• What an SOP actually looks like on the page — real format, real examples from Matt's library, not a blank template
• How the sale triggers the process: when a client buys a productized offering at Other., the SOP kicks off the project template automatically
• Where to start when nothing is documented yet, and the most common mistakes to skip on the way in
• How to keep process documents alive — the discipline that separates a working SOP library from a folder nobody opens
• Process is the constraint on scaling past the founder — in most firms it still lives entirely in people's heads
• Undocumented delivery makes quality dependent on whoever happens to staff the project, not on the firm itself
• Buyers pay for firms that run on documented process — that's what makes the business transferable and the pricing defensible

Jeff Klaumann: Hey everybody, welcome to the ProServe Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. I’m Jeff Klaumann, I’m the president of Collective 54, and I’m your host. If you’re new to the show, here’s what we’re all about — helping you do three things: make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. Everything we record is built exclusively for boutique professional services firms. So if you’re in the expertise business, if you market, sell, and deliver expertise, this show is for you.

Everybody agrees that process is everything, and almost nobody finds it easy to sit down and actually write a process. We usually treat that as a documentation project — write it down, put it somewhere, and done. But writing it down is only half of it. The other half is what makes people use it. A procedure that is hard to follow will be ignored, including by founders who wrote it. Today we are not going to argue that process matters. We are going to open one up and talk about what separates a process from a process that is followed.

To do that, I have Matt Jenkins back on the show. Matt is a founding partner of Other, an integrated media agency out of Toronto and Ottawa. They run a real SOP library — every procedure lives in one system, SOP training is written into job descriptions, and completion gets reviewed like any other part of the job. Matt is a Collective 54 member, and he’s one of the few people I can ask to just dive into this topic. So, Matt, welcome back to the show. It’s great to have you on today. I’ve given everybody the headline, so in about a minute, why don’t you tell everyone who Other is and what your clients hire you to solve?

Matt Jenkins: Thanks, Jeff, appreciate it, and happy to be back on here again. Other — we’re an integrated media and creative agency, like you said, and we help companies to grow using paid media. We’ve been around for about 10 years, we’re based in Toronto, we have another office in Ottawa, and we’ve recently expanded to the U.S. as well, into the Miami market. We work with mid-market consumer services companies to run all of their paid media and help them grow. So we’re often using a mix of Google products, Meta products, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify — even linear television and radio — in an integrated fashion to help our clients drive leads, drive sales, and drive new customer acquisition. We do both the media and the creative side of that for our clients.

When they come to us, typically they’ve hit a growth plateau in what they’re doing. They’ve maxed out in the channels they’re spending in and are trying to figure out how to spend more on those channels, or they need to learn how to balance brand awareness and acquisition in a more balanced fashion. That’s what we do, that’s what they come to us for, and Collective 54 has been a really big part of helping our clients be able to do that.

Jeff Klaumann: Wonderful. Well, Matt, every founder listening has been told that process is everything, and most of them are still not documenting their processes. So take us back to the point where you could no longer run the firm on line of sight and heroics. What broke first?

Matt Jenkins: It’s funny you say that, because it’s actually one of the reasons we founded the firm in the first place — so it predates the firm even existing. I’ll give you a quick story. I worked at a very large organization, one of the largest advertising companies in the world. Back then they had maybe 80,000 employees globally, and there was so much knowledge in the company from all the individuals and subject matter experts. I would talk to one subject matter expert and they would have one way of doing things, another would have another way, and a third would have a third way — and all of them had their pros and cons.

And I was like, why don’t we just get all of you in the same room and battle it out for a bit, figure out all the pros, and bring that to market as methodology? We would be so much more effective if we were using the best of everybody rather than a little bit of a bunch of smart people’s work. It really came from a product quality place — we can deliver a lot more value to our clients if we do this. It wasn’t about process efficiency or standardization necessarily; it was about being effective at what we did.

So I started to bring some of these team members together, and what I learned is that they weren’t super open to changing how they worked. It was like trying to turn a massive ship and bring a bunch of people with you and say, I know you’ve been doing this this way for a long time — let’s take the best of it, combine it with 10 other people’s stuff, and we’re going to have the best process we’ve ever had. That wasn’t going to happen.

The conclusion I came to was that you can’t go to an 80,000-person company that doesn’t have a lot of established process, create process, roll it out, and have it be effective in any sort of reasonable timeline — or without a massive amount of friction. And so it was actually part of the genesis of wanting to create a company. If we had a blank slate, and we could create process right out of the gate, and we had unification from the start, then things would be so much easier and we could do it right from the beginning. That’s been a little bit of our DNA from the start.

Certainly at the beginning of the organization you’re a lot more scrappy — every new project is new, there’s not a lot of institutionalized knowledge, and you have to figure it out to a degree. You can’t come in and write process from day one and then start finding clients. It kind of has to work the other way around. But that was really the start of it — I wanted to start fresh and clean, somewhere we could create process that had a real impact on the organization.

Jeff Klaumann: Thanks for sharing the story. 80,000 people — that sounds like a change management nightmare.

Matt Jenkins: Especially when I was 3 years into my career.

Jeff Klaumann: 100%. Okay, so members already believe in process, but what they can’t necessarily picture is the document itself. So pick a procedure that your team actually uses — what’s in it, where does it live, and how is it used?

Matt Jenkins: Yeah. There’s back office process — which might touch on human resources, finance, legal, whatever — and then there’s the delivery side of the business. What’s probably more interesting here is the delivery side, though there’s a lot of winning to be done in the back office as well. An argument could be made that it might even be more valuable there.

What it started out with for us was moving towards productization, and making sure that what we were doing for clients was replicating over and over again. That meant narrowing the ideal client profile so clients were similar in size, similar in scope, and had similar needs — in order to actually standardize and productize things. It’s hard to make products that fit everybody, and so when you narrow down the ICP and you know exactly what problems clients are facing, you can start to develop some products.

So we started to productize the offering as a first step, and we productized around problems. We broadly identified four. Number one — their hair was on fire. They had a growth problem right now and needed somebody to help them tomorrow. We wanted to build a solution that moved really quickly to help clients. Number two — they had hit a plateau. They’d been doing X and Y for a couple of years, it had been good, but they couldn’t break through a ceiling. Number three — they needed to balance brand awareness with acquisition. They’d gone really far in one direction or the other and needed a better balance and a better way to measure it. And number four — they had hit the ceiling with what they felt they could do with media, and they needed more creativity injected into it and needed to move quickly.

So we started with these problems, informally surveyed our clients about them, and then built the products around the problems. Then came the SOPs — to actually deliver the products and make sure they’re the same each time.

What we did, actually working with another Collective 54 member named Tom, whose company is called Castle Firth — they were in almost production design, physical product production, production lines, getting physical goods made, really high-efficiency kind of stuff — we worked with him and brought that approach to our business. Literally, we went through and mapped out how we execute each thing right now. Every gory step — they send us an email saying they have a problem, we respond asking for this information, and on and on and on. Literally on post-it notes on the wall in our office. We’re talking hundreds of them.

Then we looked at all the people involved at every touchpoint, the time involved in those touchpoints, and the touch time — how long you actually hold work versus how long something actually takes to get done. For example, I send you an email, it takes me 5 minutes, but it takes you 24 hours to respond. It’s a simple task but takes 24 hours — how can we cut that down? We looked at these processes, tried to reduce the handoffs as much as possible, tried to reduce the touch time as much as possible, and came up with an entirely new version of the process that was 50–70% shorter, probably took 50–80% less resources, and the delivery for the client was significantly stronger.

It was literally just mapping out what you do right now in a painful amount of detail — every single little touch — and then looking at it and saying, where can we save time, effort, and energy? And then that led to the SOP. Here’s step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, all the way to the end. That was V1 for us. We built training around that, had a standardized format with a document — a box with an explanation on the left and a diagram or example on the right — and built all the deliverable templates to support them. We created 4 SOPs around those 4 different products and migrated the clients we had into those 4 products.

Jeff Klaumann: Two great lessons I want to put an exclamation point on. First and foremost is that you started with the client problem — one of the things that can happen when we document processes is we lose sight of what the objective actually is, and the objective was to solve your client’s problem. I love that you took that approach. And I agree wholeheartedly with the post-it note approach — I find it to be the most effective way to actually document because you can see things and see where bottlenecks are.

So somebody has to take that and write it down and actually capture it. Who did the authoring of the process once you went through the entire exercise? Who authored that V1?

Matt Jenkins: Yeah. We tried to bring some structure through it so that each of the products had an owner — someone responsible for the SOP — and they would also be the person who authored it. Coming out of the work where we had mapped everything out, part of their responsibility was to sit down and write out the details. We’re going back to probably 2020, something like that — maybe 5 or 6 years ago when we did this.

So we would have somebody actually just write it down, pull the document together, publish it on our intranet so it was available to everybody, and we built some early training around each of them with testing questions and comprehension checks. That was the first iteration — literally somebody sitting down, hands on keyboards, banging out the instructions for how to get the thing done. And they would be responsible for building all the deliverable templates that went alongside all of it as well.

Jeff Klaumann: True ownership. So a procedure that nobody opens is really just an administrative exercise. At Other, what makes people actually follow it, and what happens when somebody does not?

Matt Jenkins: This is definitely one of the more challenging parts, and probably the one we’ve spent the most time on in our V2 — the modernization of what we’ve done. When we went back to do more of this — V2s of these products and some new stuff created in the last couple of years — what we actually did when we got to the stage of writing them down was, instead of actually writing them down, a couple of us would put on some headphones, get a document open, stand at the wall, and voice dictate the process — every single step — out loud into a document. Just raw. We would just speak it out. It would take maybe 10 or 15 minutes to go from one end of the wall to the other and speak out every single step.

It was so much faster to voice dictate. You could think on the fly, you could add more color, it was more interesting, you could add rationale — there was so much flavor that came from saying it out loud versus typing it. It also forced you to think it through more and to clarify things. So we took that raw document and put it into Claude — we primarily use Claude here. We did a little bit of research around what a great standard operating procedure actually looks like: everything includes a handoff, everything includes a responsibility, they all include a RACI matrix in terms of who’s responsible for what, there’s a briefing on what each role in the process is responsible for at the front of the SOP. So we would take that voice dictation, give it to Claude alongside the instructions — or put it in a project we call our SOP builder — upload the voice dictation, and it would generate a beautiful standard operating procedure for us. Long form, detailed, every step, every owner, every handoff, how long everything takes, all of that.

That leveled up the quality of the SOPs exponentially. But the new challenge it brought on is that they were much longer and much more detailed, which makes it even harder for people to read them — and we were already struggling with getting people to read them, comprehend them, and spend time on them. So then we said, what makes great training material? The path is not just to put this really long SOP in front of people and ask them to read it.

What does academic learning look like? We did some research around what makes long-form content interesting, how you can break things down and make them more consumable. Again, we built a Claude project informed by basically MBA-level research on what makes good learning, and we would plug the SOP into the training generator. It would generate interesting content that actually quizzed people on their comprehension, told stories, had case studies, all of that. It took a lot of the dryness out of the SOP and made it interesting. It made it into much shorter bites that were way more easy to consume, added all the testing alongside it, and then we put that into our learning management system. It was a significantly upgraded version of the training that people find much more interesting — and it’s also way shorter. Way, way shorter. That’s the evolution — you can see how they waterfall into each other, and that’s been how we’ve upgraded it over the last couple of years as AI has become such a part of the operating system.

Jeff Klaumann: Thanks for the walkthrough. I appreciate the evolution and how it’s not one and done — it’s continued to evolve. So every procedure at Other has a companion sitting in your project management tool. What happens when a new project starts?

Matt Jenkins: Yeah. There are two more tools we’ve built that are derivative of the SOPs. You could almost look at the SOP like the nucleus, and other things have sprung out of it. The training is one of them.

The second is we use Asana internally for project management. Every time we have a new SOP, again we use AI to generate a project template for that SOP. When a new project is initiated, you just click new project, select the type of product and the SOP we’re running, and it populates everything right away — the roles, the tasks, the instructions linking to the specific detailed steps from that SOP, the timing, all the dependencies — so that people understand what has to happen, when, how, and how long it’s going to take. And then they can manage through that.

The other thing I found really helpful is we set up another Claude project per standard operating procedure that operates like an expert on that SOP. I found it difficult — people would miss the handoff between step 17 and step 18, and then they’d have to go find the SOP document, scroll through it to figure out what that looked like, and go back. So we just educated some Claude projects on the SOPs and all their content. They have access to the long-form version of the SOP and are incredibly intelligent — you can just ask them questions. You could say, who does the handoff between step 17 and step 18, and it will give you a nice concise answer with the context as to why.

That’s really improved the usability of the SOPs — people don’t have to go digging somewhere in the drive to find a long document. We’ve maintained the integrity of a very detailed and rigorous SOP, but really enhanced the accessibility of the content to make it much better and more consumable for people.

Jeff Klaumann: Yeah, it’s a great tip, because at some point you’ve done it enough times that the muscle memory’s starting to kick in, but you can’t remember — to your point — that step 17 to 18. I love that you’ve made that easy for the team. So, last question, and then we’ll wrap up. If a member’s listening to the show today and they need to start their own SOP library, where should they start?

Matt Jenkins: The first piece of advice I have is that it doesn’t get done off the side of your desk — it has to have dedicated time. The way we’ve worked through these is what we call rapid improvement events. These were an idea that came from Tom from Castle Firth, and he helped us structure up the first couple. We will dedicate somewhere between 3 to 5 entire business days in a row to building process. We’ll grab maybe 6 to 8 people from the organization, ask them to clear their schedules for that week, and then go pick 6 to 10 areas of the business that we think need help on the process side. We go through the mapping exercise, the refinement of the process, the dictation, the SOP, the Claude project, the Asana templates — all of that. That’s where the main jump has been — in dedicating time to do it. The billable work always comes first, but it can be short-sighted, because the billable work never gets better if you don’t work on the process for how the sausage gets made.

When it comes to prioritization, it doesn’t take a lot of tools or investment other than time. We typically look at our resource expense — where are we spending a lot of time, and how can we make that faster? The other place we spend a lot of time looking is the feedback from our clients — where do they think we’re weak, where do they think we’re strong, and what else would they like to see from us? We build around that. Typically if we do one of those rapid improvement events, there’d be maybe 4 or 5 client-driven ideas in there, and then a couple of our own — maybe back office related. That allows us to make sure the development of process is connected to commercial outcomes in the company. It’s not just creating red tape — it’s making sure we’re actually creating value for our clients, and ultimately for our organization. So, allocate the time first, connect it back to real commercial outcomes second, and it’ll be well worth your while.

Jeff Klaumann: Great guidance. Well, Matt, members asked for this topic by name, and you were the one who dove in to help — and that’s a real contribution to the Collective. Matt, thank you so much for joining me today.

Matt Jenkins: My pleasure, Jeff. Thanks for hearing me out on it.

Jeff Klaumann: Absolutely. So members, Matt Jenkins will be joining us for our private Q&A session, where you can ask your questions of him directly. And then I have two calls to action for you. First, if you’re not a member and you want to keep the conversation going, head over to Collective54.com and start a conversation with our AI agent. Second, Collective 54 founder Greg Alexander has a new book coming out soon — it’s called The AI Native Boutique Firm: How Founders Build More Valuable Firms When Services Become Software. It is now available for pre-order on Amazon, so check it out. Thanks for listening. Until next time, I wish you the best of luck as you grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.

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