How To Organize Your SOPs

Hey there! Thanks for listening to the podcast today. I hope everything’s going well for you right now.

I wanted to share a quick tip on organizing your standard operating procedures.

So all of your policies and procedures that you have for your practice – whether you’re solo or a group – it’s a good idea to have those reasonably organized and documented and put in one place for you to revisit, update, and share with your team as you grow.

So I’ve been working on this and kind of pulling all of our policies and procedures from various locations and trying to put them in one place, like I said, so it can be organized and easy to access.

I’m using a tool called Waybook. I’ve talked about this before on the podcast. It’s a pretty nice tool to build a business playbook, and you can check out my other episodes to learn more about that.

But here’s a quick tip on how to organize this, and I pulled this from the book Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz, which I just finished reading again for the second time, and I got some great stuff out of it on the second read.

So he has this format; he calls it ACDC, and I’m always down for a music analogy or metaphor – or acronym, I guess I should say!

So this one is A for Attract, C for Convert, D for Deliver, and C for Collect.

So what I did in this tool called Waybook is I created four folders: Attract, Convert, Deliver and Collect, and then under that there’s subcategories for various policies and procedures.

So under Attract, it’s everything that we have about our marketing strategies and networking primarily.

And then Convert is everything related to the intake procedures.

Deliver is anything clinical related to the delivery of the counseling services, as you can imagine.

And then Collect is all about billing and invoicing and insurance.

So that has helped me because I was previously very overwhelmed with trying to figure out how to create the headings and the categories and cause it to make sense to me and to others.

And so the only other thing I’ve added to this so far are a section on Who We Are (which is essentially our guiding principles) and then I also added a section on Human Resources because that doesn’t quite fit in the ACDC framework.

But I know that once I have all of these categories filled out – Attract, Convert, Deliver and Collect, and then Who We Are and Human Resources – that I’ll have a reasonably complete set of standard operating procedures that we can continue to tweak as we go and change things.

Then I’ll have specific places to send people when they have questions about sick time policy or how our referrals match with therapists or what do we do for networking. All those types of things.

So there you go. That’s a quick tip. And of course, the footnote is if you haven’t read Clockwork, go read it. If you’ve read Clockwork, go read it again!

There’s a handful of books that I found I’m just going to read every year, and I continue to get good things out of them. Clockwork is definitely one of them.

So there you go. Thanks for listening and I hope you have an awesome day. Bye!

Psst! Hey, are you still there? Oh, good, good. I just wanted to ask you a quick question: have you heard of the Productive Therapist Business Directory?

Oh, my gosh – you’re going to love this! This is literally the only business directory built just for therapists. And it’s the Go To place to find the support and services you need to grow your private practice. This is where you’re gonna go to find your next SEO provider, maybe your Google AdWords specialist, your next business coach, maybe a virtual assistant, and so many other things.

So go check it out at Directory.ProductiveTherapist.com. Have a good one!


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