One of the biggest issues you face as your business grows is that your knowledge and skills can quickly become a bottleneck in your business operations. When your team is small, you can show them exactly what they need to do and answer their questions on an ongoing basis. However, as you start to scale, this becomes impractical – you don’t have time to explain each process again and again to new team members and it is much harder to carve out lots of one-on-one time. Instead, you must be able to translate your accumulated knowledge about how the business works into instructions that others can use to perform their roles without requiring your continuous input.
This is where Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) come in.
According the University of Cambridge dictionary, SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) are “the official or usual way that people are expected to do particular things in a company”. Essentially, they are a detailed set of instructions that describe all the relevant steps and actions required to complete a business process (also referred to as a business task or activity).
Creating SOPs will not only help you to create consistency across your business (which will in turn reduce errors and confusion), but they also allow you to delegate more tasks so that you can start to step away from working ‘in’ your business and start focusing on working ‘on’ your business.
Sounds great, right? But where do you even begin?
The first step when it comes to creating SOPs is to understand your current position – how things work, who does what and how everything fits together.
You want to begin by listing out the systems and processes you currently have in your business. Make a note of where different activities feed into each other. For example, your content planning process is likely to feed into your content creation process and then into content scheduling and finally content performance tracking and analysis.
Once you have listed out your current systems and processes, you will want to identify where to focus first. Always start with the processes that you need to delegate sooner rather than later (as creating SOPs will allow you to do this effectively). These business processes tend to be your bottlenecks and are often repetitive, time consuming and frustrating!
Beginning with the end in mind allows you to concentrate on what really matters: building a machine that is both powerful and competitive. We sincerely hope you will find this guide helpful in addressing the unique challenges and opportunities you may encounter on your e-commerce journey.
Let’s get started with it, then.
Once you have a list of processes to map, it is time to start creating your SOPs. There are two main options when it comes to SOPs:
For an ecommerce business, the best approach is generally a combination of both – written instructions with links to screen recordings where helpful to explain things in more detail. You may also find videos useful for any offline processes such as instructions on how to pack your products in a specific way.
Every business will have a slightly different style for their SOPs, but there are a number of key pieces of information that every SOP should include:
our introduction should include basic details of the business activity:
This is a high-level process flow (usually a diagram) with a short, written explanation of the overall purpose of the process. This allows users to quickly understand the overall activity and how it fits into the wider system.
This is where you get stuck into the details of the process – and this means every single click, every keyboard entry, and every single step someone will need to complete the task. The more detail, the better!
The best way to do this is to think of your Who, What, Why, Where and When:
A few tips to make your instructions clear:
The final section of your SOP should include details of any controls or authorisations that are required to complete the task in hand. This could be that spend over a certain amount must be approved or that marketing materials need to be reviewed prior to being scheduled. Ensure that you state who needs to provide authorisation and how this authorisation is given and documented.
It goes without saying that documenting the processes in your business is only ever going to be useful – after all, if you don’t have a clear grasp of what is going on in your business, how will you ensure that your team will know what to do as you grow?
However, the thought of mapping out your entire business is unlikely to fill you with the same excitement you get after a great day of sales. So how does a busy business owner manage to document their systems without losing sight of everything else going on?
Here are some top tips for smashing out your SOPs in record time:
Pip Harland is an eCommerce Scaling Strategist, One Young World Ambassador and ACA Chartered Accountant, who specialises in back-end operations and finance. After building a successful ecommerce business whilst working in corporate consulting helping Fortune 500 companies streamline their finances and operations, she knows exactly what it’s like to manage a lot of moving parts and balance it all. She is on a mission to help other ambitious ecommerce business owners scale their business without burning out in the process. Find out more at www.pipharland.com.
Pip Harland is an eCommerce Scaling Strategist, One Young World Ambassador and ACA Chartered Accountant, who specialises in back-end operations and finance. After building a successful ecommerce business whilst working in corporate consulting helping Fortune 500 companies streamline their finances and operations, she knows exactly what it’s like to manage a lot of moving parts and balance it all. She is on a mission to help other ambitious ecommerce business owners scale their business without burning out in the process. Find out more at www.pipharland.com.
