I have read a lot of SOPs written by people who never did the job. You can spot them instantly. They read like flowcharts drawn in a conference room, full of steps that collapse the first time they touch a real Tuesday.

Here is my rule, and it has held from the tire shop to fifty million dollars in roofing projects: I do not write the procedure until I have done the job myself. Personally. Hands on. Start to finish, more than once.

Not because I am a control freak. Because the job you imagine and the job that exists are two different jobs, and only one of them is worth documenting.

When I built out project accounting processes, I did not start by designing the system. I started by processing the paperwork myself. Intake to closeout, invoice to reconciliation. And within days I found things no whiteboard session would ever have surfaced. Steps that existed only because of one carrier's weird portal. A "five minute" task that actually took forty because of a software quirk. Approvals that added days and caught nothing.

The desk version of that SOP would have documented a fantasy. The field version documented reality, including the ugly workarounds, because the workarounds ARE the job.

Same thing when standing up sales offices. Before any rep ran my door process, I ran it. Knocked the doors, filled out the forms in the driveway, tried to take the photos the checklist demanded. Found out fast that a form which seems reasonable at a desk is a nightmare standing on a ladder in wind. The SOP got rewritten by the ladder, not by me being smart.

Here is the actual method, step by step:

  • Do the job yourself until you stop being surprised. Once through is not enough. The exceptions are the curriculum, and exceptions do not show up on day one.
  • Write down what you actually did, not what you wish you did. Include the workarounds and the judgment calls. If step six only works because you called Denise at the carrier, the SOP says "call Denise" until you fix the underlying issue.
  • Give it to someone else and shut up. Watch them run it cold. Every place they stop and ask a question is a defect in the document, not in them.
  • Fix the document, not the person. Rewrite until a competent stranger can execute without you in the room.
  • Date it and revisit it. An SOP nobody has touched in a year is a rumor, not a procedure.

That third step is where most companies quit, and it is the whole ballgame. The test of an SOP is not whether it reads well. It is whether it transfers. I have handed procedures to brand new hires and watched them stall on step two over something I thought was obvious. It was obvious, to me, because I was carrying context the paper did not. The paper has to carry all of it.

There is a leadership bonus in this, too. When crews and reps know the procedures came from your hands, the procedures carry weight. Nobody rolls their eyes at a checklist written by someone who has stood where they stand. The fastest way to get an SOP ignored is to have it arrive from someone the team knows has never done the work.

And one warning from experience: doing the job first does not mean doing the job forever. The point of getting your hands dirty is to earn the right to write the document, then hand the document off. Founders who confuse those two never scale anything.

Takeaway: do the job until it stops surprising you, then write down the truth, not the theory.