a a virtual assistant, even if you're not planning on having a full-fledged team in the future, you still want the SO pS And yes, these people can help you create them, but if you don't have the SOP for how to make an SOP and you don't have a system and a procedure, they really don't know how to make them very well or how you want them or what you what information you need for your business on that SOP.  

07:34 So it is very important that you do that. Another reason why you need an SOP for everything is to make sure that you don't have any inconsistent client experiences, inconsistent experiences for team members, for contractors, for just anybody in general, Your leads, your, your email list your instagram whatever you just want to make sure that there are not any inconsistencies because that reflects on your professional profession ability that's not right, but that I'm drawing a blank but that that reflects on you and you don't want things to look awful, like you don't have it together because that makes people less likely to come to you as a business so it really just keeps your business together and cohesive.  

08:24 And it's also easier when you have a process right now to note where things are going wrong and say, oh, this is where things aren't working quite well and we need to go back and fix that. And here's where we can go in and make those changes to see how we can get things back on the right path. And for some, for some businesses, they can tell immediately when something's going wrong. And for others, it may be working now, but six months or five years from now, it stops working for you. And if you have it documented well, you'll be able to see, OK, this part's going well.  

09:03 Oh, it seems like here is where things are confusing or where they're where they're falling apart. All right, there are a lot of words on here. Just process as I'm talking. Basically, this is what you have to have it in SOP. Again, I want to reiterate that I am very passionate about helping you do your business your way. I don't believe there is one right way to do business. There are people who get up at four AM and work till twelve AM and they have multi million dollar businesses and they're very happy.  

09:38 And then there are people who work 4 hours a day and have million dollar businesses and are very happy. I cannot tell you how to run your business, what's right for you, what's wrong for you only you can do that. However, there are some bare minimums that have to be in your SOP for it to be effective. And this is based on writing SO PS for at least 20 different businesses and my own business and reading SO PS and just general experience.  

10:14 So I want to point out some things first, like some necessary things before we get to what you have to have in the SOP. So all of your SOP should have the same format all the time. And if you change the format, I highly recommend that you change all of them. Again, when I talked about consistency, if one person is looking at an SOP and then they move to another one, it could be incredibly confusing it could cause things not to go well.  

10:42 It could cause inconsistencies. Having everything the same just kind of flatten everything out. All your SO PS should have a review process. It shouldn't be someone writes 1 and they're done. There should be a review process. Who's going to look at it who's going to decide if it's good to go? Who's going to know any places where it needs to be more clear, those sort of things.  

11:07 And then also all SO PS should be easily repeatable by anyone, anyone. So here, unless it's necessary, I try to use i try to avoid using a lot of jargon because even though as an OBMI know certain words and things, if I have Ava doing things for me, they may not know those words and phrases yet. So even if I do use the word that I know, I may put in parentheses or to the side or an explanation of this is what a system is or this is what Kajabi is i don't know that's the first name that came in my brain.  

11:46 So just make sure that it's easily repeatable by anyone back to that how to example. That means it needs to be incredibly detailed. So what do you absolutely like, absolutely have to have an SOP title. Typically the title is a task name. I do suggest that you have a naming conventions for your SO PS and all of your files so that they're easily searchable and you know where they are and you can find everything. But that's a whole nother discussion. But you all what you want to title the name of the person or the team who's responsible, Step by step instructions very detailed.  

12:32 And then I guess this one's not a necessity for everyone, but this is where me mentioning I'm a former teacher comes into play. If you're hiring people who are outside of your country and their language is not your native language, then you want to make sure that you have visuals because it will ensure that things are getting done correctly if there is any kind of language gap. And even people who are mostly fluent or conversational or just even mostly fluent in a language can sometimes, especially when we're doing processes and getting down into the, the details of things can make mistakes and having a visual is definitely going to help.  

13:15 The visuals can be screenshots, they can be just other pictures, they can be videos, they can be whatever. So those are the bare minimum. And then the niceties, which I highly suggest you have but are not required and really depends on your business and what you need. I highly recommend having an objective, objective or purpose for your SOP. So to let the person doing it know why you're doing this. It gives them a purpose, motivation, whatever the frequency how often does this happen so for example, in my tax scenario, that would be one time a year, but in my email marketing SOP, that's twice a week.  

14:01 So it really just kind of depends on what you're doing, required tools and softwares. A lot of people put this in the step by step instructions. I like to have a separate section for this so that I can have the links that I need to them and tell where the passwords are. And that way, before someone even gets started with a process, they can pull all of that stuff up and be logged in.  

14:26 And then who wrote the SOP and, or has helped write it and the reason I put that is because if you have any questions, especially if you're reviewing it, if you have any questions, you want to be able to go to that person and ask them for clarification. And then screenshots and Loom video. I always include an Illume video with my SOP's That's for our visual learners or people who just didn't understand the step by step directions and needed to go back and look at that or if something was forgotten and missed during the review.  

15:01 Those are that those are just really great things to have and then the screenshots help those people who are reading through versus the auditory and visual learners help them see what's going on and get through that. Faqs are really important and it kind of goes along with the common issues and troubleshooting. So FAQs and troubleshooting common issues are going to be things that that come up frequently. So for example, let me think, oh, for example, if we are logging into, if I have an SOP for email management and a client has multiple emails and we have a habit of logging in and it's not working.  

15:50 So we're trying to log into the email and the password 's not working. So the common issue troubleshooting that I have put on other clients, SO PS, would be make sure you're using the right Google account because there are multiple on their profile and it's very easy to to not realize you're using the wrong 1 and that's why the password's not working. That's just a very simple example.  

16:15 And then I like to include the date created and the last date updated. And the reason for that is so that I know when, when it was updated last and if it may need to be looked at again and date created i mean, that's not really necessary i just like that information. And then any links to related SO PS, This is when I see a lot of people leave out of their SO PS. And it can be really frustrating if you're the one filling out the processes and things like that, or if you're completing the process i'm sorry, if you're completing the process and it says, oh, you need to do XYZ, but then you don't have instructions for XYZ.  

16:54 So then you have to go through the list of SO PS and find that one and then all of that. And I have also seen people make them into one really big long SOP. And then it feels overwhelming when you're trying to scroll back and forth and it feels overwhelming when you're trying to actually do the process. So by having those links in there so they can open them up, have them on two sides or two screens, it's just extremely helpful and it really doesn't take that long to do and it makes the world of difference. Ok, I am going to close out of this and walk you through creating an SOP.  

17:34 So I like to organize my things with titles and headers. So I'm going to actually show you my SOP template and see I have an SOP for how to make an SOP. I keep my stuff in, click up and we have a bank here and then there's like SOP's and they go further in because it doesn't have a good subfolder system and this is how we organize them so, but everything is searchable in here and then I have, this needs to be there we go. I have everything in here that I need to know and I.  

18:17 Yeah, have everything in here that we need to know. And we make a copy of this every single time. So just because I want to keep this under 25 minutes instead of going through actually making one with you, I'm going to go through what's in my SOP and we'll talk through that. So let me close this.  

18:41 There we go. Ok, so if we go back to the necessities, we have a name. So I put my name up here, which in click up is the actual title and this one's the template so I always remember to make a copy and then I always have SOP and then task name so that when I see it, there is no doubt in my mind this is the SOP. So I might say SOP, create presentation in Canva or SOP.  

19:18 Respond to client inquiry, new client inquiry, and then I have a video for how to complete the process. I typically do that in Loom, but you know, you can do whatever you want. You don't even have to have a video, but a lot of people do like them. So that's why I suggest that that's one of those niceties. Even though I do recommend you have some kind of visual, I do have my purpose. So I have these as bolded text and I think they're header threes or fours in mine. And by having those as headers, it makes it easy to, especially if you're using a Google Doc or a Microsoft Word doc, it will make it easily findable or searchable so that you can jump through things because these can get lengthy depending on what process we're talking about.  

20:11 So then I do have the responsible party here so who is supposed to do this? And sometimes that's a specific person. I do recommend you keep it as general as possible because people come and go on your team. So if this is the social media manager or if it's the online business manager or the CEO, whatever, I would just put that person's title if you can, instead of their name. That way you don't have to go and change it if it's somebody who changes.  

20:44 Frequency, I have that one under the niceties like how often should it be performed? Tools and resources. Excuse me, I always bullet this out and I, I bullet this out and I put the tools any other documents when I mention the SOP's that's where this is where I put it. And I also have some other SOP's and documentation down here. And this is anything that's required to complete the task. So that is what's going on with that step by step instructions.   21:27 We write them out, you use as many as you want. And then.  

21:33 I have been trying to decide if I like this right here because I've been doing that for a while, but it's kind of tedious to write that out so I included this because I'm thinking about changing it up deadline, when is it due so is it due so for example, if we're talking about my blog post, I have an SOP for how to do blog post, which includes how to do keyword research, how to note it and click up and note the process and all of that. And so deadline is the final blog post is due the Tuesday before it's scheduled so that we're a week ahead all the time.  

22:11 Quality check this is where I document where and this I did not put in the niceties, but I do suggest that you do that. I actually put little check boxes in here and work through who is done what. So after after I usually have the I record my videos, I have a VA write up the SOP, then I have another VA check the SOP and then I check the SOP. So we have a little process in here that goes here. That may be something you always do. Sometimes it is stuff we don't always do. I sometimes I don't have a second VA check it if it is short, If it's something really short like the SOP for an SOP, we didn't check that one.  

23:02 Have another person check that one so put whatever you want in there, common problems, troubleshooting areas, things that may come up that you already know about. And then how do you know if this is complete? Again, I don't have that on the niceties list, but I'm sharing that with you now because that is something I really like to have. How do you know what do you do? So once the VA completes the task, they notify the next Virginia and then they need to also mark and click up that it's the next Virginia's turn and also send them a message in Slack.  

23:35 And then that person's going to do what they need to do, and they have this many days to do it. And then they're going to send a message to me and say, hey, it's ready and click up and connect the template or the document to the task and you know, so on and so forth. And then any related SO PS or documentation. So I know I said that sometimes I'll put those up here, up here i really do like a lot of the tools so you need Canva, you need this, you need that. Anything specific goes down here.  

24:06 So for example, the exact SOP that it relates to I will put down here. And also, I have an SOP for what to do if someone reaches out.  

24:19 And has booked a sales call. And then in the documentation down here, I have added the email that I send and variations of it that I send and told myself in highlights like this is where you need to say this or this is where you should say that with possible subject lines. So that it's really easy for me to grab that SOP. It's just down there at the bottom.  

24:43 And then I put it into my email and send it off. And if you have any questions about this, I am more than happy to to answer them. Oh, we're just at 25 minutes perfect. Thank you for listening today i know I speak really quickly so if you have any questions feel free to reach out. I have this the missing link Standard Operating Procedures guide for you today. It is my SOP guide and it also includes that template. It includes my exact template that I use and that is in the form of a Google Doc rather than a click up form or a click up doc, but it is the exact template that I use.  

25:26 I want to encourage you to tweak that for you and your team because again, we help you do business your way and I hope you have a wonderful day. Thanks again.