When I joined Bizeebay as a website developer there were no SOPs. Not for websites, not for SEO, not for anything the agency sold. Operations ran on email. Clients got no reports.
Nobody could say how long a website should take, what the steps were, or at which step we had to go back to the client. The founder was doing nearly all of it himself.
- Price per website
- $1k→$5k to $12k
- Monthly SEO retainer
- $2.5k→$4.5k
- How long clients stayed
- 3x longer
An SOP is a promise you can keep
I wrote one SOP per service. Each one lists the steps in order, how long each should take, and the exact points where the client has to give input or approve.
That last part turned out to matter most. Most delays were not us being slow. They were us waiting on a client who did not know we were waiting.
Then the system around it
- Projects moved out of email and into ClickUp.
- Our SEO partner worked inside the same system as the rest of the team.
- A client portal sent the reports and the updates, so clients could see where things stood without asking.
- On the build side, the team moved off templates and onto custom builds.
Once the work was written down, a new hire followed the SOP instead of shadowing whoever already knew the job.
What changed
Clients stayed about three times longer. The company could charge more for the same services: websites went from $1k to $5k and $12k builds, and SEO went from a $2.5k engagement to a $4.5k monthly retainer.
Delivery stopped depending on who was free that week. I moved from developer to project management to CTO along the way, and we sold the company in November 2025.
The order matters
It is tempting to hire first and let the new person figure it out. That just copies the chaos onto one more calendar. Write it down first. Then hire.