Standard Operating Procedures & Workflows, Systems, Efficiency, & Productivity

From Lab Coat to COO: My Origin Story in Business Systems

Most business consultants will tell you about their MBA or their years climbing the corporate ladder. My path was different and, honestly, a lot more interesting.

Before I became an operations strategist helping entrepreneurs build sustainable businesses, I spent years in healthcare working in a molecular diagnostics laboratory, a world where systems aren’t just nice to have, they’re literally life-saving. I wasn’t analyzing spreadsheets or profit margins. I was analyzing blood and tissue samples, running quality control tests, and ensuring that every single result we reported was of the highest quality because it was literally impacting someone’s cancer diagnosis and treatment decisions.

In healthcare, there’s no room for “figuring it out as you go.” Every process, every protocol, every handoff between team members has to be documented, tested, and refined. Because when systems fail in healthcare, the consequences are immediate and serious.

The precision, the protocols, the systems thinking required in healthcare? That became the foundation for everything I do now at Spark to Sprig.

Now, I work with visionary leaders, entrepreneurs, coaches, and service providers who are brilliant at what they do, but drowning in the day-to-day chaos of running their businesses. They’re wearing all the hats, reinventing the wheel constantly, and wondering why growth feels so exhausting.

Sound familiar?

Let me share the five biggest lessons healthcare taught me about building business systems that are actually sustainable, and how you can apply them starting today.

1. Standard Operating Procedures Create Freedom

Many people hear the term SOPs (standard operating procedures) and think a rigid set of protocols that are needed in bigger businesses and companies (like healthcare), but aren’t needed in the small business world. When really SOPs are simply documents that explain how things get done, so you’re not reinventing the process every single time.

SOPs aren’t about constraining creativity. They’re about freeing up your mental energy for the work that actually requires your unique expertise.

When you document your client onboarding process, your content creation workflow, or how you handle inquiries, you stop using precious mental bandwidth on repetitive decisions. Plus, SOPs make it exponentially easier to delegate. Instead of trying to explain everything verbally or hoping someone “figures it out,” you can simply share your SOP and know the work will be done to your standards, even when you’re not the one doing it.

How to Apply This in Your Business:

  • Start small. Pick one process you do repeatedly, like onboarding a new client or preparing for a discovery call.
  • Document the steps. Walk through it once and write down every action, decision point, and resource needed.
  • Refine as you go. Your first SOP doesn’t need to be perfect. Treat it as a living document that improves with use.
  • Use it consistently. The magic happens when you actually follow your own systems.

When you have clear SOPs, you can delegate with confidence, onboard team members faster, and ensure quality stays consistent even as you scale. Most importantly? You stop feeling like you’re the only person who can do anything in your business.

If you want extra support as you build (or clean up) your SOPs, these two posts are a great next step:

2. Process Improvement Is Continuous

Healthcare introduced me to a methodology known as LEAN (if you have any familiarity with the auto industry or engineering fields, you might have heard this term come up).

LEAN is a continuous improvement framework focused on eliminating waste and maximizing value. The core principle? There’s always a better way to do things, and small improvements compound over time.

In healthcare, we regularly reviewed processes to identify bottlenecks, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement. We asked questions like:

  • Where are we wasting time or resources?
  • What steps could be eliminated or streamlined?
  • How can we reduce errors and improve outcomes?

This mindset shift was huge for me. Instead of viewing systems as “set it and forget it,” I learned to see them as living, evolving frameworks that should grow with your business.

Too many entrepreneurs build a system once and then never revisit it, even when it’s clearly not working anymore. Or worse, they avoid creating systems altogether because they’re afraid of getting it “wrong.”

When in reality, your systems will never be perfect, and that’s completely expected. What matters is that they’re better than having no system at all, and that you’re committed to refining them over time.

How to Apply This in Your Business:

  • Schedule regular system audits. At minimum, annually, to review your key processes and ask where improvements can be improved.
  • Track what’s not working. Keep a running list of friction points, bottlenecks, or tasks that feel unnecessarily complicated.
  • Implement small changes. You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Make one improvement, test it, and refine.
  • Involve your team. The people closest to a process often have the best insights for improving it.

Continuous improvement means your operations get smoother, faster, and more efficient over time without requiring massive overhauls or starting from scratch. What’s not to love about that!

3. Documentation Saves Time and Reduces Errors

In a clinical setting, documentation serves multiple purposes such as: legal protection, continuity of care, quality assurance, and knowledge transfer. Every sample that entered the lab, every test completed, every hand off between staff was recorded.

This may sound tedious, but this record creates knowledge that doesn’t live in one person’s head. It ensures consistency, reduces errors, and makes it possible to scale without chaos. The same principle applies to your business.

Without documentation:

  • You’re the bottleneck for everything
  • Quality varies depending on who’s doing the work
  • Onboarding new team members takes more time
  • You can’t delegate effectively because no one knows how you want things done
  • You waste time answering the same questions repeatedly

With documentation:

  • Anyone on your team can step in and maintain quality
  • You can take a vacation without your business falling apart
  • New team members get up to speed faster
  • You can scale your services without sacrificing consistency
  • You free up mental space for strategic thinking

How to Apply This in Your Business:

  • Create a central knowledge hub. Use a tool like Notion, ClickUp, or Google Drive to store all your processes, templates, and resources in one searchable place. If Notion is the hub you’re leaning toward, here’s my beginner guide for getting started with Notion for your business.
  • Use screen recordings. Tools like Loom make it easy to document visual processes.
  • Document as you work. Next time you complete a task, turn on a screen recorder or take notes as you go. It only adds a few minutes to your workflow.
  • Make it accessible. Documentation only works if people can find and use it. Organize logically and update regularly.

Your business shouldn’t rely on your memory or your constant availability to function. Documentation is how you build a business that can scale sustainably.

4. Systems Thinking Means Seeing the Big Vision

One of the most valuable skills I developed in healthcare was systems thinking, which is basically the ability to see how individual components connect toward the bigger scale vision.

In healthcare, you can’t just focus on one patient or one department, as everything is interconnected. A delay in the lab affects the pathologist’s ability to read results and the provider’s ability to properly treat. A breakdown in communication between the draw center and laboratory can lead to delayed results or misrouted samples.

Systems thinking means understanding that improving one part of the process often requires looking upstream and downstream to see the full impact. The same applies to your business. Your marketing doesn’t exist in isolation from your sales process. Your client onboarding impacts client retention. Your internal operations affect your capacity to deliver excellent service.

When you adopt systems thinking, you stop treating problems as isolated incidents and instead look at the root cause of the issue. 

How to Apply This in Your Business:

  • Map your workflows end-to-end. Visualize how work flows through your business from initial contact to project completion.
  • Identify dependencies. What has to happen before something else can happen? Where are the handoffs or triggers between systems?

Systems thinking transforms you from someone who’s constantly hitting speed bumps to someone who’s designing an operation that prevents obstacles from starting in the first place.

5. The Right Tools Support Your Systems

Healthcare taught me an important lesson about tools and technology: tools are only as good as the systems behind them.

The best new system can come into play that’s supposed to streamline everything, but if it’s not optimized to the way your team works and your specific needs, it can create more work than benefit.

The same thing happens in business all the time. You choose a tool that sounds great in the reel you just saw on Instagram and hope it solves all your problems.

But here’s the truth: digital tools should support your systems, not create them for you.

Before you invest in a new tool, you need to think through:

  • What problem are you actually trying to solve?
  • What does the ideal process look like?
  • How will this tool integrate with your existing workflows?
  • Will your team actually use it?

Sometimes you can have the best impact by simplifying your tech stack and optimizing the tools you already have.

How to Apply This in Your Business:

  • Design the system first. Map out your ideal workflow on paper before looking for digital tools to support it.
  • Audit your current tools. Are you actually using all the platforms you’re paying for? Could you consolidate?
  • Choose tools that talk to each other. Look for integrations and automation opportunities to reduce manual steps.
    • Looking for tips to get started with automation in your business, check out the Automation 101 guide.

The goal isn’t to have the shiniest tech stack. It’s to have the right tools, set up properly, supporting well-designed systems that actually make your life easier.

If you’re feeling stuck in tool-overwhelm, my post on the ultimate business tech stack (20 tools I actually use) can help you sort through what’s worth having, what’s worth skipping, and how to make your tools support your systems.

How These Lessons Show Up in My Work with Small Businesses

Every day, I bring my healthcare background to the work I do with clients at Spark to Sprig. Here’s how it shows up:

When I Build Systems

I approach systems building the way I approached laboratory workflows. By mapping every stage, identifying every handoff between systems, and creating a structure that supports both current operations and future growth.

When I Create SOPs

I write procedures the way I was trained in healthcare: clear, visual, detailed enough that someone who has never done the task before could pick up this SOP and run with it, but flexible enough for reasonable adaptation. I love to include screenshots and visuals, as well as troubleshooting guides for when things don’t go as planned.

When I Audit Operations

I use the same systematic approach I learned in healthcare and in my graduate program in organizational leadership: observe current state, outline the ideal state, identify gaps, investigate root causes, and implement a clear resolution.

When I Support Ongoing Operations

I bring a continuous improvement mindset where we don’t just set up systems and walk away, but rather monitor, measure, refine, and optimize over time.

The Origin Story Moral: Your Background Is Your Superpower

Here’s what I want you to take from my origin story:

Your unique background, whatever it is, is an asset, not a limitation.

I didn’t follow a traditional path to business consulting. I didn’t have an MBA or corporate operations experience. But my healthcare background gave me something even more valuable: a deep understanding of what excellent operations actually look like and how to build them from the ground up.

And whatever your background is you have unique expertise that can transform how you run your business, that’s wholly unique to you!

Your business deserves the same level of operational excellence that’s needed in healthcare, not because your work is life-or-death, but because your time, energy, and vision are invaluable resources.

You didn’t start your business to spend all your time on administrative chaos, manual processes, and operational problem solving. You started it to make an impact, serve your clients well, and build a life you love.

That requires systems that support your growth. You don’t need a massive team or a corporate budget to build better business systems. You just need to start applying these principles:

  • Document your processes so you’re not reinventing the wheel
  • Commit to continuous improvement instead of perfection
  • Create knowledge that doesn’t live only in your head
  • Think systemically about how all the pieces connect
  • Choose tools that support your systems

Start with one area of your business that feels the most overwhelming. Apply just one of these principles. Document one process. Improve one workflow. Choose one tool to optimize.

Small systems improvements compound into massive operational transformation, and that’s when your business starts to feel less like a juggling act and more like the sustainable, scalable operation you envisioned.

Ready to Build Systems That Actually Work?

If you’re ready to stop reinventing the wheel and start building business operations that support your growth, I’d love to help.

Whether you need ongoing operations support, systems builds in Notion, or strategic guidance to optimize what you already have, let’s talk about what’s possible when you have the right systems in place. Book a free Discovery Call today to get started.

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