We're 20 people now and still finding places where the lack of early documentation is costing us. Hindsight: we should've documented our quoting process before we hired our second salesperson. Each rep developed their own quoting style, and now the price/scope mismatch on the same service is genuinely bad. Took us 18 months to undo it.
The first SOP we DID document was client onboarding because it was bleeding revenue. That paid off fast. Wish I'd doubled down on documentation earlier and on more processes.
Curious what others would have documented first if they could go back. The patterns I keep hearing: sales/quoting (mine), client onboarding, hiring and new-employee onboarding, quality control or delivery review, cash flow and invoicing.
What's yours, and what did the lack of it cost you specifically?
Services founders: what process do you wish you'd documented from day one?
byu/Late-Development-543 inEntrepreneur
Posted by Late-Development-543
2 Comments
Scope definition and change requests would be near the top for me. A lot of service-business pain starts with stuff that sounded settled on a call but never got written down clearly, so the delivery team inherits the ambiguity and the client assumes extras were included. Documenting that early saves margin and a lot of awkward conversations later.
Client handoffs in my experience.
A lot of stuff is “documented” enough to get the work done, but not enough to survive a clean handoff between founder, sales, delivery, and client services without things getting dropped or re-explained.
That usually shows up later as slower delivery, confused clients, and way too much stuff routing back through the founder.