SOP 43 — Document, demonstrate, duplicate

1. What you are handing over, and to whom

The employees meant here are people in your business whom you have trained to get you leads. They get them the same way you got your own: they can buy advertising, they can make and post content, and they can do outreach either warm or cold. They can do any advertising you train them to do. More of them means more engaged leads and less of the work sitting on you.

Why this is worth the trouble beyond the leads themselves. Once a team is getting leads on your behalf, the business as a whole is worth more than it was, because it can be sold without you in it.

Set one owner beside another with identical trading figures — the same revenue and the same profit. Each of them might be doing two million dollars of income from the business. The first works eighty hours a week; the second works maybe ten hours a week, maybe twenty.

	The eighty-hour owner	The part-time owner
The belief	Nobody can do it like me	Other people can do it better than me
Income from the business	Two million dollars	Two million dollars
Net worth	The cash in the bank	The cash in the bank, plus probably ten million dollars or more in equity
What the business is	A high-paying job	A business worth ten million dollars and up

How the pair is read on this page. The pair is restated in shorthand as five million at the top line against two hundred thousand of profit for the first owner and two million for the second. Every other statement of the pair gives both owners the same two million of income, and a second reading gives both the same five million at the top line and the same two million of profit. Identical income is the reading carried here. This page does not settle which reading is right.

What staff cost you in time instead. Staff still take work, only less of it. A rule of thumb here: forty hours of work handed over cost four hours of managing. The trade can be made again one level up, when a manager takes over the managing for four hours a week of your time.

Where the people come from is not on this page. The way you advertise for staff mirrors the way you advertise for customers — asking your network, approaching strangers, posting openings publicly, and paying to promote a job listing, with referrals, communities, in-house recruiters and staffing firms as the four ways to get somebody else to do that for you. Recruiting as a marketing function is SOP 252. Everything below assumes the person is already hired.

2. The beliefs to swap out first

The handover fails on belief before it fails on method, so three beliefs are named and three replacements are given.

Drop this	Replace it with this
If you want it done right, do it yourself	If you want it done right, hand it to somebody who will spend all their time on it
Nobody can do it the way I do it	If I can do it, somebody else can do it better than me
I am irreplaceable	Everybody is replaceable, especially me

The argument offered for the third is that you are probably replaceable: a hundred percent of people are replaced every hundred years, and the species carries on regardless, because people learn from each other.

The time argument, which is the one that does the work. Even if you are better at the job, you will not spend a hundred percent of your time on it — you own the business, so you will spend something nearer a tenth. Somebody half as good as you, spending all of their time on it, will probably do the better job.

And the wager that follows it. If you still do not believe anybody is better than you at the job, the offer made is a bet that twenty of them are. Whether that is twenty people or twenty percent is not established on this page. You might ask about the genuinely rare technical specialist; the exception is granted without argument and without a test for recognizing one — if that is your case, the procedure simply is not addressed to you.

The mirror this sits inside. There is buying on both sides of a business. You acquire leads that turn into customers, and you acquire leads that turn into staff, and the second is the same skill as the first pointed at a different thing — you are advertising a job rather than whatever you sell. So as you scale one side you have to scale the other: tons of leads need tons of salespeople.

3. The three steps

Step one — document

Do the thing yourself and make a checklist of what you did.

The pro tip that goes with it. Record yourself doing the job, then build the checklist from what you captured. Building it live forces you to split your attention between doing the job and describing it; building it afterwards means you are observing what you actually did rather than what you think you do.

What each line must be. Write every line as an action someone can be seen doing, never as a result. 'Make contact' names something that happens; 'keep your eyes on the ball and hold your head still' names what to do so it happens. Wherever a line names a result, put the actions that produce it in its place. Where the job holds a choice, mark it, and write what to do on each branch. Breaking a whole process down this way, and testing the map on a learner, is SOP 279, sections 4 and 8.

Run the checklist on yourself first. In your next work block, do the job from the checklist alone, doing only what it says. If the work still comes out at your own best standard, you have a first draft.

The same steps can train software. One practice here: the written steps used to train new team members were the ones later handed to software to run a routine computer job. People did the work and wrote it down first; only then did the tool get it. For software, go one layer more detailed than for a person, down to each click and keystroke, and when it gets something wrong, correct the written steps so the mistake does not come back. Handing over a task this way, and checking it, is the automate step on SOP 221 — Move faster: run the five-step process, then commit, section 6.

Step two — demonstrate

You do the job in front of them, working through the checklist line by line. Each time the learner halts you, or needs you to go slower to follow, that is a checklist fix: make it there. What results is the second draft, the one they try.

Step three — duplicate

They do the job in front of you, from the same checklist. If the checklist is right, their result matches yours; if it is not, that shows up quickly. Keep correcting the checklist until it holds, then keep them on it until their work does too.

4. The cycle that closes the handover

The three steps are not the end of it. After the third step comes a loop:

They do the job in front of you.
You give them feedback.
Repeat.

Stated as a whole, the sequence has three moving parts: you bring the person in, you build the checklist and demonstrate against it, and then they demonstrate back while you feed corrections in.

The loop ends when they can give themselves the feedback. At that point they have mastered the skill, and that is the finishing line the cycle is aiming at — not a number of repetitions and not a period of time.

4.1 Rules for the training itself

A confused learner means a confusing instruction. If they get it wrong or lose the thread, the fault lies in the checklist. Any step you find yourself explaining is too complex or, more likely, several steps run together; split it. Needing a long explanation or several demonstrations is the same signal. A weak checklist can probably be forced to work while you train, but it falls apart once somebody else takes over the training.
Knowing is not the same as doing it well. A person may understand every step perfectly and still be some way from doing them well. Then the instructions are fine and nothing needs changing: what they need is more repetitions.
Judge the following before the result. Train people to follow the directions. If they follow them exactly and the result is still wrong, the directions are wrong, and that is the part you control. Praise them for following, and correct the checklist then and there.
Praise, do not take over, do not penalize. Tell them each time a step is done right, and praise them if they respond to praise. When they slip, leave the job in their hands: stop for a moment, give them room, and have them go again. Quick feedback makes people learn faster. Mistakes made while learning carry no penalty of any kind. A rule of thumb here: behavior you reward is behavior you see more of.
One correction at a time. Give a single piece of feedback, practice that step until it is right, and only then move to the next.
Retrain when performance dips. Whenever results fall well below normal, retrain the team. The cause is an important step dropped, often because nobody knew it mattered. Find it, and from then on reward everyone who does it.
The clarity test. Could someone new reach your results with nothing but the checklist and no help from you? That is the standard to write to.

5. What to screen for, and what to stop trying to teach

One of the key things found with this: give people only a short window to prove themselves. Jobs at the entry level of advertising are rarely complicated. What they demand is not really skill but a trait underneath it — grit, in the sense of being willing to keep going in the face of failure.

And that trait is the expensive one. Grit sometimes takes longer to train than the skill it sits under. So the screen runs the other way round from the obvious one: look for endurance and grit first, on the grounds that the other skills can be taught afterwards.

When somebody shows they do not have it, the position taken is to generally not spend the time trying to teach it — with the qualification that this is a limit of the teaching rather than a fact about the trait. Maybe ten years from now it will be teachable; it is not being taught now.

6. The cut rule

If you have trained somebody properly and they are still below expectations three weeks in, cut them.

Three weeks is the figure offered, and the condition attached to it is properly trained — the clock is measuring the person, not the handover, so it only reads true if §3 and §4 actually happened.

The reasons given are about the rest of the team rather than the individual. It keeps the culture of the team high. And it shows the team that you respect that culture, so that nobody is left feeling somebody else is freeloading.

7. The scope limit, stated inside the procedure itself

By and large this procedure is for frontline people who will get leads on your behalf, not for director-level positions and up. Hiring at that level is a different problem and is deliberately left out. What to do at that level — buy the skill rather than build it — is SOP 44.

8. What this page does not decide for you

These are gaps in the procedure, not omissions from this page.

How long a checklist should be. What each line must be is in section 3: an action someone can be seen doing.
How many feedback rounds to expect before somebody can self-correct. The finishing line is a capability, not a count.
What "below expectations" means. The three-week rule needs a standard to measure against and none is given.
How to test for grit before you hire. The trait is named as the thing to look for; no screen, question or exercise for finding it is given.
How many people one person can take through this at once.
What to do with somebody who is at expectations but not above them at three weeks.

9. The checklist

Question	The answer
Who runs this	You, or whoever already does the job being handed over
Who it is for	Frontline people who will get leads, by and large
Who it is not for	Director level and up
Step one	Document — make the checklist
The pro tip on step one	Record yourself, then build the checklist from what you captured
Each line on the checklist	An action someone can be seen doing, not a result; each choice marked, with what to do on each branch
Handing the job to software	The same steps, one layer more detailed, after people have done it; correct each mistake into the steps
Trying the checklist	Work your next block from it and nothing else; work at your best standard means a first draft
Step two	Demonstrate — you do it in front of them
Each stop in the demonstration	A checklist fix; the result is the second draft
A confused learner	Fix the instruction; split any step that needs explaining
Knowing against doing well	More repetitions, not new instructions
During training	Tell them each step done right, with praise if they respond to it; no take-over, no penalty; one correction at a time
When performance dips	Retrain; find the dropped step and reward it
The clarity test	Someone new gets your results from the checklist alone
Step three	Duplicate — they do it in front of you
What comes after the three steps	A feedback cycle
When the cycle ends	When they can give themselves feedback
What that signifies	They have mastered the skill
What to screen for	Grit, and endurance
Why that one	The skill can be taught; the trait sometimes takes longer to train than the skill
The cut rule	Below expectations three weeks in, after proper training
Why the cut rule exists	It keeps the team's culture high and stops anyone feeling others are freeloading
The belief to drop	Nobody can do it like me
The belief to adopt	If I can do it, somebody else can do it better than me
The time argument	They give it all their time; you would give it a tenth of yours
Number of feedback rounds to expect	Not established on this page
How to test for grit	Not established on this page
How much this lifts lead volume	This page gives no figure for the return on a trained employee

10. What this page does not cover

Costing the payroll behind a trained team, and the learning budget that keeps it experimenting, are on SOP 42. Deciding whether to train somebody or hire somebody who already has the skill is on SOP 44. Buying the skill from outside the business entirely is on SOP 45 and SOP 46. Recruiting as a marketing function is on SOP 252. The four methods you are handing over are on SOP 12, and the daily volume you are handing over with them is on SOP 52.

Pay, contracts and job titles are not covered on this page.