Episode 193: Turn SOPs into a Growth Engine: Build a Policy Factory that Runs on Autopilot

Building a thriving accounting firm is impossible without the right systems - but most firm owners are still creating SOPs from scratch, one painful document at a time.

In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Kristy and the Wize Team break down the real secret to scaling your firm without chaos and it all comes down to building a centralised policy factory.

✅ Why having an SOP for your SOPs is the most important system you'll ever create 

✅ The simple impact vs. ease framework for knowing which SOPs to tackle first 

✅ How to delegate SOP creation so it's never all on the firm owner 

✅ The tools top firms are using to build, store and share SOPs (Loom, Scribe, ClickUp and more) 

✅ How to onboard new team members so they're productive from day one

If you're a firm owner tired of things falling through the cracks, frustrated by inconsistent team performance, and ready to finally step back from the day-to-day, this conversation is a must-listen.

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PS: Whenever you’re ready… here are the fastest 4 ways we can help you fix and grow your accounting firm:  

 1. Download our famous Wize Freedom Map for FREE - Find out the 96 projects every firm owner must implement to build a $5M+ firm that can run without them - Download here 

2. Need to Hire right now? Book a 1:1 FREE discovery call with our WizeTalent hiring coaches to help find your next team member the Wize Way – Click Here 

3. Work with Jamie and our mentors for 8 weeks - Build a custom business plan for your firm - Apply here

Transcript

Welcome And Housekeeping

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Wise Way, the show for accounting and bookkeeping firm owners. One more time, freedom, and a business that can run without. I'm Fred Ford, your host, and each week we deep dive into the real story, proven strategies, and battle-tested tools. Successful firm owners just like you. Our wise mentors want to share their journey of how they've scaled and customised their way to freedom. So you can too. If you're stuck in the grind or you're ready to scale smarter, this is your blueprint. Let's get into the episode.

Why SOPs Enable Real Freedom

SPEAKER_05 0:38

Hope everyone is well. I cannot believe we're somehow in February. That's a little bit scary. I feel like January is just the testing ground of the year. It's not really a month that counts. Certainly not for me. I was fortunate enough to have six weeks off, which in part comes down to today's topic. Having great SOPs in place and being able to continually generate them is what can give you the opportunity to have a lovely break yourselves. I'm sure for our North American um attendees, perhaps having six weeks off over your winter is not what you're looking for. So it would be your summer season that you're hoping to. But um, yeah, we'll we'll kick off. So as usual, our our standard housekeeping, you are all uh gold star people. Chris Chang, I'm sure you will get onto camera when you can. But it is great to be able to see so many of you. Thank you so much for really bringing yourselves to this and not having me just look to our WISE team, which is absolutely representing today. I love these calls where we all get to hang out. Um, but where possible, if you can be muted. If we stay a small intimate group, though, and there are questions during the main session, please just come off mute and ask your question. And I do like to make this interactive. So there's nowhere to hide when I'm hosting. Um so I will always be friendly if it's not for you to contribute, but I really love getting our members involved in these topics. You've put aside the time to be here, so why not get the most out of it? And your voice is really important, and making sure that you have everything you need before the call ends is a priority for us. So, firstly, welcoming our team. We have our fabulous support person, Selena, taking care of anything that you need, if you need assistance, locating anything, um, you know, accessing the program, accessing resources, getting these calendar events locked in. Selena is your go-to gal. How are you, Selena?

SPEAKER_02 2:37

I am good, excited for today's session.

SPEAKER_05 2:41

Great. And Wise Talent, full representation today. I love it. We have Danny, our wise talent coach. And uh Danny, great to see you. New haircut, new year, looking fast.

SPEAKER_03 2:52

Thank you, Christy. I'm glad that you're um you're back as well hosting. Because I do like these sessions when you're hosting.

SPEAKER_05 2:59

I can go a bit rogue sometimes. Um, and Paulina, lovely to have you here. How are you?

SPEAKER_06 3:05

Hi everyone, good, good.

SPEAKER_05 3:07

How are you today? And Chris rounding out our wise talent team. Lovely to see you too. Hello. Cool. And then to close out our team today, we have Rao, our Wise Hub coach. We're going to touch on a little bit of Wise Hub usage today. So if anyone gets a bit lost or is unsure, Rao is absolutely the person to connect with. So great to see you, Rao.

SPEAKER_07 3:31

Yeah, welcome everybody.

Tools For Fast SOP Creation

SPEAKER_05 3:33

Great. And I think you all know me, or you all know me by now, and I am one of the mentors here. I get to work one-on-one with our WISE Growth members and also chat to new members to help them find the right pathway into the WISE universe. So that's our housekeeping. That's the team. As usual, we will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of this session for the last part. If we stay small, we might just stay in this main room and we'll stop the recording and you can just ask any of the coaches and mentors here a question. Otherwise, if the need arises, we'll go into our breakout rooms and you can move between the rooms if you want to ask Danny and the team about something recruitment related or Ralph or a Wise Hub technical question or me to put my mind to the test as I get back to the work mode and uh help you with growing your business. So let's kick off with this very important topic: building a centralized policy factory so you can simplify and standardize SOP creation across your business. It is vital to have a clear understanding of what goes on. For those who've been around for a while, you would have heard Ed Chan, one of our co-founders, say repeatedly, it's about creating extraordinary systems for ordinary people. And this isn't about shading people and saying, you know, that they're ordinary. You can have a great person running a great system. Having an extraordinary system in place is what allows for consistency in your business. It allows you as firm owner to withdraw from the day-to-day, but have confidence that the work is still delivered at the standard you require. It allows you to focus on other areas of growth and development in your business. And it does mean you're protected as you scale and bring new team members in, they are supported with processes to follow. And if you're in the unfortunate position of having to transition someone out and a new person in, there is less disruption to your team and your clients when your systems are in place. We've gone through this ourselves at my own firm a few times where you know we've we've made the tough decision to move someone on and we've been concerned about how we're going to manage that heavy workload while we transition a new person in and train them and onboard them. It's actually been quite easy compared to how it used to be, and we've been pleasantly surprised. Our last newest team member joined us a little over 18 months ago, and within a couple of weeks, it was like she'd been part of the team forever because she had those systems and processes to follow. It really does make it easy. One of the best ways to identify where you need SOPs or policies is I don't know if you'll be able to see it, having a little sticky note on your desk every time you're doing something. Ask yourself, should I be doing this? And if not, do you have a policy on it or a procedure so someone else can take it on? Another little cracker that I love anytime you're doing 100% of anything, you're doing it wrong. Can't just tell a team member what you need from them. You need to show them. We don't have time to show everyone everything all the time. So we create SOPs for them to follow. There are some great tools out there. There's Loom for video recordings, you can use Teams, you can use Zoom, and there are some good software add-ons that you can use like Scribe. Scribe is a free version, does some pretty basic SOPs, and then you look at the paid version and so on. Is anyone else here using anything different for SOP creation other than Loom and Scribe?

unknown 7:19

No?

SPEAKER_05 7:20

Cool, you're a quiet little bunch today. Oh, Natasha, yeah, what are you using?

SPEAKER_03 7:23

Uh we've started looking at the systemology system by um David Jennings from Melbourne, and he has a product called System Hub that we're just looking at implementing for our SOPs.

SPEAKER_05 7:34

Great, great. And Liz, I can see that you've dropped in a different one that you're using. It'd be great to hear how you found that, unless you might be driving into the office at this hour. Oh no, you're in.

SPEAKER_04 7:45

Uh look, we use something called sweet process to do our procedures. So it lets you upload videos and um create your procedures in terms of little little bunches or or you know, big or little bunches and and put in as as much as you want. So it's quite good. Great. Awesome.

SPEAKER_05 8:08

And Tim, using ClickUp, is that to store and um itemize your SOPs or do you use it to create the SOPs as well?

SPEAKER_01 8:17

Yeah, so we use it for both. Um it's a job management system as well, but there is a part of it where you can store documents um and even take videos on Clickup that um sort of like loom. So yes. Cool.

SPEAKER_05 8:31

Great. I mean, who who wants another software subscription, really? You know, we're all we're all here to fit the mould of of being conscious of subscription. So it's great if you're all using systems that you can already leverage or investing in something initially to help you get there faster is is always a great idea. Why reinvent the wheel? Um I would hope most of you have found that we've got quite a lot of SOPs in the WISE vault as well, including the most important SOP you must have. Who knows what that would be?

SPEAKER_06 9:06

What's the most important SOP? It's an SOP for SOPs.

Delegation And Ownership Of SOPs

SPEAKER_05 9:16

You've got to have a standard way of creating your SOPs. Those standard operating procedures must be simple to follow, they must be the same with a styling guide. You can even use Chat GPT and put in your template for SOPs, and when your admin is asking it to create an SOP based on notes, they can get it formatted and stylized directly in chat. So it's another little great way of speeding up the process. Who here has a list of SOPs that need to be developed? I'd love to know if anyone started documenting the list. Tim, how what's prompted you to do that? Or was that a question hand?

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Uh sorry, I thought you said uh we don't have a list, we need to create the list.

SPEAKER_05 10:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 10:05

Has anyone else created a list or you know, started that list of what SOPs you know you need?

SPEAKER_02 10:19

Um part of it was with uh through training with Raul on Wisehub and spending some time going through that and talking about that and uh places to places where um we could create lists to delegate things and through that delegation list then it led to okay, if I'm gonna delegate, then I need to get a list together of what and how I'm going to go about doing that.

Impact Versus Ease Prioritisation

SPEAKER_05 10:47

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. That's great. So, yes, on that, there are a couple of great initiators of developing SOPs and policies. Firstly, when you complete your owner's quad delegation in your WISE Hub, when you take note of all of the things that you're doing in all of the days that you're doing them and look at what you should and shouldn't be doing, then you can have a look at what you need to be delegating first to create space for yourself, and then how do you go about creating that SOP? One of the most important things to know is it's not the responsibility of the firm owner to create every SOP for eternity. It's just about when you're a small team, yeah, you do have to create a lot of them because it is just you that does it. But when you add team members in, maybe you ask someone in admin to put together based on your notes, or you get someone in production to start the bones of it and then you build on it from there or you review. It leads back into that don't be doing 100% of something. When you've got team members around you, then delegating part of the SOP process is really important. And another driving force for creating SOPs and policies is when something annoys you or something goes wrong and you don't want that to happen again, get a policy or an SOP. We had just this issue yesterday in our firm. We had something uh not have the outcome we wanted, and it was pretty simple if we'd had the right policy in place of how to handle certain queries. I would like to think it's obvious in our team that, you know, most of our team members have been with us for a number of years. It's pretty simple stuff, you would think, but it slipped through the net, and this team member was not paying attention, and we didn't have a policy to help in a performance management with them. So we've now created that policy and it got done within about five minutes. Nothing like a B in your bonnet to get action happening. But that's also another way. I know in one of my one-on-one sessions with a firm I've worked with for a number of years now, they were increasingly frustrated by their team's performance and consistency, and they looked at their systems, they didn't really have SOPs or policies for the team to follow. They just accept expected them to be extraordinary and they weren't able to because they didn't have the framework for that. So that firm owner took some time one night when they were really impassioned by how their business was not growing the way they wanted to, and wrote about two pages worth of titles of SOPs and policies that they needed done, and instantly the weight started falling off their shoulders. They felt like, okay, I'm not gonna have this same frustration again. And then it was about systematically working through the list of SOPs and policies. I always like to look at it as impact versus ease. What's going to have the highest impact in my business, but is the easiest to do, and get those done first. And then what will have high impact, but is harder to do. Maybe you need to collaborate with a couple of extra people, maybe a bit more research is needed, but it's still high impact, so get it done. And then you might have some low impact, easy ones that are still important to have in place, but they're a lower priority to complete. It's a bit like looking at the quads, break it down into chunks of what's needed. Rao, I'd love to throw to you quickly if you can show us how the WISE team have already started to help all of our WISHub users with a bit of an SOP development guide. So I'll stop sharing my screen for a minute and let you take the reins. And um, I hope that you've all had a bit of an explore around your WISE Hub, which is constantly being updated and improved, uh, where we have some standard meeting templates that you can use in your firm. So over to you, Rao. How do we how do we do this?

Wise Hub SOP Meeting Templates

SPEAKER_07 14:51

Well, our Dia of every single day from the Wise Hub is make your daily life in business easier. So we have prepared this SOP development meeting to help you uh kind of like a prompt so you can develop from or start from here. I will add board since we think like this is something that the senior client managers or people who are responsible from other people's or people who are sitting in bigger chairs are involved in the creation of the SOP. So after you create the meeting, what I'm doing is just uh going here and meetings, create a meeting. You can add the name that you want, and and it doesn't need to be one and specific, you can add the name that you how you're gonna identify that meeting, and then we'll just add that uh agenda. So here adding agenda item, then here at the bottom you will find this section. So here will be uh different uh templates that we have created for you based on this WISE program that uh when you speak with the mentors or with somebody in in WISE will be so much related with this. So this is just a guide for you guys. And here's the SOP development. The owner, you need to add yourself if you are in charge of creating the the SOPs or if you're already delegating these to somebody in your firm, who will be that person and the status.

SPEAKER_06 16:27

So that's easy, and voila, voila.

SPEAKER_05 16:33

I love how easy the wise hub makes things. We used to have to manually ask our support team to put one-by-one things into people's um meeting agendas. So this is just a bit of a guide, and we encourage you to add your own. But um my estimate, there aren't any links currently to any of those, but there are resources in the WISE vault for you to review and modify to your own style guide and um you know processes in your firm for these SOPs, and then it's about building from there. So you might choose to have yourself as firm owner and your senior admin and maybe your senior client manager involved in these meetings. It might be once a month you touch on it. It's good to include in a weekly managers meeting uh or weekly exec meeting the progress of SOPs. So where we see our CEO being responsible for SOPs is they're responsible for signing off, for approving the implementation of the SOPs. Sometimes it takes two minutes, a quick look, and it's done. Other times it might require a little bit of debate, a little bit more conversation, a little bit more refinement. But the firm owner is only doing that last part once the team has prepared it when you get to that point. Um, I do, yeah. Rao, this is this is great. Has anyone already got these meeting templates running in your Wise Hub, or is this new news for us all today? New news, love it. Love it when you come away learning something new, guaranteed. Cool. All right, thanks, Rao.

SPEAKER_07 18:15

No, my pleasure.

SOPs vs Checklists And Context

SPEAKER_05 18:16

Okay. And um Randy, just back to your point in the chat as well, that yes, there's certainly the difference between um a checklist and an SOP, you know, your checklist being how the work is completed in the day-to-day doing of the work and client specific, but then the SOP is on, you know, it's giving that framework of what's expected, what's that standard that you require. And, you know, I think we've all been given an assignment to do, asked to do something, whether it's been previous iterations when we've worked for someone, or um, you know, I had a great example with my husband the other day when he asked our son to do something. When when we don't understand the context, we don't have the same buy-in, or we don't know how to answer the question put to us because we're not sure where it might go. The beauty of SOPs and policies is it provides the context for your team. And that's what creates the safety for them. They know what's expected of them, they know how to get there and get that result, and they also understand why it's important. What impact does this have on the work that I do? Why do I need to care about this? It's so important that the context is included in your SOPs so that team members are able to be fully supported to thrive and be successful in their roles. I'd love to know anyone here who has implemented an SOP or policy and it's instantly changed the way that your team worked.

SPEAKER_06 19:57

Has anyone had a really great success story? Oh, that's a shame. None of you, none of you have had a good moment from an SOP.

Building And Storing Your SOP Library

SPEAKER_05 20:10

Well, you've got to develop some more or or have a look at them. Okay. So look, a great way of also documenting and storing. It was awesome to hear, Tim, that you're using ClickUp and that there's a few other softways out there. It's really important that you know you invest time, energy, and money in paying team members to create, but where are you going to put your SOPs? How are people going to know what SOPs there are? So you've also got to work out with your senior admin, or you know, hopefully someone else on your team is there to help carry the burden and load, work out how your SOP library is going to be documented. There are ways of adding it into your WIS Hub, breaking it down into the seven divisions. You may choose to use an online resource center using SharePoint or Google site. We use a Google site page and it's searchable. It's easy for our team to find anything and everything. But it's really critical that if you've put these SOPs and policies in place, that your team know how to access them. Sometimes you will link an SOP into a job checklist because you know it's often going to be needed and referred to, so that's easier, but you still need that SOP stored somewhere central in a logical filing structured way. Randy, so get guru and Google search. Yeah, cool. Okay. It's really, I really love hearing different softwares in the marketplace. It's it's good when everyone, you know, sort of uses similar things and we all know how to support each other, but also great that you're finding really useful tools out there. So that's really wonderful. Um, you know, again, one of the important things with SOPs is having a clear framework of that initial onboarding for team members. So there may be some key SOPs and policies that you put. Into either your welcome handbook for new team members or as part of the onboarding work item. So with our firm, we have an onboarding work template in carbon that has some pretty standard things of how to familiarize yourself with the way that we operate as a firm, how to find basic things and the key information that everyone needs to be successful on day one to know exactly what's expected and required of them. So that's been really useful for us to develop over time. I wish I'd had it a few years ago when uh we were first adding team members in and not doing a fab job of it, but something that's evolved. I'd love to know who has some uh set templates and SOP policies that you share with new team members, who's got a really solid uh onboarding process in place.

Team Q&A And Closing CTAs

SPEAKER_00 22:57

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Wise Way. If today's episode sparked an idea or helped you see things differently, please don't forget to leave us a review. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast on your favourite platform yet, please go ahead and do that as well. Let's continue the conversation here through YouTube or any other social platforms that you can find us on. And just remember, if you're not a subscriber of our weekly Friday tip newsletter, you can get that to your inbox every week going forward. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, you don't have to do it alone. Let's build a business that works for you, the wise way. We'll see you in the next episode.