Most business advice is structured around helping you waste less time and squeeze every bit of efficiency and success out of the measures you undertake. It’s called lean optimization.
That’s not a bad intention to have when advising anyone. But the truth is that, like in life, what makes a business work is not necessarily how efficient every process is. There are costs worth having, time worth spending, and processes worth being a little more cumbersome for its best practice to work.
Table of Contents
Biz Optimizations
Unfortunately, some firms think that unless they’re undergoing several optimizations a year in the interest of lean operations, they’re just not agile enough. Sure, agility and removing dead weight aren’t bad ideas, but we need to know why it was placed there before we remove something.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the following three areas of business planning:
Safety for Lean Optimization
Safety is one area where cutting corners or looking for optimization at all costs is never worth Physical safety on-site, digital security measures, or ensuring proper protocols are in place; this requires robust planning, reviews, audits, and comprehensive inspections when something goes wrong.
Perhaps you need to upgrade your systems with new safety equipment or infrastructure changes like a new supply line or kunkle valve. While this might take time, and an audit could be weeks in the making, the effort, resources, and cost this takes could ultimately save a life.
We cannot happily avoid that outcome, and it’s worth ensuring you’re operating effectively but not hyper-efficiently at the cost of everything else.
Robust Accounting Lean Process Optimization
One accounting issue can often spiral into many bookkeeping problems, and this is a difficult ball to stop rolling once it gets going—improper housekeeping due to an efficient system that robs all oversight from your managers.
For instance, it could potentially harm payroll and lead to delays or incorrect payments, perhaps the quickest way to frustrate a team otherwise on good terms.
Robust accounting must also be implemented for comprehensive tax audits and the ability to structure clean bookkeeping. Remember, if you’re a small business looking to centralize everything in a single software package with AI tools to help automate the process – your oversight is more important than anything.
Retaining Experienced Talent
Keeping experienced employees can initially feel expensive, but it’s always worth it. They know how your business works, have valuable skills, and provide stability. As they get older, they’re also more likely to stay with your firm if they’ve crossed that five-year gap, provided you keep their salary in line with expectations and sustain all the promised benefits as part of their package.
Unfortunately, some companies look to their older staff and run a cost-benefit analysis that doesn’t work in their favor. This can dismiss their best talent and cause a rift in that relationship. This is a mistake and one that should be easier to avoid.
Conclusion: Lean Optimization
Lean optimization shouldn’t be used if it limits long-term strategy or stifles innovation. Over-focusing on efficiency can hurt creativity, flexibility, and growth. Lean methods might backfire if your business requires bold investments or involves uncertain markets.
It’s also risky when scaling or experimenting with new ideas that need room to breathe and develop. Remember, not every decision is about cutting waste—sometimes, you must take calculated risks. Is lean production an area you are looking at?
With this advice, we hope you can more easily avoid overly lean optimization in business planning and hopefully curate a more agile business in the areas where you’re supposed to.