12 SOPs drafted in full, so you edit instead of starting blank. Write 3 this week, then 1 a week after that.

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The Problem

You answer the same questions every week. You wrote procedures once, and nobody opens the folder. That is not a discipline problem. Most written procedures were written from memory, stored where the owner would look, and owned by nobody, so they quietly stopped being true.

And most of them have no real check. "Van restocked" gets ticked every night while the van is missing tomorrow's parts. "Reminder sent" is true even when it went to a dead number. A check that confirms the activity instead of the outcome reports green right through a failure.

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The 3-Layer SOP

• OUTCOME: why the job exists and what done looks like, observable by someone who was not there.
• STEPS: numbered, verb first, 5 to 15 of them, for someone competent who started last week, with the exceptions and who decides them.
• CHECK: evidence the outcome happened, produced by doing the work, seen by someone other than the doer.

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What's in the Book

• Part 1, The 20-Minute Quick Win: guess your repeated questions, write 1 SOP, test its check, and run the hand-over test. Free to read.
• Parts 2 and 3, What It Costs: interruptions, the training gap and rework in your own numbers, then a pessimistic case at half. Saved time is capacity, not cash.
• Part 4, Why Your Last Attempt Failed: the 4 reasons written procedures stop being true.
• Part 5, The CHECK Layer: the outcome rule and its 2 tests, worked on trade examples.
• Part 6, The 3-Layer SOP: the full spec, outcome before steps, the Decision Rights Table and the 6 things every escalation carries.
• Part 7, The 12 SOPs: client, team and owner procedures, each with a check that passes both tests.
• Part 8, Choosing and Building Them: the Question Tally and the Rescue Log pick the order. The team writes, the owner writes the check.
• Part 9, Train It, or It Drifts: the 3Ds (document, demonstrate, duplicate), counting hesitations, 1 piece of feedback at a time, the coaching cycle and the 4-cause check.
• Part 10, Keeping Them True: 4 fields, the mark-it-wrong line, the quarterly pass, retiring a procedure.
• Then: the scorecard, your baseline, 4 worked composites (1 that went wrong), 10 common mistakes and the 30, 60 and 90 day look-back.

Deliverables: 12 drafted SOPs and 9 worksheets (Question Tally, Rescue Log, cost worksheet, 4-field header, Decision Rights Table, 3Ds Training Record, scorecard, quarterly pass, look-back), a weekly tracker, a 60-minute quickstart and a storage and access guide.

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A Sample: Pick by Minutes, Not by Count

A hypothetical music school owner guessed he answered 10 repeated questions a week. He counted 26. The most frequent was booking make-up lessons: 9 times at 5 minutes, 45 minutes a week. But rental instrument returns came up 6 times at 8 minutes each: 48 minutes. So rental returns became SOP 1. Every number is a round hypothetical. The book shows you how to run it on yours.

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Questions

Do I have to write all 12 this weekend? No. Write the 3 costliest in week 1, then 1 a week. Your tally decides the order, and your list may not match the 12 exactly.

Does it tell me how much time SOPs will save me? No. There is no savings figure, training-time cut or revenue claim in it. You count your own repeated questions and rescues before you change anything, and compare at day 30, 60 and 90.

Who writes them? For most of them, the person who does the job writes the first draft. You edit it and write the check yourself.

What about one-off client projects? These are procedures for work you repeat. Scope, change orders and project close are in Project Management Templates.

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Who This Is For

The owner of a small service business with a team (a plumber with 3 vans, a music school, a salon, a cleaning company, a garden centre) who is the bottleneck, whose people ask the same questions every week, or who wrote procedures once and watched everybody ignore them.