SOPs Capture the Steps, Not the Calls You Make Along the Way

You know that client deck you spent 4 hours rewriting at midnight last week because it was easier than delegating it? THAT’S why your agency can’t run a week without you.

Of course you remember it. You’re still recovering from it.

And you were right. It was the easier move. It’s the easier move every single time, which is exactly the problem.

Multiply that over a few years and somewhere along the way you stopped being the person who runs the agency and became the person it runs through.

You’ve already tried to fix this

You hired someone senior. You wrote the SOPs. You moved everything into a new PM tool.

None of it hit the real problem, because SOPs capture the steps and not the calls you make along the way.

Think about what was actually in those four hours. Not the slide order. You decided this client would read the second recommendation as a criticism of their team, so you moved it and softened the framing. You cut the competitive section because the meeting was already going to run long and that was the part you could lose. You knew the number on slide nine would get challenged, so you put the methodology next to it instead of in an appendix. You left one weak recommendation in, because killing it would have meant explaining a reversal from the last meeting and that wasn’t the fight for this week.

None of that is in a process doc. It isn’t information. It’s judgment, built up over years of getting it wrong in front of clients.

That’s also why the senior hire didn’t solve it. You bought capacity, and capacity is real, but the calls were still yours to make. Every deck they built came to you for a pass, and the pass was where the actual work happened. So the bottleneck moved about six inches and stayed exactly as wide.

Get the calls out of your head

Here’s something to try this week.

Pick one task off your list. Fire up Loom or Tella, and do the work while you talk through every call you’re making and why. Not what you’re doing. Why you’re doing it that way for this client, this week.

Run the transcript through AI, pair it with the finished deliverable, and the judgment is out of your head, sitting next to an example of what good looks like.

Two things about how to record it, because this is where people get it wrong.

Record real work with a real client’s name in it, not a sanitized example. The whole value is in the specifics of this account, this stakeholder, this history. A generic version teaches nothing, because the generic version is what the SOP already said.

And do it live, at whatever speed you actually work. Do not prepare. The moment you script it you start narrating best practice instead of what you’re really doing, and best practice is the thing your team can already look up.

Nobody watches training videos, and that’s fine

The objection here is that nobody on your team watches recordings. That’s mostly true, and it’s not what this is for.

This isn’t training. It’s a paired artifact. The finished deck shows what good looks like, and the transcript sitting next to it explains why it looks that way. Someone picks it up when they’re about to do the same job, not in an onboarding week where none of it means anything yet.

The transcript matters more than the video for exactly that reason. It’s searchable, it’s skimmable, and someone can find the two paragraphs about handling a defensive stakeholder without watching you build slides for forty minutes.

Do this for one deliverable type a month and inside a year you have the actual operating knowledge of your agency written down, in your own words, attached to real examples. That’s the thing the SOP project was trying to be.

It’s the same four hours, except you only spend them once, and next time the work goes out without you.

This is the third of five things I look at inside an agency, and the one owners most want to solve with a job post.