Standard operating procedures.

Even saying it out loud sounds like something that belongs in a corporate office, not a wedding planning business built on creativity and relationships.

But here’s what I’ve learned after years of running Verve Event Co.: the planners who have the most freedom in their businesses — the ones who can step away, bring on team members, take on more complex work, and still deliver a consistent, elevated experience — almost always have one thing in common.

Their processes are documented.

Today we’re doing a deep dive on standard operating procedures — what they actually are, why they matter more than you might realize, and how to build them in a way that makes sense to new team members.

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Welcome back to The Planner’s Edit. I’m Desirée Adams — wedding planner, designer, business owner, creative strategist, and your guide to building a more intentional, elevated, and sustainable planning business.

Last week we kicked off our systems and organization issue with a roundup of the five tools I use for wedding inquiry management — the inquiry form, Dubsado, email templates, the scheduler, and Fathom.

Because last week was about the tools. This week is about the layer underneath them.

Tools only work consistently when there’s a documented process guiding how they’re used. And that’s exactly what we’re getting into today — standard operating procedures.

I first want to start with defining what an SOP actually is.

1: What an SOP Actually Is — and Isn’t

Let’s start by taking the intimidation out of the term.

A standard operating procedure is not a policy document. It’s not a corporate manual. Or something that requires a dedicated software system or a formal review process.

An SOP is simply a documented, step-by-step record of how you do what you do.

That’s it.

It’s the answer to the question: if I had to hand this task to someone else today, could I give them something that would allow them to do it the way I would do it? If the answer is no — if the process lives entirely in your head — that’s a gap worth closing.

The Difference Between Knowing and Documenting

Most experienced planners have incredibly refined processes. They know exactly how they onboard a new client, how they build a production timeline, how they communicate with vendors in the weeks leading up to a wedding. They’ve done it enough times that it feels like second nature.

But, just because something is second nature isn’t the same as having it written out.  When a process only exists in your head, it can only be executed by you.

That’s fine when you’re a solo planner with a small calendar. But as your business grows, you’re bringing on day-of assistants, outsourcing tasks to a virtual assistant, tackling more complex events, or you just want to be able to step away without everything depending on your presence — not having documented processes become a real liability. You won’t be able to grow sustainably if you are hand-holding a new hire through every process.

An SOP turns institutional knowledge into transferable knowledge. It takes what you know and how you want things to be done and makes it available to everyone on your team.

What an SOP Looks Like in Practice

Now, before you get too into your head worrying about what an SOP is going to look like in practice in your business, remember it doesn’t have to be anything formal. 

An SOP can be a written list of steps, a recorded walkthrough, a checklist with context, or a combination of all three.

What matters is that it’s specific enough to follow without guessing, and complete enough that someone unfamiliar with your process could execute it without having to ask you for help at every step.

Think of it as the difference between telling someone “handle the vendor communication” and giving them a document that says: 

1. here’s what to send, 
2. when to send it, 
3. what information to include, 
4. what to do if you don’t hear back, 
5. and how to document the response.

 One of those sets someone up to succeed. The other sets everyone up for frustration.

Once you understand what an SOP actually is, the next question is usually: when do I need them? And my answer to that is almost always the same — sooner than you think.

2: Why You Should Have SOPs Created Before You Hire Anyone

This is something I feel strongly about, and I’ve written about it in this guide to growing your team. One of the first things I tell planners who are thinking about hiring is this: before you bring anyone onto your team, make sure your processes are written down and repeatable.

Because here’s what happens when you don’t.

1. Hiring Without SOPs Creates More Work, Not Less

The reason most planners want to hire is to get time back. To offload tasks that are consuming their energy. Or create space for the parts of the work they’re best at.

But if your processes aren’t documented before you bring someone on, onboarding becomes an indefinite project. You find yourself explaining the same things repeatedly. You start to notice things being done differently than you would do them.

Over time, you end up spending more time managing than you saved by hiring. And that’s an extremely frustrating place to be, especially when you’re already feeling stretched thin.

SOPs solve this problem before it starts. When your processes are documented, onboarding has structure. Your new team member has something to reference. And you’re not the only source of information for how things get done.

2. SOPs Protect Your Client Experience

At the full-service level, consistency isn’t optional. Your clients are making a significant investment — financially and emotionally — and the experience they receive needs to reflect that at every touchpoint, regardless of who on your team is handling a given task.

When processes are documented, that consistency is possible. When they’re not, the experience varies depending on who’s handling the task, how busy everyone is, and whether anyone remembered to do the thing that’s supposed to happen at this stage.

Your clients shouldn’t be able to feel the difference between a week when you’re fully present and a week when you’re leaving it in the hands of someone else. SOPs are what makes that possible.

3. SOPs Also Protect You

There’s a personal dimension to this too that doesn’t get talked about enough.

When your business depends entirely on knowledge that lives in your head, you can never fully step away from it. Vacations become partial. Maternity leave feels impossible. A sick day creates a backlog. Every time you’re not available, your business loses something.

Documented processes give your business the ability to function without you being present for every moment.

Systems and structure create real freedom. And it all starts with writing things down.

Now that you understand what SOPs are and why they matter before you hire. The next question I hear most often is: where do I actually start? I completely understand the idea of documenting every process in your business can feel paralyzing. So let’s narrow it down.

3: Where to Start When Building Your SOPs

Remember, SOPs are the step-by-step instructions for how you run your business. From how you onboard a client to what happens on wedding day, your processes need to be written down and repeatable. Your team can’t read your mind and they shouldn’t have to.

That framing is useful because it tells you exactly where to start: the processes that are most repeated, most visible to clients, and most likely to create problems if they’re done inconsistently.

1. Start With Your Client-Facing Processes

The highest-stakes processes in your business are the ones your clients experience directly. These are the ones worth documenting first.

Your inquiry process — from the moment a form is submitted to the moment someone is booked — is one of the most important SOPs you can build. We talked last week about the tools involved: Dubsado, email templates, a scheduler. An SOP takes those tools and outlines exactly how they work together, step by step, so that the process runs the same way every time regardless of who is managing it.

Your client onboarding process is another critical one.

• What happens after someone signs a contract and pays a deposit?
• What do they receive, when, and in what order?
• What does the first call look like?
• What information do you need from them before anything else moves forward? All of that should be written down.

2. Then Move to Your Internal Processes

Once your client-facing processes are documented, turn to the internal ones — the things that happen behind the scenes that directly affect the client experience even if they never see them.

This could include: 

• Your vendor communication process. 
• Your production timeline workflow. 
• Your wedding day checklist and setup sequence. 
• Your post-wedding offboarding and review request process.

These are the exact processes worth documenting because they’re the ones most likely to break down when someone else is executing them for the first time.

3. A Simple Way to Prioritize

If you’re not sure where to start, ask yourself two questions.

1. First: what would go wrong if I couldn’t be reached tomorrow? The answer tells you which processes are most dependent on your personal presence, and therefore most urgently need documentation.
2. Second: what tasks am I doing repeatedly that I could hand off if someone else knew how to do them? The answer tells you where documentation would create the most immediate time back.

Start there. You don’t need to document everything all at once.

Knowing where to start is half the battle. The other half is actually sitting down and building them — which is where most planners stall. So let me show you how I actually do it. Trust me, it’s a lot simpler than you might be imagining.

4: How to Actually Build Your SOPs

Here’s the thing about building SOPs that no one tells you: the hardest part isn’t the documenting. It’s making yourself stop and do it in the first place.

When you’re already busy, sitting down to write out a process that you know how to do feels like the least urgent thing on your to-do list. There’s always a client email to answer, a timeline to build, a vendor to follow up with.

But every time you skip it, you’re choosing short-term efficiency over long-term freedom. And at some point, that trade stops being worth it.

So here’s how I approach it in a way that makes it as frictionless as possible.

Use Loom to Record First, Write Second

The tool that changed how I build SOPs is Loom. And I talked about it in Episode 150 of Ask the Planner — it’s one of my all time favorite tools.

Loom is a screen recording tool that lets you record yourself walking through a process in real time, narrating what you’re doing and why as you do it. Instead of sitting down to write an SOP from scratch, you can actually complete the task while recording yourself doing it.

That recording becomes the foundation of your SOP. Someone on your team can watch it and follow along immediately. After you’ve recorded your Loom SOP, throw the transcript into your AI of choice and have it write a step by step process. 

The result is an SOP that has both a video component — which is incredibly useful for visual, step-by-step tasks — and a written component for quick reference. And it only took you the time it takes to do the task once, not an entire afternoon.

Build SOPs as You Go, Not All at Once

The other mindset shift that makes SOP building sustainable is this: you do not have to do it all at once.

The most effective approach I’ve found is to build SOPs as the tasks come up naturally in your workflow. The next time you onboard a client, record yourself doing it. The next time you build a production timeline, record the process. Or the next time you send a vendor communication sequence, write out the steps.

Over the course of a season, you’ll have built a library of documented processes just by recording what you were already doing. That’s a much more manageable approach than trying to block off a weekend and document everything from memory.

Keep Them Accessible and Updated Often

An SOP that lives in a folder no one can find isn’t doing much for anyone. Where you store your SOPs matters.

We keep ours in a combination of Loom — for the recorded walkthroughs — and Asana, where the written steps are attached to the relevant workflows. The goal is that anyone on my team can find what they need without having to ask me.

And because processes evolve, your SOPs should too. Build in the habit of reviewing and updating them periodically — especially after a season where something didn’t go the way it should have. Those moments are often the most useful prompts for improving a documented process. Seriously put a reminder in your calendar every 3-6 months to update any processes that might have changed.

Building SOPs is the work. But what they make possible is the point. The real value of a well-documented process isn’t just efficiency. It’s what it allows you to do next.

5: Using SOPs to Train, Delegate, and Scale

Let’s talk about what documented processes actually unlock in your wedding business. Finally, this is where all of the work pays off.

1. Training Becomes Structured, Not Reactive

When your processes are documented, onboarding a new team member stops being an improvised, reactive experience and becomes a structured one.

Instead of explaining things as they come up — which puts the burden of knowledge entirely on you and creates inconsistency depending on what questions get asked — you have a library of SOPs that a new team member can work through before they ever shadow their first event.

They arrive at their first walkthrough already knowing your process for vendor communication. They’re already familiar with your production timeline format. They clearly understand what the client experience is supposed to look and feel like at each stage.

That’s a fundamentally different onboarding experience — for them and for you.

2. Delegation Becomes Possible Without Constant Oversight

One of the most common patterns I see with planners who have team members but still feel stretched is this: they’ve delegated tasks without delegating the process.

They’ve handed off the vendor emails — but not the sequence for how those emails should go out, in what order, with what information. They’ve asked someone to manage client communication, but without a clear SOP for what that communication should sound like and when it should happen.

When delegation happens without documentation, the planner still has to be available to answer questions, correct mistakes, and fill in the gaps. That’s not real delegation. That’s just sharing the workload while keeping all the responsibility.

Real delegation requires that the person you’re delegating to has everything they need to execute independently. SOPs are what make that possible.

3. Scaling Becomes Intentional, Not Chaotic

And finally let’s talk about the connection between documented processes and sustainable growth.

When your business is built on processes that only you know how to execute, your growth is limited by your own capacity. Every new client, every additional wedding, every expansion of your services adds more to your plate — because you’re still the only person who can do it the way it’s supposed to be done.

When your processes are documented, that ceiling lifts. You can bring on new team members who execute at your standard. You can take on more complex work knowing the foundation is in place to support it. Finally, you can step back from day-to-day execution and focus on the parts of your business that actually require your leadership.

That’s what documented processes make possible. Not just efficiency — freedom.

BEFORE WE CLOSE

I want to leave you with this: The goal of building SOPs isn’t perfection. It’s about being repeatable.

A documented process doesn’t have to be flawless on the first draft. It just has to be clear enough that someone else can follow it. And clear enough that you can come back to it, improve it, and hand it off with confidence the next time.

Repeatability is what gives your business stability. It’s what allows you to grow without everything depending on your constant presence. It’s what makes it possible to take a real vacation, bring on the right team member, or step into more complex work — without the looming anxiety that something will fall apart if you’re not watching.

If today’s episode made you want to start somewhere, start small. Pick one process — ideally the next one you’re doing this week — open Loom, record yourself walking through it, and save it somewhere your team can find it.

There’s your first SOP! Everything else builds from there.

Once you’ve made your first SOP, come find me on Instagram at @plannersedit and let me know which process you started with. I would love to hear!

Let’s Create SOPs for Your Wedding Business

If today’s episode made you realize that the freedom you’re looking for in your business — the ability to delegate, to scale, and step back without everything depending on you — starts with the structure underneath it, that’s exactly why I built my program Booked for Full Service.

Inside, we don’t just talk about positioning and messaging. We build the operational foundation that makes it possible to lead a full-service wedding business at a high level, including the process documentation, the systems, and the structure that allows you to deliver a consistent, elevated client experience no matter what’s happening behind the scenes.

Enrollment is currently closed, but you can join the waitlist at desireeadams.co/education to be the first to know when spots open again.

Thank you, as always, for listening to The Planner’s Edit.

If today’s episode was useful, share it with a planner who’s thinking about growing their team — or leave a quick review to help more creatives find the show.

Until next time, I’m Desirée Adams — and this is The Planner’s Edit.