One good SOP is worth more than your next operations hire

You are about to post a job listing for an operations manager. Stop. Before you do, answer this question:

Is the job you're hiring for actually documented anywhere?

If the answer is no, you are not solving a people problem. You're about to create a very expensive one.

What happens without SOPs

A new person joins. They're smart, they want to do well. But there is no written process for anything. So they do the job the way they figure it out themselves — which may or may not be the right way.

Over a few months, they build their own version of the role. Then they leave. And everything they built leaves with them. The next person starts from scratch. The founder is back to square one, frustrated, wondering why they can't build a stable operations team.

The problem was never the people. The problem is that every time someone leaves, institutional knowledge walks out the door because it was never written down.

What an SOP actually is

An SOP is just a written answer to one question: how does this task get done here?

It does not have to be long. It does not need a fancy format. A one-page Word document with step-by-step instructions is better than a 20-slide presentation that nobody reads.

A good SOP has four things:

• What task it covers
• Who is responsible for it
• The steps, in order, with enough detail that someone new can follow them
• What "done correctly" looks like

That's it. Nothing more required.

Where to start

List the 10 tasks that happen most often in your operations. Pick the one that causes the most problems when done wrong. Write the SOP for that one task.

Don't try to document everything in one week. You won't finish and you'll give up. One SOP done properly this week is worth more than a 50-SOP plan that never gets written.

Once the first one is written, test it. Give it to someone who doesn't know the task and ask them to follow it exactly. Wherever they get stuck is where the SOP needs to be clearer.

The hiring test

Before you post any operations role, do this:

Write down the top 5 tasks the person you're hiring will do every week. For each one, write a simple SOP — even a rough draft, one page, 10 minutes each.

Now look at what you've written. In my experience, doing this exercise reveals one of two things:

Either the tasks are clear and the role is ready to be hired for. Or you realise the tasks overlap with three other people's roles, nobody is actually accountable for the outcomes, and the role is too vague to hire for yet.

That clarity is worth ₹8–10L in potential bad hiring costs. Because a bad hire into a broken role is a near-guaranteed result.

SOPs don't constrain good people — they free them

A common pushback I hear: "My team is experienced. They don't need a manual."

Here's the thing. SOPs are not for experienced people doing their regular tasks. They're for every person on their first day, for every task that happens only once a month and is easy to forget, for every situation where the usual person is sick and someone else has to step in.

Good operations people love good SOPs. It means they can spend their energy on the hard decisions — not on remembering the steps of something that should run on autopilot.

The goal of an SOP is simple: the task should run the same way whether Vinod is there or not, whether the experienced person is there or not, whether it's Monday morning or Friday at 6pm.

A six-week plan to get this done

Week 1–2: List all recurring tasks in your operations. Rank them by frequency and impact when done wrong.

Week 3–4: Write SOPs for the top 5. Use the format above. One page each. Have someone test each one.

Week 5–6: Roll them out. Train your current team. Put them somewhere accessible — a shared Google Drive folder, a printed binder in the office, whatever your team will actually use.

That's it. Six weeks, five SOPs, and your operations are already more scalable than most ₹20Cr businesses in India.

Then hire. Once the role is documented, you'll know exactly who to hire for it.