Dan Martell - June 19, 2017


How To Create a Business Playbook™： How To Make SOPs

Topics
playbook creation
Hosted by
Dan Martell
SaaS Sales Funnel in 3 Basic Steps (Especially In The Early Days) The 5 Reasons SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) Customers Churn

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

208.78

Word count

1,862

Sentence count

83


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, learn how to create a procedures manual for your business. Some people call them SOPs (standard operating procedures) and others call them playbooks (playbooks). I like to call them Playbooks because they are simple, repeatable, scalable documents and checklists so that your customers get the promise that you made, they get delivered on.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.500 Repeatable, scalable document.
00:00:10.700 How to create a procedures manual for your business.
00:00:13.680 Some people call them SOPs,
00:00:15.880 standard operating procedures.
00:00:17.480 I like to call them playbooks, but in today's video,
00:00:20.000 I wanna share with you guys how to do this the right way
00:00:22.560 because maybe you're frustrated
00:00:24.140 that you've tried this in the past
00:00:25.680 and nobody was following the procedures.
00:00:27.680 Or you sat down, documented everything
00:00:29.800 and the documents are now stale,
00:00:31.460 so they're not even relevant,
00:00:32.980 or you actually did the work,
00:00:34.520 never distributed it to your team
00:00:36.020 because it never got finished,
00:00:37.600 or you just feel like you spent all your time
00:00:40.280 creating procedures versus having somebody else support you.
00:00:43.260 Here's what I think the future could look like for you,
00:00:45.680 is literally having your team
00:00:47.820 in a very structured, simplified, iterative process,
00:00:50.720 creating these beautiful, repeatable, scalable documents
00:00:55.160 and checklists so that your customers get the promise
00:00:58.640 that you made, they get delivered on.
00:01:00.600 So as a business, you make a promise.
00:01:02.280 That's what these procedures are gonna allow you to do.
00:01:04.180 And really get free from the day-to-day
00:01:06.420 of the firefighting in your business
00:01:08.320 so that you can spend more time being creative
00:01:10.680 and building out the business.
00:01:11.720 Now, I really had to learn this lesson over the years
00:01:15.400 because I used to be the person that wanted to do everything.
00:01:18.700 And I realized that I needed to start building a team
00:01:20.960 and having other people support me.
00:01:22.260 And that started with my company, Sphere.
00:01:23.900 And in the early days, we used a wiki tool called Confluence.
00:01:28.040 So it was a wiki software, if you've ever used
00:01:30.480 or been to Wikipedia, that was the tool we used.
00:01:33.280 And then my next company, we decided to migrate off Confluence
00:01:36.240 because it was a little too geeky
00:01:38.080 and used something like Google Sites.
00:01:40.120 And that kind of worked, but there were still the challenges
00:01:42.380 of keeping it updated, having documents in there
00:01:44.500 that were started that were never finished,
00:01:46.200 and really just not having anybody having the procedures open
00:01:49.300 while they were doing the work.
00:01:51.540 And it wasn't until my last company
00:01:52.940 that I really found the way, you know,
00:01:54.840 I've literally scaled remote teams from zero to dozens
00:01:59.220 of employees, have been involved helping set this up for a lot
00:02:02.840 of my portfolio companies as an investor.
00:02:05.620 And what I'm gonna teach you today is the 80-20 to get
00:02:09.320 something going today and have it stick and have it
00:02:12.160 continuously updated and really get you the freedom back in
00:02:15.360 your business.
00:02:16.360 So the first step that you need to understand is start by
00:02:18.640 defining a program.
00:02:19.960 A program is for every department in your business.
00:02:22.160 It could be sales, it could be marketing, it could be
00:02:24.040 operations, it could be the delivery aspect of how you
00:02:26.840 actually give the customer the value, either a service
00:02:29.220 business or a technology product, is document the high
00:02:32.680 level steps from the beginning, the input to that
00:02:35.380 department, to the output and the expected results.
00:02:38.180 And it doesn't have to be detailed.
00:02:39.520 Most people make the mistakes of feeling like every step,
00:02:43.060 checklist, screenshot, procedure, detailed labels and
00:02:47.600 naming and everything needs to be defined and that's not the
00:02:49.900 way to start.
00:02:50.900 Starting is really creating what I call a program overview
00:02:53.640 document to make sure that you at least capture all the things
00:02:57.340 that people do and it's really great if you have a team
00:02:59.340 because you can just say, hey, can you make a list that if you
00:03:02.180 were to hire somebody to do your job for two months because
00:03:04.560 you were going to go away on vacation, what are all the
00:03:07.020 different areas, either things you monitor, things you create,
00:03:10.460 collaborations you have within our business, input-outputs,
00:03:13.300 what would you want to review?
00:03:15.160 So not like writing out exactly how to do it but what's the
00:03:19.040 conversation topics that you would want to have with those
00:03:22.200 people, that is the first step in creating a playbook.
00:03:26.540 In my world, that's what I call it,
00:03:27.580 a playbook for your business.
00:03:29.240 Start off by creating a review.
00:03:31.680 Number two is set up in your weekly meeting.
00:03:33.840 Hopefully you're having a weekly meeting.
00:03:35.640 Every week you actually add an agenda item to review the new
00:03:39.760 or updated plays or procedures or SOPs in your business.
00:03:44.320 So every week you have people creating things,
00:03:47.100 updating it because there's, and I'm gonna talk about this
00:03:49.260 in step four, but you want to have the ability
00:03:51.960 to review and communicate the new documents within your team.
00:03:55.060 That's why you could literally start with one,
00:03:56.860 which I recommend the number one if you wanted it.
00:03:58.660 Which one should I start with?
00:03:59.900 Your recruiting process.
00:04:01.100 Your people at the end of the day is what's going to allow you
00:04:03.700 to scale the business.
00:04:04.700 If you don't have a predictable way to attract and convert and
00:04:09.080 retain incredible talent, start by creating your program there.
00:04:12.880 But number two is really getting the weekly review dialed in so
00:04:15.920 that as it's updated, the rest of the team understands it,
00:04:19.160 It's communicated and you can have feedback
00:04:21.420 and collaboration around it.
00:04:23.040 Third thing you need to get right is the team culture.
00:04:25.640 You need to be in a business where if there is a procedure
00:04:29.300 that it is a must, not a nice to have, not a suggestion,
00:04:32.400 not a maybe, it is a must that they have the procedure open.
00:04:36.780 Okay, so the third area that you need to make sure to,
00:04:39.380 even if you sat down and you hired somebody,
00:04:41.520 I've seen people hire really expensive consultants
00:04:43.960 to come in and create a business manual
00:04:45.720 or a procedure or a playbook.
00:04:47.220 And the challenge is that nobody referenced it.
00:04:49.920 Nobody had it open when they were doing their work.
00:04:52.320 So the biggest challenge is making sure that people
00:04:55.020 integrate it into the culture of how they do business.
00:04:57.760 So one of the roles within all my companies is that if there's
00:05:00.400 a procedure that exists for the work you're about to do,
00:05:03.840 you must have it open.
00:05:05.480 It has to be sitting there and you gotta reference it so that
00:05:07.680 you can actually ensure that each step of the work gets done.
00:05:11.540 And if there's an issue where you say go to this screen and all
00:05:14.540 of a sudden that screen changes in the software,
00:05:16.620 you can actually update it in real time, okay?
00:05:18.780 So this is super key.
00:05:20.460 And people are always asking me, what tools do you use?
00:05:23.020 Below in the comments, or actually in the description
00:05:25.220 of the video, I'm gonna put all the tools that I use,
00:05:28.360 because it might change over time,
00:05:29.900 and that's where it's gonna be updated.
00:05:31.260 So if you have questions around the technical implementation,
00:05:34.440 do it there, check out there.
00:05:36.640 Number four is the structure.
00:05:38.780 The way I create it, and this is the tool that I'll probably
00:05:41.520 use for the near future, is I use a spreadsheet.
00:05:44.740 And I use Google Docs online, use Google Sheets,
00:05:47.880 because it's a super lightweight of having a list of the
00:05:52.240 procedures in my business.
00:05:53.440 Now I have three tabs in that spreadsheet.
00:05:55.780 I have procedures, I have references, and I have templates.
00:05:59.720 Because in a business that's kind of the three different
00:06:01.620 things you're gonna have.
00:06:02.560 You're gonna have the procedure which is the checklist or the
00:06:04.900 how-to of getting the work done.
00:06:06.560 You're gonna have the references which is content or
00:06:09.060 information that you need to do the work.
00:06:10.960 So those things might be referenced in the document.
00:06:13.100 So if you have like an employee onboarding procedure,
00:06:16.000 you might have a spreadsheet which is all the employee
00:06:18.500 contact information and one of the steps is to add or edit or
00:06:21.840 update that reference document.
00:06:24.140 And then the third is the templates which might be an email
00:06:27.420 that you send afterwards to the new employee, the new hire,
00:06:30.120 or if you're terminating somebody, the email or the
00:06:33.360 documents that you need to produce.
00:06:34.660 All the templates are linked to in this spreadsheet.
00:06:37.560 So they don't live in there but they're linked to it.
00:06:39.900 And the beauty of this is that you're not managing a folder
00:06:42.160 structure. A lot of people, you know, they create these folder
00:06:45.220 structures on network drives and then they've got all these
00:06:46.900 documents. I literally would much rather have one reference,
00:06:50.260 one single point to go and say, here are all the documents in
00:06:52.700 my business that help us accomplish the business.
00:06:55.200 And where are the documents and references and templates that
00:06:58.700 exist, even if they're in subsystems, in your project
00:07:01.520 management software, in your Dropbox, wherever they exist,
00:07:04.520 but they're referenced in one place.
00:07:06.060 And that is the structure of setting up and creating an
00:07:09.260 incredible procedures manual or what I like to call a playbook.
00:07:12.860 So the number one tip that I want to share with you,
00:07:15.100 the last thing that I think if you don't get this,
00:07:17.760 it will change the game for you in building out your own
00:07:20.440 playbook is when you hire somebody and you're training
00:07:23.380 them, you can literally have them read all the different
00:07:27.580 documents that they have access to,
00:07:29.020 all the procedures, and you give them a test.
00:07:31.380 And the test is their understanding of the work.
00:07:34.280 So you might have a question in there like how much vacation
00:07:36.760 does somebody get after three years of working with us?
00:07:39.260 Those answers will tell you if they read the procedures.
00:07:41.960 So if you wanna onboard and train somebody,
00:07:43.800 you can have everything sit in your documents
00:07:46.660 and then have them go in, consume everything
00:07:49.000 for the first two days of working with you
00:07:51.180 and then have a test to be able to see if they understand it.
00:07:54.940 So your training becomes super simple.
00:07:58.140 Hope you understand how cool that is
00:08:00.320 because a lot of people are like,
00:08:01.240 well now I gotta hire all these people,
00:08:02.280 I gotta train them to make it effective.
00:08:04.120 Let them self-study, train, come to you with questions
00:08:06.880 and then give them a test at the end
00:08:09.380 so that you know that they've done it properly.
00:08:11.980 Hopefully this video finds you incredibly well.
00:08:13.980 If you want my templates for the structure I use,
00:08:17.320 click the link below in the description.
00:08:18.920 I'll give you access to my templates for my playbook
00:08:21.800 that'll walk you through the Google Drive
00:08:23.400 on the folder structure for the sheets
00:08:25.000 as well as several different procedures
00:08:27.440 like the how to create a procedures template
00:08:29.900 to get you going fast today.
00:08:32.180 As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger life
00:08:34.400 and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
00:08:37.000 If you like this video, please subscribe to my channel
00:08:39.400 to get other tips and strategies on how to start
00:08:41.400 and grow your business.
00:08:42.400 I'd also invite you to join my newsletter
00:08:44.200 for exclusive invites, free entrepreneurial training videos,
00:08:48.400 and other community contests and if you're ready to get going,
00:08:50.900 I've got two more videos queued up, ready for you to go right now.
00:08:54.100 I'll see you next week.