In this Series…

I’m covering the 25 best ways to start documenting your systems and processes in a way that your team will love so your business can grow and scale.

Tip 10: Use your existing assets

There’s a good chance that your employees have already created a wide range of assets. Things like:

• Diagrams
• Numbered Lists
• Checklists
• Cheatsheets
• Guides & How-tos
• Resource guides
• Product/Pricing Lists
• One-sheets
• Etc.

There may be many that exist without you knowing about them. Ask around, as employees will often create extremely valuable assets to help make their job easier but never think of sharing them with others.

Rather than ignoring their existence, lean into the fact that assets already exist and, with the right tools, can be used to shorten the development time it takes to create great SOPs and process docs.

Embedding and the Source of Truth

A word of caution: Embed assets rather than exporting a copy and pasting a version in your SOPs and process docs.

This will ensure that the docs you've created automatically update when the source asset changes.

Without doing this, each change in the source asset forces all docs that leverage them to be instantly out of date — and causes one of the top reasons that your docs will be ignored and no longer used.

Using Best-in-class Tools

Many platforms promote themselves as an “all-in-one” solution. While they may offer some cross-functionality, they are rarely as powerful as a platform with a single focus.

If you drive by construction sites, you don’t see everyone using Swiss Army Knives to build a house. Instead, they have a whole set of tools specifically designed to do one thing well.

The platforms you use are your tools for building a business.

Likely, your teams have already used some of these tools to build your existing assets. For diagrams, it’s probably tools like Miro and Lucid. Why would you ignore those efforts and rebuild in a platform that’s not as good?

Combining the two, you can build assets with the best tools and embed those resources in your process docs and SOPs. This gives you the best of all worlds.

Summary

1. Use existing assets instead of recreating them
2. Embed assets whenever possible to maintain a source of truth
3. When creating new assets, use the best tools for the job