Over the last couple of months, I've been rewriting our SOPs. The documentation. The procedures for how we actually do tax and accounting work at the firm.
We've been in business 15 years. So there's a lot to get through.
What triggered it was hiring. We brought on a couple of new team members recently, one in tax and one on the controller side. When you bring people in, you see your own process through fresh eyes. You start asking whether the way you've always done it still holds up.
Here's the question I kept coming back to. If I were starting this company again today, how would I build the process now? Not the way we set it up 15 years ago. The right way to do it today.
So I set up a small task force. Just me and two others. We're going through it slowly. One by one, person by person, department by department.
We use different software internally to run the work efficiently. The vendor trainings on those tools are thorough, so we've been uploading the transcripts into a Claude project and building the playbook from there. Meticulously getting back into the weeds on each one.
I haven't been in that seat, that far into the details, in a long time. Let's face it, most CEOs avoid it. It's been fun and refreshing.
The approach was simple. I acted like I was a brand-new hire, right alongside the actual new hires.
I went through the software providers' trainings A to Z, and I asked the critical questions a kid straight out of college would ask. Why do we use this piece of tax software the way we do on a 1040? Why do we organize the document files like this? I challenged the assumptions on all of it.
That's the whole point of a beginner's mind. When you've done something the same way for years, you stop seeing it. Going back through the training start to finish is how you see it again. And here's the part that matters. I wasn't throwing the old process away. I was revising it.
The most interesting thing to come out of this wasn't a tax procedure. It was how we structure the day itself.
Is there a better way to run a workday than living in your inbox? That's the question I kept asking. So we built the answer into the framework. Not just the tasks. How we define what actually counts as a win.
That's the core of it. Everybody on the team should be able to name a win at the end of the day. An inbox is never empty. A win is something you can point to.
Out of that I built a best-practices framework for the job role of your day. Somebody right out of college can use it. Somebody with 20 years in can use it. Same target for both. Is it a little OCD? Sure. That's the point. It gives all of us something to aim at.
The roles inside it stay flexible. Some people start at 6am, some start later. It's a standard framework, not a rigid schedule. This is the operational version of something I've written before about deciding what deserves your attention. You decide what a win is, so the noise doesn't decide it for you.
The other thing driving this is consistency. Let's face it, it's the quiet problem every long-running firm has.
I've got people who've been with us 10 years, 15 years. When you're on a team that long, you develop your own way of doing things. Sometimes it's faster. Sometimes it's slower. Either way, it drifts. People come and go over time, and they aren't all doing the work the same way.
So we're documenting the smaller stuff too. The random one-off tasks that never made it into an SOP. That's what drives consistency across everybody, not just the big obvious processes.
Here's the part I didn't see coming. Call it the icing on the cake.
The buy-in went up. The whole culture of everybody participating got better, because we're doing the work together, and not trying to leave anybody behind. You can feel it. The culture is more upbeat. People are bought in.
I think a lot of my own clients are going through this same phase right now, and I'll be able to show them how I got through it. Otherwise it just sits there. The big elephant in the room for every CEO and entrepreneur who's been at this a while.
So here's the challenge. If you've been running your business long enough that nobody remembers why you do things the way you do, that's your signal. This week, pick one process and go through it like it's your first day.
