How The Lion Richlands standardized operations and onboarding across a 330-staff venue with SOPX

Like a lot of busy venues, The Lion ran on knowledge that lived in people's heads. Across gaming machines, food service, and the floor, most procedures were known by a few experienced senior managers, and when one of them moved on, the how-to often went with them.

The clearest sign was the phone. Duty managers would call a senior manager after hours to ask how to handle something, a steady run of "how do I do this?" questions at all hours.

Two things made it harder to get on top of. With so many procedures across the venue, it was tough to even know which one to write down next. And some of the most important procedures came up only once or twice a year, so they were the easiest to forget and the hardest to capture, unless someone recorded them the moment they happened.

Getting it all documented was something the team had wanted to do for years. Nothing had made it easy enough to stick.

The team wanted a platform duty managers would actually use. That meant documentation had to be fast to create and, just as important, easy to search, reference, and follow on the floor.

SOPX covers that whole loop. A procedure is documented once, straight from a phone, with no writing, so it takes minutes rather than hours to add or update. From there it lives in one searchable place the whole team can reach. They chose SOPX over screen-recording tools, which only capture on-screen workflows and don't fit a hands-on operation.

Security mattered for a regulated gaming venue. SOP content stays scoped to the organisation, is never shared, and is never used to train any AI model, which met the venue's due-diligence requirements.

Matthew Ball led the rollout. In the first few weeks, the team documented more than 15 procedures and shared them with staff. Now people look up how to do a task instead of asking whoever usually handles it. Answers no longer wait on one person, and the after-hours calls have dropped.

Because procedures take minutes to document, the reference stays current, and even infrequent tasks get captured for the whole team. New and rotating staff work from the same guides, which keeps things consistent across a seven-day operation. It started with the duty-manager team, with a clear path to scale toward the venue's 330 staff.