Getting Rid of Drag and Waste

From week to week, we need to work on making our practices better and more effective. It can be hard. It takes a commitment of time and effort, energy, and thought. But what IS easy is making small improvements from week to week that, over the course of say, a month, make a dramatic difference in the efficiency or effectiveness of our practice processes and procedures—by identifying and getting rid of drag and waste. So here are 18 ideas that can help.

Got any engineering-type friends? If you do, you know they are all about substance over form. Performance over style. Sometimes our business tools, practices, and procedures need that too.

From week to week, we need to work on making our practices better and more effective. It can be hard. It takes a commitment of time and effort, energy, and thought.

But what IS easy is making small improvements from week to week that, over the course of say, a month, make a dramatic difference in the efficiency or effectiveness of our practice processes and procedures—by identifying and getting rid of drag and waste.

So here are 18 ideas that can help. Better still, some of these fixes can make your practice more profitable without any increase in billings.

1. Let people schedule meetings or calls with you using a calendar app (I use Calendly) to eliminate phone/e-mail tag.
2. Convert voicemails to text and have them delivered via e-mail or text messages with PhoneTag.
3. Use SpeakPipe so your website visitors can contact you while they’re browsing.
4. People move on—purge old Outlook/Gmail contacts and LinkedIn connections.
5. Issue all your draft and final reports in PDF only.
6. Get noise canceling headphones to tune out office distractions.
7. Clean out a desk drawer.
8. Cancel e-mail subscriptions you’re no longer reading.
9. Cancel paid subscription services you’re no longer using.
10. Streamline your engagement letter and remove the legalese.
11. Accept credit card, ACH, and wire transfers for fee payments.
12. Consider any change that would make it easier for clients to work with you.
13. Create a standard report template.
14. Don’t attend a meeting without an agenda.
15. Update your LinkedIn profile.
16. Put together a travel bag with everything you need to leave your office/home.
17. Outsource the things you’re procrastinating doing.
18. Consider whether an office footprint matters to your client.

So what?

Drag and waste. It slows us down. It costs us money.

Work on this list during the coming month of September so you can head into the 4^th quarter with the wheels greased.

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Everyone has a different idea of what a successful practice is. The practice you want is personal because it is based on what “successful” means to you. I help practitioners focus on the strategies, tactics, tools, and tech to build/grow/scale their versions of successful practices. If you want some help with that, e-mail me at rod@rodburkert.com.