The One System That Stops the Questions and Double-Work: Build an Ops Manual That Actually Gets Used

This is the most important single piece you can build into your business that will help everything else flow better. having a single hub, a central location where all the brains of your business live, means it doesn't have to live in your brain. It means you are not relying on yourself or your team, are not relying on you to be the holder of all the knowledge. Welcome to the Differently Aligned podcast for neurodivergent business owners.

I'm Adina Levy. I'm an autistic, ADHDer, business coach, speech therapist, professional educator, and multiple business owner. I support neurodivergent business owners to create businesses that are sustainable, enjoyable, impactful, profitable, and burnout free. I provide safe spaces for you to share with like-minded community who get it, me included.

Everyone is welcome here. Whatever your neuro type, gender, race, any other intersections and special, fantastic, unique things that make you you, you are welcome here. This podcast is recorded on the Aboriginal lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people. I acknowledge the traditional owners, elders past and present, and I extend my respect to any First Nations people who are listening in.

hi folks. I am coming to you today about the one system that stops all the questions either that you ask yourself, like, how do we set that up? Or how did I message that client last time? Or questions from your staff to you.

The same things over and over. How do I deal with this when that thing happens? How do I log into that page? All of that, stops the double work, stops you rewriting and rewriting and rewriting emails, templates, redoing things, figuring things out again and again and again.

When you've already done it before. What's the solution? The solution is to build an ops manual that actually gets used. Ops manual being operations manual, and there are many other words.

You might have heard of SOPs, standard Operating Procedures playbook and Knowledge Base. I previously had a version that was called the Hub. I think it was the hub where you know, all the team knowledge, information, documents, links, processes, guidelines, it's all there in one place. If this feels boring to you, please stick around because I genuinely believe that this is the most important.

Single piece you can build into your business that will help everything else flow better. Promise I, I genuinely promise that. And the catch is, it's gotta be used, which is why I've put this in the title. Yesterday I had a one-on-one coaching session with a client, and it came up to the surface in so many ways, in so many of the areas that she was working on with her team that an operations manual was needed.

And some of the problems she was facing that will, I believe, be fixed with the operations manual are things like her team constantly coming to her with questions that they should know the answer to because they've dealt with it before, but they've forgotten. And whether you have a team or your solo, having a single hub, a central location where all the brains of your business live, means it doesn't have to live in your brain. It means you are not relying on yourself or your team, are not relying on you to be the holder of all the knowledge.

And you can offer a lot of consistency in your processes, which benefits you and your clients or customers. Now I'm recording a full webinar version of this with visuals and with assorted tools as well that will be available for my Neurodivergent Business Collective members. So if you are not a Neurodivergent Business Collective member, you are very welcome to become one. The link is in the show notes.

Go and check it out. On the podcast, I'm sharing the briefer version, the outline to get you ticking and thinking. And I'm also gonna let you know that if this is something you know you need in your business and you want support to build this and build everything in your business to be streamlined, supportive, and very AI forward, but in really useful nons scattered ways, I really encourage you to go quickly. Depends.

When you're listening, go and check out my differently aligned AI lab, which is my group coaching program. Half the spots are filled. At the moment I'm recording this and a couple of other spots we're in discussion, so there may only be two or four spots left. This program runs from February, 2026 till July 7th.

February 17th, Is our first date. Like I said, very limited spots. If you're listening, when this episode comes out, you've got just a few days left to grab early bird pricing. So the 4th of February is the end of early bird pricing.

Get in touch with me very quickly. Go and check out the info. You can book a call with me. If you wanna discuss whether the program's right for you, you can apply and I'll let you know if the program looks like a fit for the things that you share with me.

It's a big program. It has me walking alongside you, essentially, well in digital terms for the next six months with you and a very small group of other aligned neurodivergent business owners. And it's a very personalized but also collaborative way of learning how to use AI and systems and processes in your business across all business facets. And I am gonna support you to build things your way.

So anyway, all of that said, go and check out the info about the differently aligned AI lab. If you're listening after the fact, go and check it out anyway and you'll see what is available or when is it available Next, the link is in the show notes. So in this episode I'll be covering what are the benefits of an ops manual? Why should you have one at all?

What are the user requirements? What do your users need for this to be successful? Not just a little activity where you create something and put it in a drawer and never see it again. Build it.

So where are you gonna build it and how do you build it? The contents we're gonna talk about what should be inside or what can be inside it. And finding information. How does it actually get used?

How is it gonna be navigable? I really love that word, navigable. Neurodivergent Business Collective members have access to a template. That's my notion template for the ops manual.

And also a very simple version, a Google Docs version of like a template for an ops manual if you just wanna get started without any heavy tech or anything like that. Not that notion is heavy tech, but. You know, to get it as simple as possible and just get it done. So I offer both of those templates to my members.

So why should you even have an OPS manual? I I said a few things at the beginning to kind of lure you in to make sure that you are invested enough in this topic that you think, yeah, I might need that. There are many, many reasons why you will benefit from having an ops. Manual.

Some of them are more like sexy and delightful and like joy bringing, and some of them are more boring, But they're all gonna lead towards you having a stronger business and you releasing your brain from all the things that it's currently holding and you can spend more time either doing fun things for yourself. Or connecting with humans or doing, you know, the parts of your job that you really, really love, unless you do love this. But rather than continually running in circles, doing the same kind of admin operations tasks over and over again, operationalize it, put it in the manual, delegate it perhaps, and it just, it frees you up for so much more.

So the main benefits are consistency. Consistency in what happens within your team in what happens every time you do that process. Consistency for client and customer experience. That just saves a lot of energy and effort.

And also it's a really good client and customer experience when there is consistency. There's executive function support. Now, this is a huge one for neurodivergent folks, especially if you are in A DHD, but so many people have struggles with executive function. Now, executive function is.

That ability to plan and hold in your mind all the things that you are supposed to do and the steps and planning what's next or what's important? Prioritizing, basically managing yourself. I don't have brain space for extra layers of, thinking through how do I do this task that I've done 14 times, but I don't do it every day, so I can't really remember or where do I find that link? And by the time I've gone to find the link, I've clicked through and I've got distracted.

'cause I've seen seen all these other pages and that other email and I can't find it. And I've got a thousand tabs open, you know, figuratively and literally, and, oh, it's a lot. I'm just working myself up thinking about it. I want for you a work life that releases you of excess executive function burden.

I want for you a work life where you can easily find what you need. Your team can easily find what they need. You don't have to remember things that the system can and should remember for you. You don't have to go hunting for links.

You don't have to go and remember all the seven steps that you need to do every time you onboard a new client. Your system takes care of that, and the ops manual is the holder of the knowledge. It's the brains really. When you have an ops manual, it aids in delegation, so you can easily train new team members.

You can have the team members follow that same process procedure, and they can follow it as easily as you can because it's all documented in there. And what that means if you have a team, is less interruptions for you. Were with team members asking you questions of things you've already discussed, or things that are easily found in the OPS manual. Yay.

It's a central hub. It's very common these days that we have so many different apps and places digitally and probably physically for some people too, where all the things are, different apps, where different business functions happen, different apps that we need to interact with, different links, different everything. That can feel quite scattered, but when you have one central hub, one location that you know, this is the go-to place, I just need to go to this one location, this one link, and from there I can find exactly what I need.

It can then give you the shortcuts and handle all of those other links and directions and places that you need to go. You will hear throughout this that the process of building an ops manual is a work in progress always. And I don't want you to be listening to this and thinking, oh, I've gotta build it all myself. Even if you're solo, AI can help you by the way, but empowering your staff if you do have a team to co-create this with you is really, really awesome.

Especially if you have some sort of admin staff, especially if you have new staff. There's a really, really great. People to help and times that you can get help. So we'll talk more about the who and the building process as we go.

But essentially when you are empowering staff to be part of that documentation process, you can also give them some powers to suggest optimizations. They might be able to suggest to you, hang on, why are we doing this three different ways? Or what is that step for? Can we do it simpler?

And letting staff be involved in building the how of the business can be really awesome. 'cause then they kind of own that process and they feel that they've got a say in, you know, how things unfold. it's not uncommon for people or businesses to have an ops manual and then still find that it gets ignored. I used to have a team at the most, it was about 10 people and I actually had a shortcut in my phone that was saved so that I could write a chat message that said, have you checked the ops manual?

And very often they'd go, oops. And go and check it, and they'd find what they needed. It didn't answer every question, but the cool thing about it always being a work in progress is you get to then keep building it as you find questions that haven't been answered. And then you go and put the answer in there.

And so the whole point of it is it has to be. Easy to use, easy to access, easy to update, or it doesn't get used. And it's a little futile exercise that will die in a ditch, a digital ditch. Thinking about what is easy to create, meaning you have to be able to create it in the first place.

Now I've given a help for my members by providing templates, a Notion template and a Google Docs template. To just create the bones of it. If it's hard to use. For the users, whether it's you, whether it's team members, it's not gonna be a successful experience, so make sure that it's very easy for people to go and find what they need.

Users need to find clear benefits from the OPS manual. Users need to know that it's actually helping them. It helps them quickly get things done without extra effort. it helps 'em do higher quality work that they can feel confident that they've easily checked all the boxes in the checklist of all those steps, and they're done.

And it can help you feel. Like that executive functioning load is off your brain. You don't have to think and rethink or reinvent. You need to feel the ease and your team needs to feel the ease that comes from the actual usage of it.

You need to feel some quick joy, and your team needs to feel some quick joy where they go, oh yes, I found what I need, or That made my job easier. Now we're gonna talk about building your ops manual. So where are you gonna build it and how, what do you need to think about as you're building? The first thing is.

If you're looking at like what app or platform to house it on, there are so many options and I don't want you to get too overwhelmed searching and searching. If you've already started, then just think, can you use it better? Can you use what you've already started on better or do you need to kind of start fresh with a better platform to host this? Generally, I recommend using your existing systems, so for example.

Notion, Google, Microsoft are three systems or apps that you might already be using. In which case possibly look at sticking with what you are already mainly using in your business. But don't let that be your only deciding factor. I talk about notion a lot.

I love it. It's incredible. And. Very, very flexible.

Like I said, I provide a notion template for the OPS manual for my Neurodivergent Business Collective members. So you can get started with that. The huge benefit of notion is notion AI is integrated into your notion board. So, what I use, and I'll do a demo in the webinar for my Collective members to show how we use it in my team.

We can use Notion AI to actually help us draw the information out of the ops manual that we need, for example, to figure out what are the next steps in a process or what's the email I should send to somebody. And it also helps us input things into the ops manual. I've also previously had a Google site and I've also used a Google Doc before, so again, I provided a template for that. If you wanna go a bit more simple and just build it there, it's still very searchable And Gemini AI can do quite a lot inside Google as well.

Microsoft SharePoint is another option. If you are embedded in the Microsoft world, go and check it out. I will share some of the things you need to think about, when you are assessing, how will this system work? What do you need it to do?

We'll share that in a moment. I've mentioned already, you need to think about this as a work in progress. The operations manual will never be finished, and that's okay if you are a perfectionist, that could be hard to sit with, but really say that to yourself over and over, that's okay. And what that means is I don't want you to feel daunted as this is a huge task.

Oh my gosh, I'll never get to it. Start today. Literally start today and build from there. Just create the bones of it and go from there.

And every time you're doing a new thing and you think, oh, this could be easy. Next time, if I find it in the ops manual, go and add it to the ops manual, even a draft version. That's okay. Getting AI to help you build it is a really, really great idea.

Whether you use chat, GPT, co-pilot Notion, ai, whatever you're using for ai. There is so much efficiency you can have, for example, take an email that you sent a client, just delete their name paste it in and say, turn this into a template email with placeholders, and it can then create something with like funny little square brackets or something that will have like, date or client name and things like that, which means that becomes a template. It doesn't have the identifying things in there.

You can then go paste that into your ops manual. Happy days. That's just one way you can get AI to help you build it. But so, so much flexibility.

It does depend on the system you're using a little bit. And AI is gonna shift over time, but there's endless ways that you can get support to build this thing. Let's chat about what goes in the ops manual. So many things.

It's limitless and at the end of the day, it has to be basically what is useful for you and your team to do business. And if you really want, make it fun and delightful as well. Do whatever you need to make it enjoyable to use. But useful is first.

Some of the examples of what might go in your ops manual might include things like templates or scripts, processes, procedures, checklists, user guides, including screenshots it's very useful to have visuals as well. FAQs, links, anything that you can think of, anything that is gonna make your life easier. The links to me is a big one. I hate going searching for a link.

I've got things like spreadsheets here and there. I've got I don't know, template documents. i've got links for calendar bookings. I hate hunting for them.

And so the Ops manual now contains all of those shortcuts. And because mine is in Notion ai, I can say to notion ai, just quickly I can pull up a little chat and say what's the link for my 60 minute booking calendar, whatever. And it will just say Link and I. Good.

Great. Copy paste. So that's the usability of like getting the information out of the ops manual. The quality of the data you put in there is what is gonna make it easier or harder to get information out of there.

So use headings, use subheadings, use images, use whatever helps you and your team be able to understand how is this thing done? How can I make it easier for myself to do it in the future or for my team? So now we've got the ops manual constructed, or you know, the bones of it. You need to be able to navigate it easily.

So these are a few tips about how to think about the data structure and also how you actually do the act of getting information out of it. First, think about how to organize the data. You can just use quite simple ways to organize it. Things like having categories, or like I said, headings, subheadings having like chapter titles, if you're gonna use a Google Doc, it's very helpful to then navigate it and you can add a table of contents at the front.

I've got that in my template. Adding tags can be very useful, especially in a system like notion. You could do hashtags in a Google Doc, I'm sure I haven't tried it, but you can, you know, make up your own systems as well. And so for me, I've got tags that kind of what kind of process.

It is a little bit more specific. So the categories I use are a bit higher level and the tags I use are a little bit more specific. This is a view of at the bottom of my ops manual in the Notion Board that explains the different areas you might call 'em categories. We've got marketing, content speaking and events, sales, customer support, member and client management, paid content.

Finance and tech and systems, and I've color coded them in the way that makes sense for my brain. And we use that consistently. So, ops, manual entries are categorized by like their category slash area and also they get extra tags for more specifically like what type of thing it is. It is also really useful to have some checks, and what I mean by check is so it's easy for you or your team to check the quality of the information in there.

For example, having a status that might be like finalized, checked, or draft probably correct or draft very scrappy. That might mean you can't fully rely on that data and it will trigger you to go or somebody, the owner to go and check and make sure that that process is correct, but at least you've contained it somewhere and got that scrappy draft ready. But then also. Users know that that's not a final, complete thing to fully rely on until it's got the status of like confirmed or active or something like that.

It's really helpful to have last updated date. Something like Notion will track that automatically. If it's a Google Doc you're using, you will wanna add that manually, to each entry if you've updated it, update the last updated date. And then you can also see how old is that information.

It might be helpful to have owner, like who is in charge of that particular bit of knowledge or information. So who could team go and check with? Maybe it's you, but maybe it's somebody else. Maybe it's admin or somebody else like that.

Just a few final notes about finding information. So this is. On the user side, like you wanna go and get something out of that ops manual, what's gonna help it be a very useful tool, and this will help be your filter for how you're choosing the place where your ops manual will live. Generally speaking, cross device access is really, really useful.

So being able to access it on mobile, it may not be an essential for your team. It is for many teams, especially if you have. Staff who go out and about things like that. Very, very useful to be able to access the ops manual easily, at least to check things on the go.

Make sure it's available and visible on all different devices that you're on. And ideally, hopefully there should be some offline access just in case the internet falls over. Search. Oh my gosh.

Search is important. You need to be able to search the ops manual and easily find what you're looking for. So do some experiments as you're building the ops manual and see how are you presenting the information and how are you getting information out If search is slow or is showing irrelevant entries or just doesn't find what you need, maybe it means what you need is not in the OPS manual, but maybe it means that. The search or the data structure is not great.

So it's very important that users get great search experience. AI help can be very useful. Like I said, I know that Google Gemini is very useful. I know that notion AI is incredibly helpful for us and my team.

And the other part of that is, it's not just about adding entries into the ops manual, which yes, it can be useful for, but getting information back out of it. Of course, with all ai, it comes with a caveat. You have to check, so ask it to prove to you, like send you the link. Where did it find that and prove to you that it has found that information or the exact quote that you found, or still check it's working.

' cause it can. Go a little bit haywire. It just needs your help sometimes, but the better you have, your data and input structured, the better it's going to be able to do a job of getting that back out of there. So in a moment, I'm going to give a demo on the webinar version of this to my Neurodivergent Business Collective members just show you what the ops manual looks like on my side.

If you're not a Neurodivergent Business Collective member and you would like light touch support and tons of resources, templates, webinars, et cetera, please go and check the link in the show notes to the Neurodivergent Business Collective and you can find all about what's going on please do check that out. Go and join and you'll get the full version of this, all the templates, et cetera. And again, if you are interested in. The differently aligned AI lab.

That is where we can go deep together in a small group. We're gonna learn together, learn from each other. I'm gonna support you to build these systems in your business in really comprehensive, holistic ways that fit you, fit your team, fit your clients, and stop all that extra work, bring it all together and make your life a bit easier. That is what I'm doing in the differently aligned AI lab.

I hope you'll check it out if that's of interest to you. Now your next step is start building. Start building your ops manual today. Spend up to 15 minutes figuring out where are you going to build it.

The options I said might be a good starting point, but don't go further than that. Literally just start building, pick something and start. You can also migrate it over to a different platform if you need to eventually just build it, and don't put it off to another day. Literally get started and write your first entry as you go and do your work as you're doing your work today.

Think I might do this again. I might send this email again, or here's a process I've just followed that lived in my head. I'm gonna quickly screenshot it or just quickly write out the steps in the ops manual and get it started. Build the habit.

Of adding to it, updating it, and keep it scrappy if you need to, that's okay. Just get started and build that habit for you and your team to go to the ops manual and search and find what you need. Feel the joy of how easeful it can be when you've documented things. You know, even scrappy is better than nothing.

And make sure that you take all of that junk outta your brain. Your brain has created it. It doesn't need to hold it. Let the robots and the machines and the systems take care of it from here.

Thank you so, so much for listening. Have a beautiful day.