1. Why This Comes Up in Nearly Every Conversation We Have

On a recent episode of Virtual Equity, Nicole ran Lindsey through four unscripted business scenarios. Losing employees, being buried in approval requests, missed deadlines, and a sudden spike in sales that led to mistakes piling up. Four different problems, and one answer kept showing up underneath all of them: a standard operating procedure, or SOP.

If the phrase SOP makes you picture a thick binder nobody reads, this article is for you. Lindsey has built SOPs inside fast growing, chaotic small businesses for most of her career, and her approach has almost nothing to do with polish. It has to do with getting something written down today, even if it is rough, so your team stops depending on you for every answer.

Here is exactly how she builds a first SOP, in plain terms, with no formal training required.

2. What an SOP Actually Is, and What It Does Not Have to Be

An SOP is just a repeatable answer to a question your team keeps asking you. That is the whole definition. It does not need branding, numbered steps with screenshots, or approval from anyone. It needs to exist somewhere your team can find it.

That distinction matters because a lot of owners avoid building SOPs entirely because they imagine the finished version has to look professional. It does not. The first version of any SOP just needs to answer the question correctly. Someone can always make it prettier later.

3. The Fastest Way to Start: Just Record It

When Lindsey needs a process documented fast, with a small team and no time to spare, her go to method is video. Whoever figures out how to do a task records themselves doing it, right then, on their phone or their screen. No script. No editing. The video gets labeled and dropped into a shared drive.

This came directly out of a period Lindsey describes as mass chaos, building out a team while hiring for roles that did not exist yet and training people in real time. There was no bandwidth for a formal documentation process, so the rule became simple. If you figure something out, record it. Sort it out later.

This works because it removes every excuse. You do not need to know how to write instructions well. You do not need special software. You need a camera, which almost everyone already carries, and two minutes of doing the task while it records.

4. If You Would Rather Write It Down, Do It the Messy Way First

Not everyone wants to be on camera, and that is fine. Lindsey's backup method is just as unpolished. Open a plain document and type the steps as short instructions. Do this, then this, then this. No formatting requirements, no screenshots required.

She is upfront that she is not naturally detail oriented about the visual side of documentation. She will write "in general, it is in this screen" rather than mark exactly where to click. Her method is to write the rough version and hand it to someone else, who can add the screenshots and the arrows later if the process needs that level of detail. The rough draft is what unblocks everyone. The polish is optional and can happen on someone else's timeline.

5. Tools That Can Speed This Up

If you want something a little more structured without spending extra time building it by hand, there are tools built specifically for this. Lindsey mentioned Scribe as an example, a tool that watches your clicks as you complete a task and automatically generates a step by step guide from them. Tools like this remove even the small effort of typing the steps out yourself.

None of these tools are required to get started. They simply remove friction if writing things down by hand feels like the part that is holding you back.

6. You Cannot Use Not Having Time as the Excuse

This is the point Lindsey comes back to most directly. Whether it is a video, a rough document, or a tool generated guide, there is no version of "I do not have time to write a process" that holds up once you know it can take two minutes.

Lindsey shared a story from an earlier role where an owner kept losing recruiters every few weeks and could not figure out why. The answer was straightforward. There was no process for anything, so every new hire had to guess, ask, or get it wrong. The owner resisted building one, worried it would slow the business down. In reality, the absence of any process was what kept costing him hires, month after month.

7. Let the Person Doing the Work Own the Process

Once a rough SOP exists, the best next step is handing ownership of it to whoever actually does the work day to day. Nicole shared an example from her own experience with an assistant who managed a huge volume of paperwork and requests while Nicole was constantly on the road. Because they had sat down together and defined exactly how they communicated and how each type of request should move, that assistant rarely needed to ask a question that was not a genuine yes or no decision.

Over time, that assistant adjusted the process herself as the work changed, and Nicole was fine handing over that ownership completely. The person closest to a task every day usually understands how to improve it better than the person who wrote the first draft, so let them.

8. A Process Is Never Really Finished

One thing both hosts were clear about. Writing an SOP once does not mean the SOP is done forever. Every process gets tested the moment real pressure hits it, and pressure reveals where it needs to change.

Lindsey illustrated this with a simple example. A process might say sign a document and hand it to a coworker. That works fine until three more people start handing that same coworker documents and things get lost. The fix is not to abandon the process, it is to add a labeled tray to the desk and adjust. Expect to revisit every SOP as your team and your volume change. That is normal, not a sign you did it wrong the first time.

9. What It Costs You to Skip This Step

Every scenario Nicole gave Lindsey in this episode, from losing employees to being buried in approval requests to mistakes piling up during a growth spurt, traced back to the same missing piece. No documented, repeatable way of doing the work.

Skipping SOPs does not just cost you time answering the same question over and over. It shows up as turnover, as mistakes that repeat instead of getting solved once, and as an owner who cannot take a day off because every decision runs through them. Building even a rough first SOP is one of the lowest effort ways to remove all three of those problems at once.

10. How to Get Started This Week

Pick one task that generates the most repeat questions on your team right now. Do not try to document everything at once. Choose one thing.

Record yourself or a team member doing it, or write out the steps in plain language in a document. Do not worry about formatting, screenshots, or tone. Save it somewhere your team already looks, like a shared drive or a pinned message. Tell your team it exists. Hand ownership of keeping it updated to whoever uses it most. Plan to revisit it once volume or the process itself changes, because it will.

That is the entire starting process. No binder, no big rollout, no perfect first draft required.