Surprisingly many businesses fail to create such an essential item; the reality is that these types of businesses and entrepreneurs who don't create a documented system usually spend lots of time training and supervising employees. Often they forget that the reason an employee or
other person was brought into the business was to help it grow yet spending time on re-training or needing to quality check work constantly is not growing the business and it is a huge waste of time.
The standardized procedures do not need to be extravagant, often times the simpler the better. Get a piece of paper or type up each step involved in performing a specific task or process. Employees, contractors, temps and so on should also be involved in this process. Take the completed
documents, print them up in binders or other media and hand them out to all the people in the organization.
Once the business has been thoroughly documented and the work standards created make sure that they are regularly followed, no exceptions. If there are any problems with a document simply get feedback from the employees, then go back and revise the standards.
Once an area or process has been formally documented begin continuous improvement efforts, go out and look for simple commonsense ways to improve each and every process to become more efficient. Greater efficiency ultimately leads to the business becoming more profitable.