Writing SOPs for a Peptide Business

An SOP is simply a written, repeatable description of how a task gets done — written specifically enough that someone unfamiliar with the business could follow it without needing to ask the founder for clarification at every step. Most founders skip this until they're forced to, usually right when they're trying to hire their first operational employee and discover nothing is written down.

Start With the Most-Repeated Tasks

Not every process needs an SOP on day one. The highest-value starting point is whatever task happens most frequently and most identically each time — order fulfillment steps, common support responses, or routine supplier communication are usually the best first candidates.

Write It While You're Doing It

The easiest way to produce an accurate SOP is to write it down the next time you do the task yourself, capturing the actual steps in order rather than trying to reconstruct them from memory afterward. This produces a far more usable document than attempting to write SOPs in the abstract.

SOPs Are What Make Hiring Possible

Without documented processes, every new hire requires extensive one-on-one training and the founder remains a bottleneck indefinitely. With SOPs in place, a new hire can follow the documented process with much less hand-holding — which is precisely what makes scaling past founder-led operations possible at all.