Scaling with SOPs (guest edition with Luna Tolunay)

If you’re the only one who knows how to do something in your business, that’s your sign to write it down today.

Bonjour à tous,

Last week, Luna Tolunay walked us through exactly how Fun Planners scaled from 300 events a year to over 1,200 — and from a 3,500 sq ft warehouse with two employees to 40,000 sq ft with 18+ full-time staff and 80 contractors. If you missed it, the recording’s right here.

Here are the four moves I’m not letting you scroll past.

The #1 rule: take yourself out of it. Luna’s test is brutally simple — if every client has to ask for vous by name to get a good outcome, you don’t have a business yet. Every position needs to be teachable, learnable, and executable by a trained employee.

You don’t have to write the SOP yourself. This is the move I want you to steal this week. Have every person on your team text or talk through what they actually do in a day. Doesn’t have to be polished. Drop all of it into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to turn it into an SOP. Luna calls AI ‘the most affordable, most reliable employee you’ll ever have.’

Processes flow end-to-end and trigger themselves. Luna’s team has SOPs for every stage — sales and quoting, contract handoffs, dispatch, pull and prep, delivery, post-event reports, repairs. Each step triggers the next person inside Goodshuffle Pro without someone pinging her.

Culture is part of the SOP, too. Uniforms on every job site. A weekly Friday memo recapping wins, lessons, and customer shout-outs. Quarterly half-day team trainings. A literal positivity board in the warehouse. Luna says 90% of Fun Planners’ new business comes from word of mouth — and she’s clear it’s not an accident. It’s a system.

Pick one and run with it,

Mallory Mullen

Le remue-ménage