Why Your Growing Company Needs To Work Slower

By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon

You might have seen last week’s discussion of automating administrivia and clerical work simply as a systemization of the E-Myth. That’s fair, but remember that the goal was to reduce cognitive load on focus workers. We didn’t eliminate ALL administrivia and clerical work – and you can’t. Discussions on scaling a growing company rarely cover the burden this work creates. The key to keeping this work from bogging things down? Work slower.

Work slower?

A few years ago, Richard Tripp and I were talking about the challenges of installation and on-boarding in complex enterprise environments. He started the conversation by asserting that “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

As he explained, you have to slow down your processes to improve them.

On a rough road, potholes, dips, and washboards make it difficult to drive safely at high speeds. On a smooth paved road, accelerating to and maintaining cruising speed is easier, safer, and more comfortable. The situation is exactly the same for a growing company’s admin and clerical work.

Note the emphasis on “and maintaining” in the previous paragraph. It isn’t fast to repeatedly accelerate, slow down, then accelerate back to cruising speed. It’s jerky and disruptive. If processes aren’t streamlined and capable of consistent speed and volume, then the work is neither smooth nor fast.

A flat tire on a busy highway

Process disruptions kill you when you’re trying to scale operations.

Fits and starts are demoralizing. One-offs to deal with random failures and issues consume a ton of time and take your team off task. This frustrates your team and delays work output – often backing up other work as a result.

These problems impact your operations like a flat tire affects travel on a busy highway. When a car has a flat, the impact isn’t limited to that car – it slows down the surrounding cars.

In your business, work (traffic) backs up, plus the task that suffered the failure (the car with the flat) is completely halted. Any work dependent on the stopped task is also at a dead stop. A shipment stuck in production can hold up packaging, shipping, the loading dock, invoicing, or other areas.

When you work slower, you create time and space that makes it easier to identify and eliminate the bumps and potholes in your processes. “Slow is smooth” takes shape. It’s about reviewing fundamentals, but also about the deconstruction and review of each part of the process.

Hummingbirds and governors

If you’ve ever watched a hummingbird fly, there’s not much to see. By naked eye, the wings are a blur at best. The bird hovers and appears to veer about as it flies. It seems anything but smooth.

In a slow-motion video, the beauty of a hummingbird’s flight is revealed. Every motion is smooth and consistent – motion that looks much different to the naked eye. Likewise, slowing down your processes and analyzing them step by step allows you to identify inefficient motion, poorly designed screens and paperwork, as well as unnecessary steps.

The elimination of inefficient motion isn’t the reason for a governor, but the idea is similar. A governor is a physical device that changes position as rotational speed of the governed mechanism increases. Eventually, rotational speed reaches a point where the governor moves into a position that cuts the throttle or otherwise limits the speed of movement.

Like speed, scaling reveals flaws

Governors are used to limit machine speed, giving the machine a means of protecting itself.  A mechanism without a governor could gain enough rotational speed to tear itself apart.

Your processes at at risk in the same way. If your business is used to shipping 100 items a day or onboarding 15 new customers a month, things change when you double those numbers – or add a digit. Where 100 shipments a day sustained you, 1000 a day might put you out of business. Under those conditions, an ungoverned not-so-smooth business can tear itself apart.

Smoothly-operated, well-rehearsed processes can accelerate to high speed and high volume without exploding – thus “smooth is fast“. You may need to get faster equipment to handle the volume, but faster equipment won’t fix a broken process. It simply breaks it at high speed.

Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your work processes allows you to be ready to “remove the governor” at any time, without allowing the business to destroy itself.

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Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on LinkedIn or Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.