The Real Cost of Not Having Standard Operating Procedures in Your Business
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) sound like something large corporations worry about. They sound bureaucratic. They sound like something you build when the business is big enough to need them.
This is the assumption that costs most growing businesses in Kenya far more than they realise.
The cost of not having SOPs for small businesses is not a line item in your accounts. It shows up as time lost, mistakes repeated, staff who take months to become useful, and a founder who cannot take a week off without the business slowing down.
What an SOP actually is
An SOP is a written description of how a specific task is done, who does it, in what order, using which tools, and what the output should look like.
That is all it is. Not a corporate manual. Not a policy document. A written record of the right way to do something, clear enough that someone who has never done it before could follow it and produce a correct result.
Most businesses have informal versions of SOPs already. They live in the founder's head. Or in a team member's memory. Or in a WhatsApp message that was sent once and never recorded anywhere permanently.
The problem is not that the process does not exist. The problem is that it is not written down where anyone can access it reliably.
The hardware business case
We worked with a hardware retail business that had been operating for over three years. The business was profitable. The founder was experienced. The team was functional.
But when we did an initial review, we found that almost every operational process, stock ordering, supplier payments, staff scheduling, and customer credit management existed only in the founder's head or in informal habits the team had developed without documentation.
Three years of accumulated knowledge, none of it written down.
The cost was invisible most of the time. When the founder was present, things ran well. When they were not during illness, during travel, or during any absence, the team defaulted to guessing. Mistakes happened. Supplier relationships were managed inconsistently. Credit limits were applied unevenly.
When we implemented QuickBooks Online and documented the financial processes alongside it, the bookkeeping time dropped by 75 per cent. But the more significant outcome was that the founder could step back from the day-to-day financial management entirely. The process now existed outside of any single person.
That is what SOPs actually do. They make the business less dependent on any one person, including the founder.
You can see related work in our portfolio.
Standard operating procedures where the cost actually shows up
Staff turnover. When a team member leaves, and the knowledge they held was never documented, it leaves with them. The cost of rehiring and retraining a replacement is high. The cost of the errors made during the gap is often higher.
Repeated mistakes. If a mistake is made and no process is updated to prevent the same mistake from happening again, it will happen again. Most businesses fix the immediate problem without fixing the underlying process. The same fix gets applied repeatedly by different people at different times.
Slow onboarding. A new hire who has to learn entirely through observation and conversation takes months to become productive. A new hire who has documented processes to follow is useful within weeks.
Founder dependence. If the business cannot operate at its normal quality without the founder present, the business is fragile. SOPs are the mechanism that transfers knowledge from a person to a system.
Client experience inconsistency. When different team members handle the same client-facing task differently, with different tones, different response times, and different follow-ups, the client experience becomes unpredictable. SOPs standardise the experience regardless of who is handling it.
How to write your first SOP without overcomplicating it
Pick one process. The most repeated, the most error-prone, or the one you most frequently have to explain to team members.
Write it in plain language. Not formal language. The kind of language you would use if you were explaining it verbally to a new team member.
The structure:
· What this process covers (one sentence)
· Who is responsible for it
· When it happens (trigger or frequency)
· The steps, in order, numbered
· What the correct output looks like
· Where the completed output goes
That is a complete SOP. One page. Sometimes less.
Write it, share it with the person who currently does the task, have them follow it once, update anything unclear, and file it somewhere the whole team can access. A shared Google Drive folder works perfectly.
Our services include SOP documentation as a standalone engagement or as part of a broader operations build.
The test
The test of whether you need SOPs is simple: if a key team member left today and was replaced tomorrow, how long would it take the new person to match the output quality of the person they replaced?
If the honest answer is more than a month, the knowledge is in people, not in the system.
That is not a team problem. That is a documentation problem.
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Virtual Assistant Solutions, Fractional COO and Operations Consultancy. Nairobi, Kenya. Working remotely with founders and business owners across East Africa and beyond.
