A free template is worth downloading to see the shape, and it will not survive contact with your crew. What survives is a procedure written as a checkable state rather than a set of instructions, short enough to be read in the truck, and owned by a named role. You can write that yourself in an afternoon and this page is how.
Written by JD Davenport, who still sells for a living. Updated 4 November 2026.
There are plenty of them and most are free for a reason. A template is a blank with headings on it. The headings are the easy part. What makes a procedure work is the specific thing your business does differently from the one next door, and no blank can hand you that.
Almost every template you will find is written as instructions. Step one, do this. Step two, do that. Instructions decay. Somebody reads it once on their first week, works from memory after that, and inside a month the document describes a process nobody is running. Then it gets blamed for being out of date, which it is, and replaced with a longer one.
The second problem is scope. A generic construction SOP tries to cover every trade, so it covers none of them at the level where the money is. Your material order either gets checked against the estimate before it ships or it does not. A template that says "ensure materials are verified" has not told anybody when, by whom, or what happens if the answer is no.
The third is ownership. A document with no name on it belongs to nobody. If the answer to "who owns this" is "the company", the answer is nobody, and the first time it is inconvenient it gets skipped with no consequence.
Write states, not steps. A step is an instruction somebody has to remember. A state is a condition somebody can look at and say yes or no to.
"Verify the material order" is a step. "The material order has been compared line for line against the signed estimate and the differences are written on the order" is a state. One of those can be checked by a person who was not there. The other cannot.
Then give each state four things:
A trigger. What has to happen for this to be due. Not a date. An event, like the contract being signed or the crew leaving site.
An owner, by role. Not a person's name, because people change. The role.
A pass test. What a person who was not there would look at to decide it is done.
A failure route. What happens when the test fails, written down before it fails. Most procedures have no answer to this, which is why failure quietly becomes the normal path.
A procedure that runs at the end is a report. A procedure that runs before something expensive is a gate, and gates are where the money is.
On most contracting work there are two points worth gating. One before material is ordered, where an error costs a phone call. One the day the job finishes, where you find out what the first gate missed. The loop between them is the whole thing: what the second gate catches this month becomes what the first gate checks next month, automatically, without anybody deciding to improve.
If you write only two procedures this year, write those two. Everything else is documentation. Those two are a mechanism.
One page per procedure. If it does not fit, you have two procedures or you have written instructions again.
The test is whether somebody can read it in a truck with the engine running. Anything longer gets printed, put in a binder, and used as proof that a process exists rather than as the process.
Free templates are a shape. They are useful for about twenty minutes, and the twenty minutes are worth having before you write your own.
What they cannot be is yours. The whole value of a written standard is that it names your trade's words, your roles, your failure routes and the thing that went wrong here last spring. A blank cannot hold any of that, and filling one in is roughly the same work as writing the thing from scratch without the headings fighting you.
So: download one, read it, throw it away, and write states with triggers and owners. That is free and it is better than any template you will find.
If you would rather start from something already written in this shape, the two gates, the loop between them and the board that runs them are The Production Standard. What goes in a procedure, in more detail, is on this page. The free browser tools are on the tools page and cost nothing. More answers on the questions page.