Optimizing Your Business Using Lean Processes & Fundamentals
Written By: Brooke Scott, MBA
When you’re planning to optimize your business, you shouldn’t be planning for one period of time to focus on it during your next fiscal year or quarter. You should be looking at optimizing your business through the lens of a recurring initiative that happens in your day-to-day operations and on a monthly basis. The importance is to shift your perspective of “optimization” being a heavy focus and to start looking at “optimization” from the lean perspective and lens. Introducing the use of lean processes and fundamentals will help you be able to identify these areas a little easier.
The purpose of operating using a lean approach is to keep efficiency, collaboration, improvement, observation, optimization, and elimination of the waste in your business, at the core focus. While you’re focusing on those areas, the goal is to operate through the perspective of your ideal client. If you’re consistently approaching things in your business through that lens and are using a lean approach, you will always have what’s priority and what’s in alignment, in mind. Lean fundamentals are focused on standarizing your processes, are involving the people who are doing the work, and are driven by the incremental but rapid improvement that comes from introducing lean process improvement routines into your business.
Lean processes and fundamentals are value based initiatives that keep you in alignment with your business bottom line and help you eliminate waste in your business as you operate. The waste in your business can be defined as: defects, over-production, waiting, confusion, travel, inventory, motion, excessive processing, time, money, efforts, and more. The point is to “lean up” and keep your business trimmed of that waste so that you can operate quicker and reach your goals faster.
Benefits Of Optimizing Your Business Using Lean Processes
Let’s break down the benefits and best practices of optimizing your business through the use of lean processes and fundamentals.
[1] Knowing The “Why” Behind Your Operations
Everything stems from “why” you have specific systems or processes in place, “why” you are using a specific platform, and “why” you even have the integrations you do, connected in your funnel. Having a foundational understanding in order to effectively and efficiently communicate what things are and why things are happening in your business is key for being able to even get started in optimizing your business. If you don’t have the knowledge of why things are operating in the way they are, then you truly can’t optimize because you aren’t starting from the ground up. You’re starting on the initiative without a foundation or purpose to why you’re doing it at all. Which then, opens the door for the question: “If you don’t have the understanding behind a process, system, etc., in your business, then how do you know that it is even connected and in alignment with your business bottom line?”. Missing this step will cause you to focus on initiatives that aren’t benefiting your business and that should actually be skipped entirely. In order to make real change and optimize your business, you need to know the “why” and be able to explain the “why” so that you can effectively communicate with your team and key players who are involved, and will be able to quickly troubleshoot if you need to.
[2] Increasing Your Team Culture & Cohesiveness
What’s happening in your business operations is more than the SOPs you have in place. It’s the legitimate foundation for your business AND your team. Focusing on truly optimizing your business through the lean lens, creates an encouraging environment of constant learning that opens the door to opportunities in benefiting your team. Problems, tech errors, and barriers come and go, but knowing how to problem solve and incorporate those restorative qualities with a lean perspective, will keep your team ahead of the curve while remaining operating in an efficient and cohesive manner.
[3] Reducing The Amount Of Waste In Your Business
Optimizing your business through lean processes, helps you identify wasted time, energy, clicks, money, etc., and improves productivity across your entire team. The more you can eliminate and condense within your understanding of your “why”, the simpler and more aligned your processes will be. The key is making sure that again, everything is contributing value to the process and to your business. If you’re focusing your optimization efforts through lean processes, you’re not only reducing the amount of waste in your business, but you’re uncovering areas for improvement.
[4] Evergreen Improvement
Consistently optimizing your business through the use of lean processes encourages small wins for your team and transforms those small wins into a rapid snowball effect of wins and continual improvement. The more aligned and fine tuned your processes are, the clearer and easier it will be to manage them, regardless of your role on the team. Plus those small wins and continual improvement show your team the small results of their work which then encourages the culture to build upon itself. Consistent optimization opens the door for consistent and evergreen improvement.
[5] Aligned Metrics Tracking
Identifying your leading indicators to improve your context and answer questions is what drives you to make more informed decisions. Having more data means having stronger decision-making on all fronts. That can look like collecting your page conversions for your launch and then optimizing the page for the next launch period based on the data you tracked. In this perspective, letting your metrics guide you in your optimization with that lean foundational understanding, you’ll be able to pin point and target what needs to change or improve moving forward.
Optimizing Your Business Through Lean Organization
After understanding your foundation, a lean organizational approach you can use to optimize your business, is through the 5S approach. Using this process you will not only keep optimization at the forefront of what you’re doing, but you’ll be doing it in a way that keeps you organized at the same time. Let’s break it down further.
[1] SORT – Get rid of what’s unnecessary.
Give each task in your business a timeline tag of importance (physically or virtually). If something needs to be done in 90 days, 60 days, 30 days, etc., give it a priority rating so that you can determine what can be tossed out according to what is most important for your business bottom line at the moment. If it’s something that isn’t priority within the timeframe you set, then put it aside on your tending list to revisit at a later date.
[2] STRAIGHTEN – Organize the areas where your tasks will live.
A great way to get started here is by categorizing your business down through the departments. Determine what department buckets are living in your business and then break those down individually. For example, for your Operations or Head Quarters bucket, you might throw in anything related to HR, daily one-off tasks, and team resource documents as a “resource library or hub” for the business. If something doesn’t belong, set it aside until you move onto the next bucket.
[3] SHINE – Clean up where things are living.
After you have your buckets created and tasks divided out by department, start cleaning up how you want things to not only look, but how you want them to flow. It will probably start out as a chaotic pile of things but here is where you take into consideration where you want things to go and where they should move once they are active.
[4] STANDARDIZE – In order to maintain what you’ve created through the first three steps in the 5S approach, there should be a standard to uphold it.
This is where your internal SOPs for organization come into play and are created. Decide routinely when something needs to be cleaned up, reviewed for improvements, or touched so that the living & breathing home of your operations stays caught up. This is your front line standard work. (AKA those tedious tasks) During this step, you want to determine when you plan to audit this piece as well. Once you have an SOP in place, it’s not something you want to just sit on the shelf. You should consistently be pulling it off the shelf and determining if you can optimize further on that process. Introducing this as a routine in your business will strengthen the standardizing process.
[5] SUSTAIN – Put what you’ve created into a routine.
This is where the entire team comes together to discuss what standards are being done and what needs to be improved or removed from the process. This is your Monthly, Quarterly, or Annual checkin for all of your team to be on the same page with what is going in and coming out of the business at each level for success. This is a point past what your audit would be. You’re not only reviewing the assets but you should be reviewing the actions taken by your team members who have their hands directly on that asset. They will be the one who will have a greater understanding of how it could be optimized further.
While there are multiple ways to incorporate the use of lean fundamentals and process improvement routines in your business through different initiatives, practices, and approaches, you should first focus on getting in the habit of operating through that lean lens. Once you start approaching your business with the intention of keeping things efficient, keeping processes standardized and reducing the amount of steps needing to be taken, then it will become more of a routine practice and second nature to how you are operating and optimizing your business. If you start your lean journey with the understanding of the “why” in your business and start using the 5S Approach to optimize and organize your business auditing, then you’ll be on the fast track to start implementing more lean practices as you advance in the repetitive process of optimization. It’s not a one and done process or audit that you do, ever so often. It’s incorporating it into how you are showing up for your business. Once you get more comfortable with using lean in your business, you will start seeing more areas you can optimize on a daily basis because it will be the first thing you notice.
About your Author
Brooke is a COO & Integrator and her mission is to help others optimize & restore their business operations foundation without wasting time and money. She focuses her approach to any project or task using lean fundamentals with the overall goal of keeping things streamlined from the ground up. She serves women entrepreneurs & mompreneurs, agencies, coaches, course creators & consultants by creating the swoon-worthy, efficient systems of their dreams and managing their internal & external operations so that they can get back to doing what they love in their zone of genius.
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