What Good Looks Like: SOPs
If you have grown fast and almost nothing is written down, you are not behind and you are not alone. It is one of the most common things a growing team runs into, and it is rarely a discipline problem. Good usually does not mean a binder of procedures nobody opens. It means the handful of processes that break most often, written plainly enough that someone could follow them without you in the room. Most of the way there is a few hours on the right processes, not a documentation marathon, and there is real ground you can cover on your own this week. Here are a few places to start.
Where it stops: you can write the procedures that break loudest. The harder part is the set staying consistent with each other, current as the work changes, and actually used, which is structure, not a document.
Erin Peshoff is the Founder of Vivid Operational Advisors. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivid around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
