The three-week SOP launch cadence

## Week 1: HQ authoring Week 1 is the authoring week. The HQ ops team finalizes the SOP — the actual procedure, the rationale, the edge cases, the FAQ. Stakeholder review happens within the week (legal sign-off if needed, ops director approval, sometimes franchisee advisory council input). By end of week 1, the SOP is locked. The discipline here is not extending into week 2. If the SOP needs more authoring time, push the rollout — don't compress weeks 2 or 3. Most operators we've seen who blow their cadence do it by letting authoring overflow into the training rollout, which compresses the location-level training and burns the verification step. ## Week 2: training rollout Week 2 is the rollout. Day 1 of week 2: HQ converts the SOP into a training course (with document-to-course AI, this is hours; with traditional authoring tools, this is the bottleneck that breaks the cadence). Day 1–2: course review by L&D, knowledge-check questions adjusted, course pushed live. Day 3–7: every frontliner across every location is assigned the course with a 'complete before next shift' rule. Franchise managers see their per-location dashboard light up with assignments and track completion through the week. By end of week 2, the rollout is functionally complete at locations that ran it well, and identifiably incomplete at locations that didn't. ## Week 3: verification and gap-closure Week 3 is verification. Day 1: HQ pulls the cross-location completion report and identifies locations below threshold (typical threshold: 90%). Day 1–2: regional managers reach out to lagging locations — phone, in-person if needed — to understand why and clear blockers. Day 3–5: laggards complete or are formally noted. Day 6–7: HQ closes the rollout with a final completion report and any escalation paths triggered for locations that remain below threshold. The verification week is the part most franchise systems skip. They consider the rollout 'done' at end of week 2 and move on to the next thing. The result is the chronic-laggard locations that never finish, which compounds over multiple rollouts into a meaningful gap in brand-standard adherence. ## What this cadence assumes The three-week cadence assumes three things: (a) SOP-to-training conversion is hours not weeks, (b) HQ has live visibility into per-location completion, and (c) regional manager bandwidth exists to handle the verification week. Without (a), the cadence is impossible — you can't run a 21-day cadence with a 6-week content build cycle. Without (b), verification week is impossible — you can't close gaps you can't see. Without (c), verification week becomes notional rather than real. Most franchise systems have (c) — they have regional managers. They lack (a) and (b). Aristotl was built to provide both: the document-to-course workflow handles (a), the multi-location dashboard handles (b). ## What HQ tracks across the cadence The metric that matters: percentage of rollouts that completed within the 21-day window, measured quarterly. A franchise system running this well hits 90%+. A franchise system that's just starting the discipline starts at 30–40% and works up over a year. The cadence becomes muscle memory only after 6–8 cycles, so the first two quarters are the hard part. ## What good looks like A franchise system running the three-week cadence well has 90%+ of SOP rollouts completing within 21 days, has L&D effort linearly scaling with content volume (not consultative-project scaling), and has the rollout cadence be 'normal business' rather than 'each rollout is a crisis'. This is what mature multi-location L&D operations look like — and it's the operating rhythm Aristotl was designed to support.

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