Mastering Business Flow, Episode #27: Why 90% of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are Garbage (The "Best Practice" Lie)

Listen Now: [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] | [YouTube]

Summary

Many service-based business owners are currently "volcano mulching" their growth by standardizing broken processes just because they are considered industry "best practices." This episode breaks that cycle by introducing the 1% Rule for marginal gains (a strategy used by the British cycling team to transform from a team without any world class wins to a winner of several Tour de France and Olympic competitions). By auditing your SOPs to ensure you can explain the "why" behind every step, making your workflow perfectly visible to spot the problems, and looking outside your industry bubble for cross-pollinated innovation, you can transition from a reactive reactive owner to a strategic CEO. The solution isn't adding more complexity; it’s about simplifying your systems to focus on what matters to finally 10x your business.

Stop the Overwhelm: One Step at a Time

If you're tired of the "invisible workflow," join my Strategic Growth Email Course. It is a zero-overwhelm, weekly guide delivered straight to your inbox. Each week, I provide one strategic, actionable item to help you move from "Firefighter" to "Conductor." Sign Up for the Free Weekly Growth Tip

Quick Win from this Episode: Identify one task this week and ask: "Should we even be doing this?" If you can't answer why based on results, stop doing it immediately. This is your first 1% improvement..

Exhaustive Timestamps

• [00:08] Playing by the rules: Why "industry standards" lead to stagnant growth. • [01:35] The Landscaper's Fallacy: What "volcano mulching" teaches us about bad business habits. • [02:40] Why documenting a broken process is just "standardizing" failure. • [04:46] The ROI of research: How I saved my own garden by questioning "common practice." • [05:59] Sir Dave Brailsford and the British Cycling Team: From zero to five Tour de France wins. • [07:11] SOPs as "Living Documents": Why your team must have the authority to change them. • [08:44] The 10x Secret: It’s not a massive strategy; it’s the accumulation of small improvements. • [09:25] Case Study: Mapping a cabinet company's pipeline to eliminate error rates and backlogs. • [10:15] Looking Outside your Industry: Learning efficiency from F1 Pit Crews and Hospital Curriculums. • [13:02] The "One Thing" Question: Gary Keller’s framework for radical simplification. • [14:40] Software Traps: Why more tools often equal more complications. • [15:10] The Power of Zapier and APIs: Automating the "hand-off" between systems.

Resource Hub

• Book: The One Thing by Gary Keller. • Automation Tools: Zapier and API integrations. • Podcasts Suggested: Freakonomics, TED Talks, Hidden Brain. • Methodologies: EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), Lean Manufacturing.

Related Episodes

• Episode 5: The Power of the One Thing: From Productivity Debt to the Joy of Done

• Episode 13: The "One Thing" Strategy That Outperforms Marketing (It's Not What You Think)

• Episode 14: The "Messy Middle" of Growth: Why I’m Choosing Quantity Over Quality (For Now)

• Episode 22: The truth about why 95% of small businesses fail to hit their goals (It’s not the economy)

• Episode 24: From Firefighter to CEO: The Power of Documented Systems

Key Takeaways

1. Question Everything: If you can't explain why a step exists, research it or delete it. Industry standards are often just "bad habits" in disguise.

2. Marginal Gains (The 1% Rule): 10x growth doesn't come from one magic bullet; it comes from making one small improvement every time you repeat a process.

3. Cross-Pollinate Ideas: Look at how F1 teams or hospitals handle complex operations to find innovative solutions your competitors are ignoring.

4. Living SOPs: Documentation shouldn't be a "Bible" that is never changed. It must be a living breathing document that the people using it can improve.

The Best Practice Lie: Why 90% of Your SOPs are Garbage

A Detailed Transcript by Cordes Lindow

The Danger of the "Invisible Workflow"

Have you been playing by the rules for years? You follow all the industry standards, you document your processes, and you’ve built exactly what the gurus told you to. So why has your growth been stagnant for three years? It’s because you are volcano mulching your business. You’re following traditions that everyone else in your industry does, but you’re actually suffocating your scale.

Today I’m going to show you why industry-standard SOPs are the reason you can’t 10x your results, and how a disgraced cycling team used the 1% Rule to go from zero to five Tour de France wins.

The Landscaper’s Fallacy

Let me start by telling you what I see in my neighborhood. It’s spring, and these large landscaping companies are out pruning. What I’ve noticed is that they love to pile the mulch about a foot high up against the tree trunk. We call it volcano mulching because it looks like a volcano around the base.

They do this because it’s the "industry standard." they just assume it is the way it is supposed to be done. But here’s the problem: when I saw my own trees struggling, I did the research. It turns out volcano mulching deprives the tree of oxygen and causes root rot. The landscapers keep doing it because "that’s how it's always been done," but they are literally killing the trees they are paid to protect.

We do the exact same thing in our businesses. We create SOPs based on what everyone else is doing, but we don't ask if those actions actually produce growth. We are suffocating our own scale with "best practices" that are actually bad habits.

The 3 Core Problems with SOPs (And How to Fix Them)

1. Standardizing a Broken Process

The biggest mistake I see is business owners rushing to document a process that is already inefficient. If you document a messy, manual, adrenaline-fueled workflow, all you’ve done is standardize failure. You’ve made it official that your team should keep doing things the hard way.

• The Fix: For every step of an SOP (and every SOP!), you must ask: "Should we even be doing this?" You and your team should be able to explain the "Why" behind every single step in your process. If a step exists simply because "that's how we've always done it," but you can't point to the specific result it produces, delete it. Don't document the "what" until you have validated the "why."

2. The "Bible" Mentality vs. The Visible 1%

Most people treat SOPs like a static Bible - something written once and never touched again. This creates a stagnant business where the workflow is hidden away in a folder. In reality, an SOP should be a living document that makes the work visible.

• The Fix: Use the Sir Dave Brailsford approach. He didn't just give the British Bicycle Team a manual; he obsessed over marginal gains. He painted the inside of the team truck white just so they could spot a tiny speck of dust that might degrade the bike mechanics. By making the environment, and the process, perfectly visible, you can see exactly where the problem areas are. When the workflow is visible to everyone, your team can spot the "dust" and make those 1% improvements every single week. If a process isn't evolving, it’s because it’s invisible.

3. The Industry Bubble (Lack of Cross-Pollination)

If you only look at your competitors, you will only ever be as good as they are. When we stay in our "industry bubble," we miss the breakthroughs.

• The Fix: Look at how a Formula One pit crew handles a tire change in seconds or how a hospital manages a surgery curriculum to prevent infection. They have solved efficiency problems that your industry hasn't even identified yet. To 10x, you don't need to copy your neighbor's SOP; you need the advantage borrowed from a completely different world.

The Visibility Framework: The Cabinet Company Case Study

I recently worked with a cabinet company that was drowning in backlogs and errors. Their workflow was "invisible"; it lived in silos of each person and their narrow focus of work..

We took their entire process and mapped it out visually. We looked at the "hand-offs", like the moment a lead becomes a quote, and a quote becomes a job. By simply making the workflow visible, we identified some steps that were completely unnecessary. We didn't need a massive strategy shift; we just needed to stop "volcano mulching" the data transfer. Next we found software to make the current status of all projects visible which enabled them a much faster turnaround on creating (and then winning) proposals, bringing more revenue into their pipeline.

Your 3 Action Steps to Unlocking 10x Growth

To move from a Reactive Owner to a Strategic CEO, I want you to take these three specific actions this week:

1. Audit for "Volcano Mulch": Identify one thing you do just because "everyone in the industry does it." Research the actual ROI. If you cannot explain the "why" for every step of that process, stop doing it immediately. You will never scale if you stay with what feels "comfortable" just because it's the standard.

2. Make One Process Visible: Pick a repetitive task that currently feels chaotic. Map it out on a whiteboard or a digital tool. Once it is visible, ask your team: "Where is the 'dust' in this process?" Find one tiny, 1% improvement to make it cleaner or faster.

3. Cross-Pollinate Your Perspective: Read a book or listen to a podcast from an industry totally unrelated to yours—psychology, sports science, or manufacturing. Ask yourself: "Is there one thing they do to manage their 'invisible workflow' that I can steal for my business?"

Stop Being the "Single Point of Failure"

If you are tired of running your business on pure adrenaline and a memory-bank that’s hitting its limit, it’s time to stop "volcano mulching" your operations. You deserve a business that scales because of your strategy, not your stamina.

Join the No-Cost Strategic Growth Email Course

This is a zero-overwhelm, step-by-step guide delivered one bite-sized insight at a time. I’ll help you identify the "invisible workflows" costing you 10+ hours a week and show you exactly how to prune the "garbage" SOPs that are suffocating your team.

The Goal: Move from the "Firefighter" to the "Strategic Conductor" and finally achieve the Double Win—winning at work and succeeding at life.

Click here to start your 1% improvements today.

A Note on my Process: This episode is 100% my own ideas and reflections, fueled by deep research. I use AI as my "production crew" and research assistant—it helps me organize complex data, generate visuals from my notes, and polish the final video. While I use AI to help synthesize information, I personally fact-check and verify every key data point to ensure accuracy. I use these tools to handle the heavy lifting of production so I can stay focused on sharing high-quality, authentic insights with you.