The Fastest Way to Write SOPs You'll Actually Use? Record Yourself Doing the Job.

A client in energy services is back out in the field running service calls himself because two people left, and none of what he knows is written down anywhere. When a job came back half-finished last week, a customer skipped the office and called his personal cell with an open-ended ask. There was no system to catch it because the system is him.

This is the spot most owners I talk to get stuck. The knowledge that runs the company lives in one or two heads, and the people who could write it down are the same people too busy using it to stop and type. So the SOPs stay theoretical, the new hires shadow whoever's free, and the owner stays the bottleneck.

Why don't the SOPs in your head ever make it onto paper?

Because writing a process from a blank page is slow and boring, and you're good at the actual work, not the documenting.

His service tech left and took the routine with him. Now my client knows the right order to check a dehumidifier setup, what to tell the customer, what to flag for a callback. He's done it a thousand times. Ask him to sit down Friday afternoon and write it out and it never happens, because Friday afternoon has six other fires and a blank Google Doc loses every time.

The work isn't the problem. The translation from doing to documenting is the problem, and that's the part nobody has time for.

What does it cost you when the process lives in one person?

You become the escalation path for everything, including the stuff that should never reach you.

The half-finished job is a clean example. The office didn't have a script for taking the message, so instead of routing it to the right ops manager, the customer ended up on the owner's cell. He's now doing the field work, the triage, and the cleanup, which means the business can't grow past what his calendar holds. Most owners file this under being busy. The calendar hides what it really is, which is one person the whole operation routes through.

The tax shows up when someone's out. One departure and suddenly there's no record of how anything runs, so the owner straps the tool belt back on. Call it a staffing gap if you want. Staffing was just covering for a documentation gap.

How do you get the process out of your head without stopping to write it?

You talk instead of type. He's going to record himself on his phone while he runs the next few service calls.

Not a polished script. Just narrating what he's doing as he does it, the way he'd explain it to a new tech riding along. Check this first, here's why, here's what a bad reading looks like, here's what I tell the homeowner. Two or three minutes of real audio per task, captured while the work is already happening, so it costs him almost no extra time.

The trick is that talking through a job you know cold is easy. You can do it one-handed in a crawlspace. Writing the same thing at a desk feels like homework. So you move the capture to where the knowledge actually lives, which is in the middle of the job, out loud.

Where does AI actually help here?

It does the part you hate. You feed the transcript in and it drafts the SOP.

The flow is short. Record the visit, run the audio through a transcription tool, paste the transcript into an AI assistant, and ask it to turn the ramble into a clean step-by-step procedure. What comes back isn't perfect, but it's a draft with the steps in order and the reasoning attached. He edits a draft instead of facing a blank page, and editing is ten times faster than writing.

A few of these and he's got the start of a real service playbook, built from how the work actually gets done rather than how someone imagined it should. The data quality is better too, because it came straight from the field instead of from memory three weeks later. Garbage in, garbage out cuts both ways, and a same-day transcript beats a Friday reconstruction every time.

What has to change in the office for this to stick?

The documents are half the fix. The other half is making sure calls stop landing on the owner's phone.

We set a simple rule: the office takes a specific message, not an open-ended one. What's the address, what's the issue, what was the last service. Then it routes to the right ops manager instead of forwarding the whole mess upstream. The SOPs give the office something to route against, and the routing protocol keeps the owner out of the middle. One without the other doesn't hold.

He's bracing for a short-term hit while this gets built, and that's the right call. Pulling himself out of every loop slows things down for a few weeks before it speeds them up. The owners who skip that step stay the smartest person on every call forever.

He starts recording Monday. First task on the list is the dehumidifier walkthrough, the exact one that left with the tech who quit.