When founders ask which SOPs to write first, the honest answer is "the ones that break when you're gone." After running this exercise with dozens of teams, the same ten show up over and over. If you have these ten, you have the spine of an operating business. If you don't, scaling is the wrong word for what you're doing.
Each SOP below is one page when written correctly. Each has the same structure: trigger, input, steps, output, edge cases.
1. Customer onboarding
The single highest-leverage SOP in any business. From signed contract → first value delivered. If this isn't documented, every new customer experiences a slightly different version of your company.
Trigger: Contract countersigned. Output: Customer has logged in (or received first deliverable), kickoff held, success criteria written.
2. Lead-to-quote response
From lead form submitted → quote sent. Every business loses revenue here without knowing it. The leak is between "lead arrived" and "quote sent" — a black hole nobody owns.
Trigger: New qualified lead. Output: Quote sent within published SLA (we recommend 24 business hours).
3. Invoicing and collections
From work completed → cash collected. Most growing businesses have a 30–60 day delay here that they treat as normal. It's not normal. It's a process gap.
Trigger: Deliverable accepted. Output: Invoice sent within 48 hours; AR aged review weekly; collections sequence triggered at day 30.
4. Monthly close
From end of month → financials reviewed. If this isn't documented, your books will diverge from reality the first month the bookkeeper goes on vacation.
Trigger: Last business day of the month. Output: P&L, balance sheet, cash position reviewed by day 10 of the following month.
5. Payroll run
From cutoff date → payroll processed. Highest stakes, lowest tolerance for error. Must be documented even if you use an outsourced provider — especially if you do.
Trigger: Payroll cutoff date (typically 3 business days before pay date). Output: Payroll approved and submitted; variances flagged.
6. New hire onboarding (first 30 days)
From offer accepted → end of probation. The cost of a bad onboarding compounds for years. Every team that complains about culture is also a team without this SOP.
Trigger: Offer accepted. Output: Day 1 readiness, week 1 wins, day 30 review held.
7. Termination / offboarding
Nobody wants to write this one. Write it anyway. The day you need it, you won't have time to invent it.
Trigger: Termination decision made. Output: Final day workflow, asset recovery, access revocation, references protocol.
8. Weekly leadership review
From end of week → leadership aligned for next week. The cadence that prevents small issues becoming large ones.
Trigger: Friday afternoon. Output: Wins, blockers, decisions, next-week priorities — one page, shared by EOD Friday.
9. Customer escalation / incident response
From customer complaint → resolution. If this isn't documented, the wrong person handles the worst situations.
Trigger: Customer escalation marked urgent (define what qualifies). Output: Acknowledged within 1 hour; root cause documented; resolution communicated; post-incident review held within 5 days.
10. Quarterly planning
From end of quarter → next-quarter plan. The cadence that prevents annual plans from drifting into fiction by month four.
Trigger: Last two weeks of the quarter. Output: Three priorities for next quarter, owner per priority, success criteria written.
The order to write them
We recommend this order:
- Invoicing and collections (the cash one — start here)
- Customer onboarding (the retention one)
- Lead-to-quote response (the growth one)
- Monthly close (the visibility one)
- New hire onboarding (the team one)
Then add the remaining five over the following quarter. Trying to write all ten in one sprint is the mistake we see most often. SOPs need to be used before they're refined — and you can't use ten at once.
One last rule
Each SOP gets an owner. Not a "RACI" — a single name, on the doc, who is on the hook for keeping it current. If you can't name an owner for an SOP, the SOP doesn't exist yet.
Related reading:
- The 5-day SOP playbook: documenting your business so it can run without you
- When to scale: the boring signal that beats every gut check
- When you need an operations consultant — and when you're just avoiding a hard conversation
If you'd rather have someone run the SOP cycle with you, Business Operations Consulting is the right place to start.
