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What happens to your business if you are unreachable for ten days?
Not on vacation with a laptop. Actually unreachable. Who knows how a refund gets processed, which email goes out after a booking, what you say when a prospect asks about price, and where the login lives? If the honest answer is "only me," you have a business that runs on tribal knowledge.
I went fully solo this year, after about 15 years of running my own business. That makes the question practical. The only backup for how I do things is what I have written down. This piece is about the cheapest way I know to get there: use AI as a writer, not as a robot employee.
Why does your first AI hire need to be a writer?
Because writing is where AI is already reliable, and documentation is where most small businesses are weakest.
Anthropic describes Claude 3.5 Sonnet as showing marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor and complex instructions, and as exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone.1 You do not need to believe the marketing line to see the point. Turning a messy transcript into a clean list of steps is a language task, and language models are built for language tasks.
Your people are already using AI without you
Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index found 75% of knowledge workers globally were using AI at work, and 78% of those AI users were bringing their own AI tools into the workplace.3 The same report found 60% of leaders worry their organization's leadership lacks a plan and vision for implementing AI.3
Read that as a small business owner. If your contractors are already using AI on your behalf, the question is not whether AI touches your work. It is whether you gave it your standards or left it to guess. An SOP is how you hand over your standards.
What counts as tribal knowledge?
Anything you do that someone else could not repeat from a standing start.
Where it hides
- Voice notes and Looms you recorded to explain something once
- Call recordings where you handle objections the same way every time
- DMs and email replies that are 80% identical week after week
- Checklists in your head: what to verify before a launch, what to say on a refund call
- Decisions you make by feel, such as which leads to ignore
What it costs you
It costs you speed, because every new contractor has to ask you. It costs you quality, because people improvise where you did not write a rule. And it costs you peace of mind, because the business has one point of failure and it is you.
How do you turn recordings and notes into an SOP?
You are not asking the model to invent a process. You are asking it to extract the process you already run.
- Pick one process. Start with the one that interrupts you most: onboarding, refunds, a weekly report, a launch checklist.
- Collect the raw material. Transcribe a Loom or call where you did the task, and add any notes, templates and screenshots that go with it.
- Ask for a structured draft. Tell the model to list the goal, the trigger, the steps in order, the decision points, the exceptions and the done condition.
- Mark the gaps. Ask it to list every place it had to guess or where the transcript was unclear. Those are the questions you answer.
- Edit in your own voice. Fix wording, add the rules you never said out loud, and delete anything you would not stand behind.
- Test it cold. Hand it to a contractor, or to yourself in a week, and watch where they stall.
- Store it once. One folder, one name, one owner, with a date for the next review.
What a good SOP contains
A usable SOP answers six questions: why this task exists, what triggers it, what to do in what order, what to do when something goes wrong, who to ask, and how to tell it is finished. If a draft cannot answer them, it is a summary, not a procedure.
Leila Hormozi made the case for spelling things out in a video she posted on May 2, 2024, about managing a large team:
Lack of clear expectations leads to assumptions, assumptions lead to unmet goals.
That is the whole argument for writing the SOP down. Every step you leave unwritten is a place where a contractor, or a model, fills the gap with a guess.
VideoLeila Hormozi
How I Managed 120 Employees at Age 24 (Without Losing My Mind)
She walks through four levels of expectations, from core values down to individual role KPIs, if you want the full structure.
What can Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Projects actually do for this?
A few specific things, and one limit.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet runs at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus, is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, and has a 200K context window, according to Anthropic.1 That is enough room to paste in several long transcripts at once. The Artifacts feature in Claude.ai shows documents next to the chat, so you can edit a draft SOP as you go.1
Claude Projects, announced on June 25, 2024 for Pro and Team customers, let you gather curated knowledge in one place. You can upload style guides, interview transcripts and past work, set custom instructions per project and work inside a 200K context window that Anthropic equates to a 500-page book.2
Why a Project fits SOP work
An SOP project can hold your voice guidelines, a template for the six questions above, and your finished SOPs. Each new draft starts from the same standards instead of from a blank chat. That consistency is the whole value, and it is the same reason you would want a human writer to have a style guide.
The limit
The model knows what you tell it. It does not know the exception you handle by feel unless you say so. Treat every draft as a first pass from a fast junior writer who has never worked in your business.
How do you know the SOP works?
You give it to someone who did not write it.
The contractor test
Hand the SOP to a contractor, or a friend, with no other context. Tell them to run the task and to stop and write down every time they have to guess. Each guess is a missing line. Fix it, then run it again.
Review on a schedule
Processes change. Put a review date on every SOP, and update it the next time the process breaks. A wrong SOP is worse than none because people trust it.
Documentation is not paperwork. It is the first time your business can run a day without you in the room.
When a process is written down, tested and owned, the handoffs stop depending on your memory, and handoffs are where revenue quietly leaks. Then you can start asking better questions: which steps can software do, which can a contractor do, and which can only you do. That is where automation and agents belong, in that order, after the writing.
Turning loose processes into something a business can run on is a big part of what I do.
Keep building.Ekai
Questions people ask
What is an SOP in a small business?
A standard operating procedure is a written, step-by-step description of how a recurring task is done, detailed enough that a new person can follow it without asking the owner.
Can AI write SOPs from call recordings or Looms?
Yes, from transcripts. Paste or upload the transcript and notes, ask the model to extract the steps, decision points and exceptions, then review and test the draft yourself. The model drafts and you verify.
What are Claude Projects?
Projects, announced by Anthropic on June 25, 2024 for Claude Pro and Team users, let you keep documents, custom instructions and chats together, with a 200K token context window per project.
Is it safe to put business documents into an AI tool?
Check the plan's data terms first and keep client-identifying or regulated information out of prompts. Anthropic states that data shared in Projects will not be used to train its models without explicit consent.
Sources
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