AI agents and employees can’t read your mind. Write every task down as a simple SOP: the job, the steps, what done looks like, the guardrails, and when to ask for help. Then hand that same SOP to your AI agent AND your team.
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AI Exposed the Real Problem. It Was Me.
Most business owners have never written an SOP in their life. I hadn’t either. Everything was trapped in my head.
Here’s the thing about AI agents and employees. Neither one can read your mind. You have to explain every ounce of the job: the steps, how you want it done, when you want it done, and why. Do that for any task and congratulations, you just wrote your first SOP.
If you’re new here, I’m Griffin Thomas. I own a pest control company in the Dallas, Texas area. We’ve been in business six years, and I document the whole journey. The good, the bad, the ugly.
From about year two to year four we were stuck around $150,000 to a little over $200,000 a year. Then I made my first true full time hire, and we went from just under $180,000 in sales that year to right around $300,000 the next. For 2026 we’re on pace for at least $370,000, maybe $425,000 to $450,000.
Growth is great. But growing without writing anything down almost buried me in phone calls.
Here’s how I write SOPs for my Grok Bot agents, the real examples I use every week, and how those same instructions turn into training for my team. Stick around for the last section, because that’s where the real lesson is.
My Phone Rang Over 37 Times
You don’t have a team problem. More than likely, you have a documentation problem.
As we went from one technician to two technicians with a CSR, my phone rang 10 to 20 times a day. At one point I had over 37 phone calls.
Some of those were legit. I needed to be called. But most were what a lot of people call little calls. How do I handle this callback? What do I tell this customer? Remind me again, how do I fill out this service agreement? And most of all, what do we charge for this?
That wasn’t my team’s fault. That was MY fault. The answers were trapped in my head, so the only way to get them was to call or text me.
For a couple weeks it felt like all I did was answer 20 to 40 calls a day. And I kept making the same excuse. Nothing’s wrong with the processes. They just don’t have experience in this industry. Give them a couple months to catch up.
After two to four weeks of slowly pumping out an SOP here and there, I hit a breaking point. Dude, I’m getting nothing done. What’s the point of hiring people if all you’re doing is micromanaging every little decision in the business?
If that sounds like you, here’s the good news. You just never had a real reason to fix it. AI agents give you one.
What an SOP Actually Is: The 5 Part SOP
A lazy input gets you a lousy output.
If you haven’t hired anybody yet, go play around with a real autonomous AI agent like Grok Bot or ChatGPT. You’ll figure that out really quick.
Say you’re running a Google or Facebook ad campaign and you just tell the agent “check my ads.” Okay. For what? A lot of times it won’t even ask. It pulls up a bunch of random stuff, and then you’re mad at it when you gave it no direction.
The agent doesn’t know your business. It only knows the context you gave it going into the task. So explain the job like you’re talking to a brand new hire who has no experience doing anything in your business.
Every SOP I write answers five questions:
- The job. What is the task?
- The steps. Step zero all the way to completion.
- The definition of done. What does done actually look like?
- The guardrails. What not to do and what not to touch.
- When to ask. When to stop and ask for guidance.
That’s it. That’s an SOP in the simplest terms possible.
Most owners hear SOP and picture that big old nasty binder. The 40, 50, 200 page company handbook nobody ever reads. That’s corporate jargon. An SOP is just writing down exactly how you expect something to be done every single time, clear enough that nobody has to call you every moment of the day.
Write the process down, with pen and paper if you have to, THEN hand it to the agent.
One Job, a Schedule, and a Reason
Every agent gets one job, a schedule, and a reason.
I run about 40 agents inside Grok Bot now. (If you want the full picture of that setup, read How I Run My Pest Control Business With AI Agents.) Every single one gets three things:
- One job. An agent is a lot like a person. A jack of all trades is a master of none.
- A schedule. Not every task needs to run every minute of the day. Plus you’ll burn through your Grok Bot usage incredibly fast.
- A reason. If you can’t explain why it needs to exist, it probably doesn’t. Remove it, or at a bare minimum go back to the drawing board.
Here are two I use all the time.
Carina, my Google Ads agent. At one point I had her checking the Google Ads account every single day. Turns out that wasn’t really necessary, and it used too much usage to justify. Now she checks weekly. Her specialty is finding waste: negative keywords and hours we shouldn’t even be running. We were running our campaigns 24/7. Now we only run during business hours, and depending on the campaign and location, not even all business hours.
Debra, my CRM report agent. She goes into the CRM every day and pulls our day by day changes. New sales, new customers, new leads, every KPI I need, into a neat dashboard. There’s even a custom section at the bottom where I can play with if then scenarios: churn, expected growth rate, even one off jobs like exclusion jobs. If we sell X amount at X dollars on average, where are we a month from now? 12 months? 2 years?
Notice one runs weekly and one runs daily. The schedule should fit the job.
One rule when you set these up: start them read only. A lot of times I’ll give an agent its own Gmail login, and I put it right in the instructions: you are a read only agent until instructed otherwise on certain tasks. When I give Grok Bot a strict rule like that, it treats it as a rule, not a suggestion.
Audit Your AI Routines and Usage
If you don’t write down what something is supposed to do and why, you get tasks nobody asked for.
At least once every couple weeks, do a deep audit of your agents. What they’re doing, what tasks they’re running, and how often.
Sometimes you explain a task to an agent and it sets up a routine on its own. You’ll see it in the fine print, “setting up routine,” but a lot of times you don’t know until you go through the audit. Then you see it set something up for every 15 minutes, every hour, every day, whatever cadence it picked.
In my first deep audit I found one agent running a task I had no idea it had even set up. It was burning roughly 4%, maybe even 5%, of my usage every single week. On that one task alone.
And the same exact thing happens with people. Somebody’s doing a task nobody asked for, and nobody has an answer why.
Do this:
- List every agent and every routine it runs.
- Check the cadence on each one. Every 15 minutes? Every day? Does it need to?
- Ask why it exists. No good answer? Rewrite it or cut it.
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A Customer Callback SOP, Step by Step
“Handle callback, make sure the customer’s happy” isn’t an SOP. It’s a phone call waiting to happen.
Here’s what this looks like side by side. On one side, the basic instruction: handle callback, make sure the customer’s happy. On the other side, the real thing, labeled from the get go. This is the SOP for a customer who calls back still seeing pests.
JOB: When a customer calls back reporting they’re still seeing pests, get the callback logged and scheduled immediately, while the customer is still on the phone.
STEPS:
- Confirm the customer’s name, phone number, email, and address so you have the right customer account pulled up.
- Ask what they’re seeing, where they’re seeing it, how many, and whether they’re seeing them dead or alive.
- Make sure they’re covered under warranty.
- If they’re under warranty, offer at least two open time slots over the next 24 to 48 hours for the assigned tech. If not, flag it for management (for us, ownership) for manual review.
- Add a note to the job with what the customer reported, word for word.
- After confirming the appointment is on the schedule, send the customer a follow up text right away confirming it’s scheduled.
DEFINITION OF DONE: The callback is scheduled, notes are on the work order, and the customer has a text message confirming the appointment.
GUARDRAILS: Never promise a refund. Never quote a new price. Don’t argue with a customer about anything.
WHEN TO ASK: Escalate to management or ownership if the customer is upset, mentions a mental health issue, or it’s their second callback within a very short period.
That dead or alive question sounds crazy. But you’d have no idea how often we have that conversation. If they’re dead, we don’t need to come back in the first place.
Notice the difference? With the first version, you’re getting a text or a phone call every single time. The second version, anybody can follow. My seven year old daughter could follow that. An AI agent can follow that. A complete new hire can follow it on day one.
And that’s the whole point.
Turn Your AI Instructions Into Employee Training
If your instructions are clear enough for an AI agent to act on its own, you’ve got a perfect training document for a new employee.
This is where it gets good. The agent made me get stuff out of my head that I didn’t even know was there half the time. Now I can feed that same document to my team.
Same SOP. Hand it to the agent. Hand it to the employee.
Building Core: a second brain for my team
If you’re extra like me, you take it a step further. I’m having Codex code up an Apple app that only my team can access, through our Apple business network. We’re calling it Core.
Think of it like a second brain of me, with AI capabilities, inside an app my team can use in real time. We’re rolling it out to the team this week.
The idea is pretty straightforward. Anytime my team has a question, they ask Core. That way they only call me for a real issue. That’s the only way I get out of answering the phone 10, 20, 40 times a day.
And it’s not just about my phone. It’s about training my team better. When they keep getting the answer from the AI that would’ve come straight from me, over and over and over again, they start to become a second version of me. Whether I’m on a roof doing a job or halfway across the world with my family.
I’ve been building it every night for just over a week. The craziest part to me has been how much security goes into it. If you’re putting how your business runs into an app, you better make sure it’s locked down.
But Core only works as good as the information I put inside of it.
You can’t build a second brain of yourself without documenting it. And it doesn’t all have to be written. A lot of mine is video, because you can upload video files into Google Drive too. I’m talking literally documenting how to use GorillaDesk and everything.
Write Your First SOP This Week
Pick one task. Just one.
I hate nothing more than when people watch business content and don’t act on it. So here’s what I want you to do.
- Pick one task this week. It doesn’t have to be a crazy thought out task. Just any one task.
- Write it out like you’re explaining it to a 5 or 10 year old with no experience in your industry or with that task.
- Label the job. Then write the steps, the definition of done, the guardrails, and when to get you or management involved.
- Open up Grok Bot, put the SOP in, and let the agent run it.
- If it struggles, go back to the drawing board and fine tune the SOP a little more.
JOB: [What is the task? One job.]
STEPS:
- [Step one]
- [Step two]
- [Keep going until the task is complete]
DEFINITION OF DONE: [What does done look like?]
GUARDRAILS: [What should they never do? What should they not touch?]
WHEN TO ASK: [When should they stop and get you or management involved?]
Don’t make it pretty. Don’t worry about the fonts. Don’t worry about making it 40 pages long. Just get it out of your head.
When an AI agent can do the task start to finish, that’s when you know your team can do the same.
The Takeaway: AI Won’t Fix a Messy Business
Here’s the recap:
- AI agents and employees can’t read your mind. Write it down.
- Every SOP gets five parts: the job, the steps, the definition of done, the guardrails, and when to ask.
- Every agent gets one job, a schedule, and a reason.
- Audit your agents every couple weeks. Some of them set up routines you never asked for.
- The same SOP that runs your AI agent trains your employee.
Employees, AI agents, none of this stuff will fix a messy business. They just make you realize it’s a mess much faster, and it compounds. So do the future you and the future of your business a favor and clean it up.
I’m not doing this to work more. I’ve been busting my butt all through my 20s, and I’ll probably keep doing it in my 30s, so I can do whatever I want with my family at the drop of a dime. The processes I’m putting in place today are how that happens.
Your turn: comment ONE task you could hand off this week, to an AI agent or a team member, on the video above. Already doing this? Get creative. Tell me what automations you’ve built, and if you know how much time per day or per week they’re taking off your plate, share that too. That’s what we’re all doing this for.
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