S.O.A.P. for Success

Reviewed by Christian Sia for Readers’ Favorite

In S.O.A.P. for Success: A Simple Method to Manage Your Business and Revitalize Your Mission, Dr. Stephanie F. West, a Cornell-trained veterinarian and business strategist, provides a tool for business owners to improve their businesses and scale. This book helps leaders cut through conflicting details, identify problems, and find solutions. The author shows how this tool can also help businesses survive challenging periods, such as the pandemic. She presents the same tool she uses in medicine for other businesses: the S.O.A.P. method (Subjective observations, Objective data, Assessment, and actionable Plan). This intuitive framework for organizational healing details how business owners can diagnose problems and address them. In a compassionate tone, she guides you to dissect pain points in business, from payroll to team engagement.

Dr. Stephanie F. West uses relatable stories to ground S.O.A.P. for Success in realism, making it even more meaningful and enjoyable. She shares her personal journey as a businesswoman with uncanny clarity, offering invaluable lessons along the way. Each chapter delivers something new and a tool to help business owners, such as “stay” interviews to retain employees, how to use spreadsheets to prioritize business actions, and a lot more. I found it interesting how well the author transforms a mere clinical protocol into a philosophy that helps you ground theory with tangible action.

The audio is clear, and you can tell when the narrator moves from one point to the next. Stephanie F. West communicates in a voice that is warm, and as I listened to this audiobook, I felt as though I was attending a masterclass in business.