I recently became secretary for my local Toastmasters group. One of my first jobs was building the meeting agenda. That job ended up teaching me more about how to write an SOP than any business book ever did.
The first time, I sat down and figured it out from scratch. Pulled up an old agenda, worked out the order, filled in the roles, second-guessed a couple of decisions along the way.
The second time I went to do it, I didn’t want to relearn any of that. So I wrote down exactly what I did, in order, while it was still fresh. Now building the agenda takes a fraction of the time, and I’m not relying on remembering what I figured out weeks ago.
That’s really what an SOP is. It’s more specific than what I leaned on in past businesses, and it’s why I’ve been building them out for SDC.
I have SOPs for onboarding clients, for processing payments, for publishing a blog post, even for how I edit a document footer. In my other businesses, I leaned on policies and procedures, broader rules, not the exact steps. It’s only recently that I’ve seen what an SOP does differently: it tells you exactly what to do, in order, every single time.
Once I started taking on real clients, that gap got obvious fast. More moving pieces, more steps that need to happen the same way every time, less room to trust memory alone.
What was actually happening without them
Every time I did a recurring task, I was making small decisions I’d already made before: which folder something goes in, the exact wording I used last time, whether I’d already sent that email.
None of these decisions are hard on their own. But making them repeatedly, from memory, adds up to real mental load.
What an SOP actually is
An SOP is a written answer to “how do I do this thing, exactly, every time.” Having it written down means I never have to reconstruct a process from memory again.
How I decide something needs an SOP
If I do a task more than twice, and I can imagine doing it differently by accident the third time, it gets written down. That’s true whether it’s onboarding a client, publishing a blog post, or processing a payment. Each of these has room for a step to get skipped or done differently if I’m relying on memory alone.
How I structure one
Every SOP I write follows the same rough shape. It opens with a short overview of what it’s for, then lists the tools involved. From there, the process breaks into stages, and each stage breaks into numbered steps.
There’s also a section for anything that doesn’t fit neatly into a step, like a rule that applies throughout. And a note at the bottom on where the document lives and how often to review it.
My Client Onboarding SOP walks through everything from the first discovery call to the welcome email. It names exactly which tools get used at each step and what gets logged where.
My Payment Operations SOP covers how money moves from Stripe to my Relay bank account and how it gets recorded. My Blog Publishing SOP, the one that’s guiding this very post, breaks the whole process from topic selection to the LinkedIn post that goes out after publish. Different processes, same shape.
The habit that makes SOPs worth having
An SOP that goes stale is worse than no SOP, because you stop trusting it. Every time I update a process, I update the document, save the new version, and note what changed.
If you’ve never written one
Pick the task you dread most because you always forget a step. Write down exactly what you do, in order, the next time you do it. That’s your first SOP. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to exist.
If you’d rather not build them alone, that’s the kind of work I do.
Stacy Derrick │ Founder, Stacy Derrick Creative, LLC │ stacyderrickcreative.com
If this was helpful and you want to support the work, you can buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com/stacyderrick.
You may be wondering — did AI help write this? Yes, and I want to be upfront about that. The process, the client work, and the thinking behind every step are mine, and they were worth reading before AI touched a word. AI just helped me pull it together more cleanly. That is a system working the way it should.
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