Building ADHD – Friendly SOPs for Scalable Growth, with Skye Waterson — Ep. 215

About this Episode

In this episode of the Agency Profit Podcast, Marcel is joined by Skye Waterson, founder of Unconventional Organisation, to explore one of the most frustrating “invisible” problems inside growing agencies: SOPs that get created, filed away, and never used. Drawing from her research background and years of coaching founders with ADHD, Skye breaks down why traditional documentation tends to fail—static, text-heavy processes that drift out of sync with real work and leave the CEO as the fallback for every question. Together, she and Marcel unpack a more practical alternative: visually mapping the business end-to-end, assigning a single DRI to each node, color-coding process health (red/orange/green), and linking every step directly to the SOP so it becomes easy to find and improve. From weekly cadence reviews alongside metrics to using AI to bootstrap checklists and delegation, this episode offers a grounded framework for turning documentation into something that actually drives clarity, stronger delegation, and a business that runs with less founder friction.

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Points of Interest

• 00:01 – Introduction: Marcel introduces Skye Waterson and frames the conversation around SOPs, documentation, and building operational “rails” that teams can actually use.
• 01:07 – Skye’s background and motivation: Skye shares her journey from academic burnout to discovering adult ADHD and building a business focused on helping founders work with their brains, not against them.
• 03:04 – Why ADHD frameworks help everyone: Skye explains how ADHD-friendly systems emphasize flexibility and challenge outdated assumptions about productivity and work structure.
• 05:05 – First principles for ADHD productivity: The discussion covers practical strategies like rewarding task initiation and reducing reliance on working memory through better capture systems.
• 06:56 – The core problem with traditional SOPs: Skye and Marcel outline why most SOPs go stale—delegated, filed away, and only referenced during onboarding or emergencies.
• 09:18 – SOP neglect as a hidden operational risk: The conversation highlights how disconnected SOPs undermine dashboards, metrics, and leadership visibility.
• 11:32 – Visualizing the business as a flow: Skye introduces her core framework: mapping the business end-to-end (acquisition through expansion) using a visual tool like Miro.
• 14:02 – Why digital visual tools matter: Skye explains why paper-based process mapping fails and why digital tools enable iteration, ownership, and follow-through.
• 15:52 – Assigning a single DRI per process: Each node in the business flow is assigned a Directly Responsible Individual to eliminate ambiguity and improve accountability.
• 16:40 – Red, orange, green process health: Processes are color-coded to show whether they are broken, manual and CEO-dependent, or documented and team-run.
• 18:09 – Tying SOPs to weekly cadence and metrics: Skye explains how reviewing SOP health alongside performance metrics turns documentation into an operational diagnostic tool.
• 24:41 – AI and living SOPs: The episode closes with best practices for using AI to bootstrap SOPs, delegate ownership, and treat documentation as a living draft rather than a finished artifact.

Show Notes

• Connect with Skye via LinkedIn
• Unconventional Organization
• Skye’s Podcast ADHD Skills Lab
• AI Chatbot: Message Skye on Instagram with the word “Marcel” and she’ll send you the chatbot
• Software as a Science Book
• Matt Verlaque

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