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SOPs or Chaos: How to Build a Business That Runs Without You | The Planify Podcast Ep. 8

• Planify Agency • Season 1 • Episode 8

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If your business depends entirely on one person knowing how everything works, you already have a problem, you just may not feel it yet. In this episode of the Planify Podcast, hosts Angelo Gonzalez and Casey Cease get into one of the most avoided and most valuable conversations in business: standard operating procedures. Not the dry, dusty binder version. The kind that actually prevents your business from falling apart when a key team member leaves, goes on vacation, or just has a bad day. Casey shares hard-won lessons from 20 years of building and scaling businesses, including the real reason entrepreneurs resist documenting their processes and what it is actually costing them. Angelo and Casey walk through the five core areas of every business where SOPs create the biggest impact: marketing, sales, operations, admin, and finance. They also cover the tools making SOP creation faster than ever, including AI, Loom, and NotebookLM. Whether you are just starting out or trying to scale past yourself, this episode gives you a practical, no-overwhelm path to building a business that runs on process, not personality.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

  • If your business depends on one person's memory, it is not a business yet. It is a job. Documented SOPs are what turn a job into a scalable asset.
  • Managing the process instead of the person removes ambiguity, makes accountability objective, and makes good hires more likely to succeed.
  • AI has made SOP creation faster than ever, but you have to capture your processes first. AI will amplify what you already do, including your worst habits.
  • Every major business function (marketing, sales, operations, admin, and finance) needs its own set of SOPs, and the best time to build them is before something breaks.
  • Businesses with documented SOPs are estimated to be 20 to 30 percent more valuable at sale or acquisition than those without them.

CHAPTERS AND TIMESTAMPS:

  • 00:00:00 - Why SOPs Matter More Than Ever
  • 00:01:32 - The Single Point of Failure Trap
  • 00:03:48 - When Vacation Turns Into Crisis
  • 00:05:38 - From Doer to Business Builder
  • 00:10:16 - Train the Process, Not the Person
  • 00:15:04 - The PBJ Test for Clarity
  • 00:17:12 - Mapping SOPs Across the Business
  • 00:18:08 - Marketing SOPs That Drive Leads
  • 00:21:57 - Sales SOPs From Lead to Close
  • 00:24:19 - Operations SOPs That Prevent Chaos
  • 00:30:08 - Admin SOPs That Protect Your Time
  • 00:32:31 - Finance SOPs for Money Rules
  • 00:34:04 - Tools and AI for Fast SOPs
  • 00:37:20 - SOPs That Raise Your Valuation
  • 00:38:50 - Final Challenge to Start Today

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Why SOPs Matter More Than Ever

Angelo Gonzalez

Hey, we're back. My name is Angelo Gonzalez. This is the Planify Podcast. I'm here as always with Casey Cease, our other host, and we're going to be talking today about something that really can affect almost uh any size business, whether that's um something that's involved in one department of a business or maybe in an entire small or to medium-sized business. We're talking today about standard operating procedures or SOPs, is how you might actually be uh know about them. So, Casey, how are you doing today? You having a good day?

Casey Cease

I'm doing great, man. I know before you skip this episode, because usually for entrepreneurs, I say standard operating procedures, they glaze over, start twitching a little bit, um, or they say, We got them, or whatever, or like, what is the standard operating procedure? And I can't tell you how many times I've talked with um uh business owners and say, What are your standard operating procedures? And they're like, you know, or or I'll say, Hey, have you documented your standard operating procedures? Oh, we did that years ago. I'm like, okay, uh, do you use them? And they just look kind of blank. And so it's so important because with the advent of AI and everything else going on, if you don't have captured procedures, uh, what I tell people is AI will amplify your worst habits. Wow. Um, and so being able to really get uh a scope around your business, people who own small businesses that that brag to me all the time, oh, I put 80 hours a week in, I'm grinding all that, and I know the grind set's important and all that. Uh, I feel bad for

The Single Point Of Failure Trap

Casey Cease

them because oftentimes they own a job. Even if they have team members, they own a job and not a business.

Angelo Gonzalez

Well, I think, you know, a common frustration that somebody, and you know, as you're listening to this, maybe you've experienced this before, but let me just paint a picture. So let's say you have a small team, maybe three, maybe five, maybe 10, uh, maybe even more than that. But you have a team that's rolling, you have somebody that's really good at what they do, right? You have somebody that's an integral piece uh of the picture, of the way it runs. Maybe it's um an admin that's been there for 10 years, or it's it's your right-hand man that, you know, knows how the business works and you just know that they're a linchpin in the whole, in the whole system. If something were to happen to them, the business would fall apart. And that's always maybe in the back of your mind. Well, what if they want to take a vacation? What if something happens where they have to take sick leave for some reason or be gone for an extended period of time, or they get another opportunity and you don't want to, you know, maybe hold them back and they get, you know, maybe move on to something else that's that's better for them. And you're a great boss, so you're excited for them, but you're thinking in the back of your mind, what's gonna happen? They know how to do all the things. They're the ones who know how our QuickBooks works, they're the ones who know how our CRM works, they're the ones who know how our sales process works, or who's supposed to call back when, or whenever whenever a job comes in, who to hand it off to and at what point. And if they come back with the problem, what they're supposed to do. Businesses deal with this, and it's very easy for a business to fall into this trap because especially if it's a, you know, something that's grown. Um, you know, somebody who's a plumber who's great at doing plumbing, they start their own business, they're doing it great. They, you know, they uh begin to um exceed expectations. They are doing all the work and they finally want to hire someone. And uh they that next person comes in, oh, they're not doing it as good as me. Well, we got to get rid of them then. Hire somebody else. Ah, they're not doing it as good as me. Get rid of them. And eventually, well, nobody does it as good as me. That's another scenario, right? So talk a little bit about this and about the idea of, you know, kind of kind of how that happens and the idea of working on your business versus working in your business.

When Vacation Turns Into Crisis

Casey Cease

I'm about to have a panic attack from uh having lived those scenarios more than one time. Uh, I I remember I was on an anniversary getaway with my wife, and there was a publishing issue. It was pretty early on in Lucid Books, and I got this panic phone call while I was sitting down for brunch. And at the time, brunch was an absolute rare treat. Uh, and they kept calling. And I was like, hey, this has to be important. This person keeps calling, and I had to take the call. And they were really shocked because they didn't know what to do. And so let's just say it was one of our less uh pleasant brunch times, um, both from scenario and for the fact that I left my team exposed on something that could have been handled easily had I captured here's what you do when right. I I also think through working in the business, those of us who started business, entrepreneurs, um are really good at $12 to $25 an hour tasks. Right? We're really good at it. I mean, we we crush it. And quite honestly, sometimes we'd rather just downgrade to those tasks because we're able to complete something and the complexities aren't as as pronounced on the repetitive tasks. But the challenge is most businesses have SOPs. The problem is they're not captured anywhere. And so the plumbing example that you gave, where they hire another plumber, unless you have the money to hire a mind reader, right, that thinks exactly like you do and knows exactly what you think, the next closest, second best step is to capture your processes and begin with the ones that are most important to you. It's like eating an elephant, right? You know, you don't eat an elephant in one bite, you take it one bite at a time. So I always tell people what's the most repetitive task that you're currently having to do that you hate to do and wish someone else would do it. We're gonna start there. And we help them capture out what are the three main steps or 10 main steps and then break it

From Doer To Business Builder

Casey Cease

down that way.

Angelo Gonzalez

Why do you think it's hard for business owners to kind of make that leadership jump? Because it is kind of a different mindset of leadership. Why, why is it hard for them to think in that terms of, you know, it's it's important for me to do this? It's not urgent, but it's important, right? In that kind of you know, framework.

Casey Cease

Well, people like to gravitate towards competency. They know how to do that. What is my necessity to this business if I'm no longer required to have to do that? Okay. Right? So let's just be honest. Um, I've started and grown several businesses, and there is a disorienting feeling when the first time something happens without you being in direct control. I mean, I still struggle. I mean, I've I've been an entrepreneur 20 years this year, you know. I mean, I started my first company, I was 13, but like my real legit business, Lucid Books, is in its 20th year. And quite honestly, um there are things that happen in lucid books that I have to trust my team to be able to do it and capture it, right? And and know that there's processes. And that's when we started implementing SOPs. But there was always a limiter of growth, and that was me. I only have 24 hours in a day I can work. And yes, when I was younger, I could work 20 hours, but quite honestly, the diminishment of my work usually happened around hour 10 to 11, right? Even on my best day. The rest that was just afterburners, caffeine, and a lot of mistakes that I have to rebuild later on, anyways. And so you have, I think part of it is like we we know what we know and we're afraid of the unknown. And what if it doesn't work, right? That's constantly the fear of the entrepreneur. We can all be cocky and say, like, I don't care if I break it, it's made to break it. We fail forward, we learn from our failures. Failure is just an opportunity to learn and grow. The reality is, though, is there's a lot of cost and ego involved in success. And so I think there's there's limiting beliefs of what value can I still add to this business if I'm not doing this myself, or if they don't need me to micromanage them. I think part of it is even if I capture it, what if they're not able to follow the process? Um, or what if I don't really know what I'm doing and I document it and it's I'm exposed that I've been winging it for 15 years. Right. Right? All of it's true. It's like the first time you get like a real professional accountant, right? You you had your sister-in-law or someone running QuickBooks for you and capturing whatever.

Angelo Gonzalez

But the first time you sit with an accountant and they say, um It's not just about having like a positive amount in the bank anymore, right?

Casey Cease

It's like just managing on on the, but there's cash in the bank. Yeah, yeah, you're negative 30,000, right? Like those moments for any business owner that's grown a business, yeah, you know, knows that it's there. So I I think you have to grow and understand that is my business just something to keep me employed? And if so, that's fine. Or is this an asset that I'm looking to build? Because as a builder, it's a different role than an operator. And so I think it's a it's a growth step. You know, limited imagination happens typically when our capacity is at is its full extent. Where we have to create space to be able to envision again and be able to work. And so I'm sure those of you listening and or watching on YouTube or online have never made a bad hire, have only batted a thousand, getting the perfect person in, or have never had an employee leave out of frustration because their work was not satisfying. All of those things are real and they happen to the best of us. One of the ways that I've been able to avoid that moving forward in our last several hires is with clear standard operating procedures, right? And, you know, one of the things that I've done is I now train my team. If a system is not developed, they need to take the first pass at it. How do you currently do it? Document it for me. With AI, it's even easier now to be able to do that. But we were doing this pre-AI, pre-even AI transcription. Um, but I don't like doing it. It's not like, man, I can't wait to make an SOP. It's my favorite thing to do. Really, the first SOP I made is I read a book called System Busters. And if you're out there in the author that published it or you know them, I will republish his book, no cost. Great book. Could use some aesthetic help and maybe some refreshing. Um, but it was my first book to kind of think through systems and processes in a basic and helpful way. But I was hooked. I didn't like having to do it. I remember one time we were leaving town for a while and I needed someone to house it. And then I created my first system with it.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

Right. And I put it in Evernote and I shared a link with them and I said, here's step by step. And it was 80% of the way there. And I said, Hey, for the first short weekend you're there, let me know whatever doesn't make sense. And we iterated, and after that, I was hooked.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah, yeah. And you know,

Train The Process Not The Person

Angelo Gonzalez

I think about uh when you think about um situational leadership and that kind of idea of somebody, you know, if you for if you're out there, you might know what situational leadership is, but you can go look it up. But the idea is that somebody is uh willing and able or not willing and able or, you know, willing and not able and those things. And at whenever you first bring somebody on, and I I remember reading this and thinking about it, right? Even working in a church world in a volunteer, like with volunteers in this capacity, I brought somebody on for a volunteer role. Um, and they had run sound before, they had experience. So I was just thinking they know how to run sound, okay? But they don't know how to run sound the way we do it. And if you maybe, again, going back to the plumber scenario, yeah, they might have plumbing experience. They might have worked for this company or this company and have 20 years or 25 years or 10 years or whatever it may be, but they don't know how you do things in your organization. And it should, you should always start from they don't know how to do it. They're willing, they they, you know, they want to do it, but they don't know how to do it with us yet. Now, that could be very fast if they have a lot of experience. They can learn, they can get up to speed very, very quickly, right? But I think a lot of times we make the mistake in thinking that our employees or the people that that we're leading know how to do something because they've done it successfully in the past, but maybe not in your organization or in a different context. And if they've done it successfully in the past in another place, you could almost have to start from the fact that they don't know how to do it here. And then it's those clear expectations that I think that set them up for success.

Casey Cease

So a good employee is someone who's teachable, they're coachable, they're humble, and they're willing to follow a process, right? Yeah. And if we're not giving them the process to follow, they're gonna do what they know how to do or don't know how to do, right? And then just kind of figure it out. Yet it's unfair because we're a moving target for them. Yeah. What does winning look like? For those who are conflict averse, right, then it's really hard to manage someone. I I go in all the time when I'm coaching or consulting and saying, why do they work here? Sometimes they're related. I'm like, okay, well, that's a little bit more sticky. Uh you know, um, but typically it's it's like they don't know how to manage them. And one of the things that System Busters had laid out is manage the process, not the person.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah. Okay.

Casey Cease

Right. So if you manage the process, here's the basic thing for processes. If the process works and produces a predictable outcome, then a person either follows the process and achieves the outcome, or they don't follow it. If the person doesn't follow it, that's a clear management opportunity to say, you have not followed it. That's strike one. Now, if they follow the process to a T and the outcome is inconsistent, then the process is at fault. Right. And we refine and fix the process. So this ambiguity of like, I don't know if I like how they're doing it or whatever, it becomes way more objective on if you want to be paid to do work here, you follow this process, right? There's books like the checklist manifesto, and basically what they do is take the SOPs and make a checklist. Yeah. Right. So, what is corrective action for someone when there's SOPs? They learn the SOP, they sign off on it. I've been trained on it, I understand it. If they fail to follow it, the next step is to put them on checklist for a week or two. They sign every checklist and turn it in. If the outcomes improve, they're back on there. If they still continue not to, the the path for them to be removed from the team becomes very clear. If you have a process that works and produces outcomes, and the person refuses or cannot follow the process, they cannot work that job. Yeah. So the arbitrary nature of it goes away, right? If a failure happens, then we can critique the process if they if we know for sure. Now, people lie and they check off checkboxes, whatever. That'll be exposed quickly and they will be removed from your team. Yeah. But then it it also brings should bring comfort for an ideal employee to know, like, I understand my job, I understand what winning looks like, and they should be celebrated when they bring improvements to the process. Oh, yeah, for sure. So for sure. This is how we do it. We want you to start doing it this way. Well, I know a better way. Great. Let's get some success with this process, and then let's meet next week and talk through what you would change. Yeah. And then we'll agree on how we're going to measure it. But that way, as a business owner, and so it's always the first thing. And what I what I've done now, Angelo, on things that like I hate doing like email should be like mail, not text messaging. Right. So if someone mails you a correspondence, you need a response, you should have a little time to do that. But it's now expected, I see an email, you better respond with like 30 minutes. Yeah. I'm not going to die in my email inbox. And so now with tools I've used and with AI, I've been able to show how I want my email managed. I'll capture it on video, I'll transcribe it, I'll make it into an SOP, I'll train it, I'll observe my assist managing it, and then we'll improve the process. Right.

The PBJ Test For Clarity

Casey Cease

And so, you know, it is something of like, I always tell people if you're not sure what to do, how do you make a peanut butter jell jelly sandwich?

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

Make an SOP for PB a your perfect PBJ.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

And what Stephanie did one time with her homeschool co-op a year or two ago is gave a general instructions, but not clarity.

Angelo Gonzalez

Oh, I love that. Yeah. My wife did the same thing with her with her class.

Casey Cease

Yeah, C Came thing. Like kids are like, wait a minute, what am I supposed to use to uh put the peanut butter on?

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah. Oh, you would you just put the peanut butter on the bread. So she takes it and grabs it or puts the jar of peanut butter on the bread and says, Okay, is this right? That's right. And it's like, well, no, you have to open it first. Oh, okay, open it and then put it on. No, you have to get the peanut butter out. Okay. No, no, no. You have to get a knife first.

Casey Cease

Uh-oh. Okay, now you're thinking about because most entrepreneurs like myself, I'm guilty of this. So I'm not judging any of you. I'm with you. Is I can give general instructions, but I know the nuance and details. Exactly. And so you're until you're actually doing it and then getting questions asked to flesh it out. You might have SOPs in your business, give it to someone who's competent and smart, and then have them do the task as is. Yeah. Watch them do it. That's my first thing. Because half the time, you know, and people have paid us six figures to come in. And my background as a publisher, I understand the process of ghostwriting. And so I understand, and I'm not a ghostwriter myself, but I understand the process. You basically get the big idea, you get the main points, you get the three sub-main points. And that's how we've been able to go into companies with blue-collar workers that you'll never get to sit behind a computer to type up their SOPs. But we've taken it to an interview style and are able to capture the information. And now even with AI able to emphasize that even farther and get really good results. But until you start and understand the process of gathering it, you're never really going to automate your business. You're never really going to be able to hire and delegate. Your delegation is going to be arbitrary. And I love, you know, I'm I'm part of my family's from the Jewish tradition. I love rabbinical approach. Come along with me, learn as we go. Let me mentor you, all that kind of stuff. But also, I'm a human being with different moods. And it becomes unfair when I react to something that I have not documented yet.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah. Well,

Mapping SOPs Across The Business

Angelo Gonzalez

and let's talk about the actual process of documenting it. And then the even the part, the parts of your business that need it. So, you know, what come to mind are marketing, sales, operations, admin, and financial big five, right? Like those are kind of the areas that you can be thinking about. I remember I was talking to a friend of mine who was coaching somebody through this, through, through um, coaching a business owner. And what they ended up doing, this was way before AI is 10 plus years ago, is they hired like a 15-year-old nephew or niece, 16. And that summer, all she did followed everyone around and wrote exactly what they did throughout the day. And when they were done with this person, they moved on to the next person. And that's what they did that whole summer as an intern. And then they had, okay, now here's all the thing. Now let's put it all together. With AI, it's even easier to do something like that. So let's, let's, let's talk about those five areas, okay? Marketing,

Marketing SOPs That Drive Leads

Angelo Gonzalez

sales, ops, admin, and financial. We'll start with marketing because we are a marketing agency, growth agency, right? So, what's what are some areas that you think are most important to have uh for SOPs in the marketing area of business?

Casey Cease

Yeah. That's really a great question because we need to start with outcomes.

Angelo Gonzalez

Okay, right.

Casey Cease

So when I build SOPs, I think through if this process were to work appropriately, what are the outcomes? Yeah, right. So we want leads. Okay, what kind of leads do we want? Right. So part of standard operating procedure for marketing is who's your ideal client? Okay, where are they? What are they doing? Um, how do we reach them? What is our offer? How are we going to measure this? And when do we know it's working or not working?

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

Right. Yeah. And so SOPs, you know, what is our content procedure? How do we create content? So right now, you and I are creating content for Planify uh agency for a podcast. That information will then be leveraged in different places to create social content, other social content, to create articles, to birth ideas as a verbal processor. This is one of the ways I ideate and say, hey, that idea was really great. Let's take that and flesh it out. Um, but in marketing, is is okay, what's a what's the budget? How do we determine that budget? Right? What is our cost of acquisition and how do we know if it's working or not? What's a client worth to us? What's a lifetime value to a client and document how we think through that? Right. Right. Because if you have that historical SOP, standard operating procedure, we like to acquire clients for under $1,000. Yeah. Right. Because our assessment is they bring in $10,000 of revenue and on one and eight bring a referral. So that, you know, that's our standard operating procedure. If you go to a marketing agency and say, hey, here's our standard operating procedures. We we do Google ads, and these are the angles we uh we operate. Here's how we do this here. Like I don't need the SOP on how to set up a Google ad, but if they're giving me standard operating procedures of this percentage of our budget we've typically found successful here, doing it here. Here's our content creation. Um, I think you know, for us as marketers, we have SOPs on when a meta ad stops working, how do we know? And what do we do? Yeah. What's our standard operating procedure?

Angelo Gonzalez

And a lot of times a standard operating procedure will develop out of something that broke. That's right. Right? That's that's a great way to do it. And it's, you know, so use those times where, oh, well, you know, uh something broke in this whole process. Well, then we need an SOP for that so that it doesn't happen again. Well, or so that what we know that when it's going to happen, we know how to get out of it quickly.

Casey Cease

When I'm gonna fire someone, I start making SOPs. And when I say that, I don't want any of our team shaking in their boots because who gets fired the most from our business? Me.

Angelo Gonzalez

That's right.

Casey Cease

When there's something I'm like, I can't do this, I shouldn't be the one doing this. This is not good for the business long term. I'm gonna be fired. That lights a fire into my rear end. To do that, why? Because then I get a promotion into the seats that I'm most successful in, right? And so being able to capture, I and even if I capture it poorly, it's at least a starting point to expand upon.

Angelo Gonzalez

You can start, yeah. You you have a plan to deviate from or to change or to refine and make better. At least you have something. Start somewhere, right? I think of areas like reputation management, how do we handle bad reviews? How do we solicit reviews? Um, how do we uh follow up with our leads? How fast do we follow up with them? What are the exact processes? How, how long does it take? Uh, what happens if we how do we know if it's an unqualified lead? All of these things need standard operating procedures as far as marketing goes.

Casey Cease

And if you go to a marketing agency and you're like, you're not doing a good job and there's no alignment, and that's why we usually start with a strategy first.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah. Yeah.

Casey Cease

What what are our goals? What are our benchmarks? And that's why we have the dashboard tracking these things. So we're the first ones to say, hey, we know it's a problem. Right. Here's our plan, what

Sales SOPs From Lead To Close

Casey Cease

we're gonna do about it.

Angelo Gonzalez

So let's let's talk about sales. Let's move on to sales. What and I think probably the biggest one that comes to mind in sales is just the sales process in general. That's right. Sometimes you have a great salesperson and they just instinctively know how to do it. There are those great salespeople that we know of, right? That you've probably met. They can sell anything to anyone, right? They instinctively instinctively have SOPs in their mind. But those things can be taught. You can train other salespeople to be as good as some of these. Talk a little bit about that.

Casey Cease

Yeah. So for instance, when you capture your sales process, right, there's outbound sales. So you're doing, you know, cold calling or door knocking or cold email, whatever, right? So there's outbound sales, there's inbound sales, right? And then there's sales ops, right? So a lot of people missed that, where they're just the sales, I mean, you know, go to like any standard roofing company. Most of the time their sales guy is also the project manager.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

Which if you understand sales and project management, it's a rare bird that's good at both. They either can do sales, but they're better at project management, or they're great at sales, but yeah, we're not sure how that roof got on there, right? Like let's just be honest, right? Yeah, yeah. And so really with the sales process, you know, when you think through SOPs for sales, what is our standard? Um, you know, if if a lead comes in, what's the time it takes when we should be calling back in a normal business hour? Right? How many times are we going to reach out to them? What are the scripts for, and they can be adaptive, but just to give a new salesperson idea of what's important for us to communicate when? What are standard objections and how do we handle those objections? This is our standard operating procedure. Once a lead comes in, it's in our high-level platform, Salesforce, wherever. What do we do with it in there? What information do we need to gather? What information do we need to communicate? How do we go about scheduling the next step or sending information, right? From lead capture to cultivating that lead to closing it, sending a proposal, closing the proposal, negotiating proposals, right? What is our process to do that? Because you get someone that's good with people that understands and believes in the product, you can help them with the right process, close deals. Yeah. Now they may not be your bulldog out there going to get them, right? But you people who can consistently close sales, especially if you have a product or service that people want or need, will and give them a process that they can oversee and run. Yeah.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

They're going to have more success. Right.

Angelo Gonzalez

Right.

Operations SOPs That Prevent Chaos

Angelo Gonzalez

So moving from sales to operations, delivery, right, fulfillment. Um, so you know, it's gone through marketing, it's gone through sales. Okay, now we we closed it. What are some places as far as in fulfillment and operations that you th that you can look at um and say, you know, here's some places where I've seen them fail, or, you know, that are linchpins there in that, in that kind of in in that part of the business as far as SLPs go. Oh my gosh.

Casey Cease

I mean, I've seen it. Let me let me share how I've caused it. Yeah. All right. I'll start with you.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

I'm typically more the outreach sales guy. I have done operations, I can't do follow-through, but we've had more than one occasion a breakdown of communication on what I sold and what's to be delivered when. And we were constantly working on improving that process. Right. So that could be replicated because I want it just a seamless handoff. Problem is, if I don't create a process to do that, then because you and I are so close, we go, hey, Angelo, here's what's going on, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, so even the process might be Casey, give me the the closing call recording and the proposal. Right. That's a better process than hey, Angelo, onboard so-and-so.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

Exactly.

Angelo Gonzalez

And in our type of business where we're we're really doing a lot of different types of uh things, we're delivering different types of services. When you start getting into maybe an HVAC or a concrete lifting or a plumber or a roofer, those deliverables are a little bit easier, probably to wrap your head around. We're we're probably either going to fix a roof or put a new roof on a room.

Casey Cease

So let me give you a functional example for a home service business. Yeah. I was working with a plumber many years ago, and um I'm working on profitability and everything else. I am not a plumber. I mean, I have unclogged a toilet and pulled some long hair out of a drain, obviously mine. Um, but you know, but I kept asking questions. I was like, how is this van so profitable and this van not when they're getting the same amount of jobs? Okay. And so I started asking a bunch of questions and being wired, how I'm wired, just ask a ton of questions. And what we realized was this the van that wasn't as profitable was not keeping an inventory of standard supplies on their truck. And so they'd either have to come back to the warehouse or go to the supply store. Okay. And so I said, What is the standard operating procedure, an inventory checklist that needs to be checked at the beginning of the day and restocked at the end of the day? And they're like, Well, we don't know that. Well, plumber over here making a ton of money. He knows it. He knew it automatically, and he was more organized and he liked being prepared for the day. I'm not diagnosing anyone, but having ADHD myself, I love unplanned breaks that allow me justifiably to be distracted for a bit.

Angelo Gonzalez

Right. Oh, I have to drive over here for 20 minutes and then another 20 minutes back. Okay. Yeah.

Casey Cease

Podcast, audiobook, yeah, call my wife, like whatever, have a soda, whatever. Right. Well, I I just asked that question. I said, Well, aren't well, they should know. And I said, Well, how do you hold that accountable? And I said, first thing you need to do is follow this guy over here, get inventory of what's in his van. Create that checklist, create AI, so they had to manually do it, yeah, and start making this guy. You're not done with your day until all this is restocked. Right. And so we did that. The next thing that broke when people are actually pre-stocking in their vans, so revenue went up, time on job went up. Problem is, is main inventory in the shop went down. Yeah. So the other vans that were coming that weren't maybe following it, started following it, they were out of inventory all the time. So we had an inventory management problem. Right? Yeah. So one fix in operations caused another break in operations. Right. And so what's our standard operating procedure for inventory management of our little warehouse? And they said, We don't have. Well, if we see it's low and the guy comes by, we order it.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah, somebody asks for something and then it's not there, we go ahead and order it.

Casey Cease

100%. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So we just kept going on the chain. And eventually we discovered that, hey, working with a plumbing supply store and letting them set up their own shop, they'll manage all your inventory management. And every time the guy's restocked, they just scan it. They have an impact. So we built like, but chasing that down and creating SOPs. So what should a van have? Once they had that, then there was an inventory problem. So I always tell people people bring us in maybe to do marketing or sales consulting or something. We always break operations when it's successful.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

Yeah. Because what we do is if your operation SOPs are not in place and you add more leads or more business to it, that's where you're going to be exposed.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

And so that's why as Planify, we've grown into a comprehensive growth solution, not just marketing. Right. Marketing is the gateway drug that causes all the opportunities for us to be able to come in and help you grow your business. Right. And I'm always going to ask, what is your standard operating procedure? And they may have a verbal tradition, oral tradition of here's how we do it. But if it's not captured, it's much harder to manage.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah. I'm sure there's tons of stories. I, you know, I had a friend who uh runs an HVAC company and all of their guys, he was having trouble with them turning in invoices in time and uh getting payment from people because they just had so much business they'd go and then they'd forget. But they were still getting paid for their jobs, but they weren't collecting payment. So he decided, you know, what I'm gonna, you know, what we're gonna do now is we're only gonna pay you out whenever we've gotten payment. Guess how many invoices started getting turned in on time? Yes, that's right. So again, this is you know, there's this thing, hey, we're not you're you know, we're not getting payments on time. There's a broken process there. Well, here, here, how's you know, and you can figure out ways, just like you said, well, you know, at the end of the day, here's what needs to happen, right? Um, the checklist has to happen. Well, you don't get paid until we get paid. Oh, well, that's gonna cause some, you know, that we're we're putting that policy into place. So let's think about we've gone through uh the those three.

Admin SOPs That Protect Your Time

Angelo Gonzalez

Let's talk about admin. You talked a little bit about it with email, but uh, what are some other spots that you see some kind of quick wins for for building SOPs out as far as administration of the business goes?

Casey Cease

I mean, scheduling, you know, okay. Mary handles my calendar, um, email management, processing receipts. Oh, okay. What do we do with receipts? What do we do with receipts? Who do we send it to for what? How do we categorize it? Um, when am I to be interrupted or not interrupted? I mean, uh, you know, I I think administratively speaking, like the more I can get out of admin, the better for everyone involved. Yeah. Can I do admin? Sure. Right. And when I'm on and begging for distraction, I get really good at admin. Yeah. But the problem is, is then I'm not doing my high value activities. And so SOPs for how do we answer the phone? How do we schedule different types of meetings? Yeah. Right? Revenue generating meetings are our top priority as opposed to just hanging out with a buddy. And I love hanging out with my buddies. Right. But I have to budget my time.

Angelo Gonzalez

Well, and even thinking about meetings, I think one of the biggest ones that we've seen over the last two years is just AI capturing our meetings and using those notes to create action items. Because how many times have you had a meeting and you had really good ideas in the meeting? And you're like, oh yeah, we should do this, we should do this, but it's you know 45 minutes long. And then you get to the end and you go, okay, what did was anybody taking notes? Oh, no, we for, oh, okay, what did we say we're gonna do? Well, with now, with you know, all the different recordings and some of them, most all of them now exist within the, you know, within the platforms, is you can go drop that in AI, or sometimes it'll just send you a summary now immediately, and you can create, you know, a follow-up tasks or, you know, designate, hey, as soon as after the meeting, so-and-so is gonna go into our task management and make sure that all of these tasks are in there and they're assigned properly so that we can actually do the things we said we were gonna do uh in this meeting, the great ideas we had, or you know, the the aha moments that we have from collaboration. Um, such an easy way to to uh to do, but not a lot of people still still do those things. And even if you're having in-person meetings, I know Casey, a lot of times you'll have your phone out just recording, and you'll say, Hey, I'm gonna record this so that I can know what we need to do next, so that I I can put this into my AI brain and know what the next steps are for the strategy uh that we're moving forward with whenever we're meeting with the client or something like that. What

Finance SOPs For Money Rules

Angelo Gonzalez

about finance?

Casey Cease

Yeah, so I mean I have a great financial team in-house and outside support. Um, I mean, SOPs are like who gets to spend what? So how do we budget? How do we spend? How do we request payment? Who does the invoicing? When do we invoice? When do we follow up on an invoice as delinquent? When needs to be automated, when it needs to be delegated. Well, you can't really automate until you capture, yeah. Right. And so, you know, breaking down to, you know, okay, once an invoice or once a contract is signed, the initial invoice needs to be sent. What is that SOP? Who gets what when? Right. Um, you know, and so it's it's really important with finance of, you know, people need to know what to do with money, how to get reimbursed. If you do, let's say you put something on a personal credit card for the company, what's the process to get reimbursed? Right. And and so, you know, I I think what's our reporting process? What when do I need to be notified? I mean, we have a controller outside of the business, so a third-party controller that knows from our standard operating procedure when to notify me if something seems off. Right. You know, and so I don't have to keep my eyes as diligently on it as I used to, because someone else, that's their job. They're doing their job. And if I get blindsided by something, we have an objective conversation to have of, hey, you knew about this here, it wasn't right communicated. What happened? Much easier.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

So it's I'm not having to build up the gumption to articulate something that wasn't agreed upon. We're now having a discussion on what was agreed upon.

Tools And AI For Fast SOPs

Angelo Gonzalez

So let's talk about really quickly just some tools that we can use to capture SOPs, to make them, to do them as, you know, it's so much easier to do them now than it was even five years ago to be able to capture those and automate them. So, so what are some, you know, including AI? I mean, you know, throw out some tools that we've used. I know we've used Loom a lot. That's a great tool that we've used to capture things that you're doing on the computer, right? Um what else?

Casey Cease

Yeah, basically what I'll do is I'll use Loom. I pay the 20 bucks wherever it is a month. Yeah, get the transcript, drop it into an AI and say, hey, you know, and we can prompt AI to know or start a project so it knows how we do SOPs, drop it in there, have it transcribe it. And then what I'll do is I'll take it and, you know, we've built some custom AI tools now that can, you know, track SOPs. But if you're just getting started, Notebook LM is a great platform that if you have a free Gmail account or a paid Google workspace, it can take up to 300 sources of data at one time, as the the data, use the power of their language model, and it can do a lot with that. So, you know, I would always recommend to people like, hey, take your SOPs for finance, drop it into Notebook LM. That's a great way to start. And what I always tell people is use the tools that exist before you build something custom because you know, people have come to us and asked for custom AI builds uh with scaling business AI. We, if they're already doing it, like I'm I'm working with a client right now, and I said, Hey, before you invest a lot of time and money, you know, building it, why don't you go to co-work and see if if your hypothesis works and if it does what you want it to do? They did that and they got the limitation of, well, we want other team members to do it, and we're having a hard time replicating it and doing this. I said, Okay, now we're gonna build on N8N.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

And so they rep, they replicated the workflow onto N8N.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

And now they have more agentic support. Eventually, I already can tell there's some customization that needs to go beyond that in a custom app. Well, that's really where we come in. And our ideal client are the ones that are like, hey, can you do it with us or do it for us? Because we get it now, we understand. But really, if you're just getting started, test it today. If you have an iPhone, I think Android might have it too, but the voice memo app now on your phone will automatically transcribe. Yes. Right?

Angelo Gonzalez

So what a powerful thing that we have now in our pockets that we didn't have five years ago.

Casey Cease

Or if you're open ChatGPT or Claude and you install, you know, I pay for this the premium version of Whisperflow. Yeah. I put the function key down, I start talking and say, here's my SOP. What I like to do is I like to put the original in a Google Doc so it's not just on the LLM in case ever something better comes along. But then I'll have it and I'll, you know, you can do it directly in ChatGPT yourself and you know, hit Whisperflow and speak your SOP, and then have it put something together, drop it into Google Doc or Word doc, whatever your platform, and just start. Do pick. I mean, I challenge a lot of my coaching clients, do an SOP a day. I don't care how dumb it is, I don't care if you don't want to use it, I don't care if it's for tying your shoes, just get in the habit of like, I'm doing this more than one time, and eventually I want someone else to know how to do it. Yeah, use technology. So voice memo or loom or fathom or zoom, you know, take it, get the transcript, prompt your AI, and now you can prompt AI to prompt AI. Yeah, give me a prompt. Give me a prompt to create an SOP. Here's an example of an SOP highlight formatted, right? And then drop the transcript in and get to work.

SOPs That Raise Your Valuation

Angelo Gonzalez

So building all of these up, let's say you build them up over the years and you want to exit your business. You want to sell your business, or somebody comes along and maybe wants to purchase your business. How much more valuable is a business with documented SOPs than one who's still making money, maybe it's profitable, but they have none of them?

Casey Cease

I mean, I think uh the numbers I read were 20 to 30 percent more valuable. So if you have a two million dollar business, and let's say it's a 20% spiff, it's a 400 grand spiff, right? You know, I mean just from documenting things that you already do. My favorite discussion, I work with some franchise organizations, but talking to business owners like we should franchise this, like awesome, let me see your SOPs. They're like, we don't have them. And I'm like, bro, like you are asking for trouble. Right. Um, so if you ever want to franchise or anything else, the high value, if you go to like a home service franchising company that that buys or helps partner with franchising, and you go with really solid SOPs, you're of much higher value to them than just somebody that has good reach and a local location.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah.

Casey Cease

Your process is the proprietary thing. So I really encourage people just make some poorly. And then as soon as you can hire someone that's good at it, um, we work with people and help help them figure out processes that make sense and help develop tools.

Angelo Gonzalez

Yeah. So if you're out there, if your business or a lot of the processes in your business rely on one person or two people or you just you.

Final Challenge To Start Today

Angelo Gonzalez

And if you were to get hit by a bus, or if that person gets hit by a bus, everything falls apart, contact us. We'd love to talk to you about building SOPs, what that looks like in your business, um, what that uh how that can make not only your employees more happy, not even you less stressful, but your business more valuable as well. So thank you for listening to this uh episode of the podcast. You can find us uh on all the streaming platforms, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, all of those things. We appreciate it. If you would uh like and subscribe um to uh our channel, uh yeah, give us five stars. All those things help with the algorithms and help us to get in front of more people. So we do appreciate it. Casey, any parting words?

Casey Cease

Yeah, go make an SOP. Just do it poorly. That's right, get started.

Angelo Gonzalez

All right. Thanks for listening.