If your business only runs right when you're personally on site, you don't have a business — you have a job that owns you. SOPs are how you get the work out of your head and onto paper, so quality stops depending on who showed up that day.
"SOP" sounds corporate, but a standard operating procedure is just the right way to do a recurring task, written down so anyone on your crew can follow it. One page. Plain steps. Usually a checklist. Not an 80-page binder nobody opens.
You can't document everything at once, so don't try. Start with the five that quietly cost you the most time, money and rework.
1. Your job lifecycle (quote to cash)
This is the backbone. Map every step from "phone rings" to "invoice paid": how a lead gets captured, who quotes it, how a job gets scheduled, what happens on day one, how it gets closed out, and how you follow up. When the handoffs are written down, jobs stop falling through the cracks between you, the office and the crew.
2. New-hire onboarding (the first 90 days)
Most trades businesses "train" by having the new guy shadow whoever's free. It's slow, inconsistent, and the new hire takes months to be useful. A simple onboarding SOP — what they get on day one, what they should be able to do by week two, by day 90 — cuts that ramp time in half and protects your standards.
3. Quoting and estimating
If two of your people quote the same job differently, you have a pricing problem hiding in plain sight. Document how you scope a job, your standard rates and markups, what's included and excluded, and the template the quote goes out on. Consistent quotes mean better margins and fewer "but I thought that was included" arguments.
4. The daily job-site checklist
A short open/close checklist for the crew — site safety check, materials staged, photos taken, site left clean, daily log updated. It takes five minutes and it's the difference between a callback and a clean handover. It also creates a paper trail that protects you when a customer "remembers" things differently.
5. Customer follow-up
The job's done; most trades businesses stop there. A simple follow-up SOP — the thank-you, the review request, the check-in a few months later — turns one-off jobs into referrals and repeat work. This is the cheapest marketing you'll ever run, and almost nobody does it consistently.
How to actually write one (in an afternoon): Next time you do the task, narrate it out loud and record it on your phone. List the steps from the recording. Cut it down to a checklist a new hire could follow. Then test it — hand it to someone and watch where they get stuck. Fix those spots. Done.
Start with the one that's bleeding the most
Don't write all five this week. Pick the one tied to your biggest current headache — usually onboarding or the job lifecycle — and write that. A single good SOP that gets used beats ten perfect ones that sit in a folder.
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