The promise of processes is that they’ll scale the business by scaling the founder.

You’ve written standard operating procedures to get yourself out of delivery. You’ve tried to give your team a clear path to stick to so you can let go of their hands.

And then you can just put more team members on the path and grow.

Except it’s not working as promised.

Agencies need standard operating procedures and there are things SOPs are great at, but they have limits, the clue is in the name.

  • Standard - great when things go as planned
  • Operating - good for doing, no need to think
  • Procedure - ideal when things go from start to finish in a linear fashion

You as a founder are not just a series of steps. Your skills actually can’t be written down. They’re a complex melody of experience, instinct, learned behaviours, and habits.

When you are at your best you are able to handle the non-standard.

You meet a new problem and you think quick and pull a new direction from somewhere (be grateful that you can do that, not everyone can).

You are not a SOP.

And if you were a SOP, if what you do could be written down in a diagram, well that’s no good either.

The value of your agency is in the hard problems. That’s what clients want you for. And the harder the problem, the bigger the value.

You’re going to come up against clients with multiple intertwined problems that don’t fall into a nice shape. You’re gonna find a client who has already done some research, already has some design.

Situations where you aren’t starting at the beginning, there isn’t an end and there’s no straight lines of progress in the middle.

There are a million different approaches. And while you can try and write a process for each one, the actual skill is in picking the right one at the right time. And doing that instinctively, on the fly, mid meeting.

If you could write instructions for that, well, why wouldn’t your client just sack you and follow those instructions?

The valuable problem-solving is the stuff that doesn’t fit into an SOP.

It’s not as easy as that.

You asked for this when you decided to solve the big, thorny conundrums out there.

If you’re going to scale, you need people who can pick the options like you do, people that know when to follow the path and when to go off track.

People who can see the outcome that your client wants, see the constraints they are operating under, and come up with a solution.

The non-standard, strategic, improviser.

Finding those people and coaching them is how you scale yourself.