What Your Shower Routine Can Teach You
I spent 30 years showering with bottles. Shampoo bottles, conditioner bottles, body wash bottles, all lined up on the edge of the bath, getting knocked over, accumulating grime underneath, running out at inconvenient times.
Then I installed wall-mounted dispensers. And I didn't realize how much unnecessary friction I'd been tolerating until it was gone. No more WHACK-WHACK-WHACKING bottles to get the last bits out, no more dodging the rush of cold water trapped under the lid, no more dashing to the cupboard mid-shower when something runs out.
It took maybe 20 minutes to install (including a teeth-clenching minute of drilling through lovely big tiles that I didn’t buy). And now, every single morning, I'm pleased all over again with what a smart decision it was. Trivial? Maybe. But I save mental energy for the rest of the day.
And that's when it hit me: if I could live with that level of pointless friction for three decades in my own bathroom, what friction was I tolerating in my business? Turns out, quite a lot.
The Friction You Can't See
Companies lose nearly 30% of their annual revenue to operational inefficiencies, according to IDC research. Working with founder-led businesses every week, that stat tracks completely.
THIRTY PERCENT.
It's not from bad strategy or poor client delivery, it's friction - the small inefficiencies, manual workarounds, and 'that's just how we do it' processes that drain time, energy, and profit without anyone really noticing.
Another study found that 26% of every employee's workday gets wasted on needless administration. That's more than two hours per person, per day, doing work that doesn't actually need doing.
Chasing down approval for an invoice. Recreating a report because the data lives in three different places. Manually updating a tracker that could be automated. Asking someone a question because the answer isn't documented anywhere.
None of it feels like a crisis in the moment. But add it up across a team, across a year, and you've got a serious profit problem disguised as 'just how things work around here.'
Where The Friction Actually Lives
The thing about operational friction is that it hides in plain sight. You're so used to working around it that you forget it's even there.
After working with dozens of businesses, we've spotted the usual suspects.
When Critical Processes Live In People's Heads
Sarah knows how to reconcile the project tracker with the finance system. Tom remembers which client needs invoices sent on the 15th versus the 1st. Everyone has their own system for tracking time, updating forecasts, or following up on late payments.
It works until someone's on holiday. Or leaves. Or gets promoted and suddenly doesn't have time to be the institutional memory anymore.
We worked with one business where a key finance process existed entirely in their bookkeeper's head. When they went on leave, the whole thing ground to a halt. No one could find the information, no one knew the steps, and the founder spent a week firefighting instead of running their business.
Not ideal.
System Sprawl
You started with Xero. Then you added a project management tool. Then a CRM. Then a time tracker. Then a separate system for resource planning.
Now you've got five tools that don't talk to each other, and someone (probably you) is manually copying data between them.
We recently helped a business migrate between accounting systems. Sounds straightforward, right?
Except their historic data was patchy, incomplete, and lived across multiple platforms. Before we could even think about automation, we had to do a mass clean-up just to understand what was actually going on.
The friction wasn't the migration itself. It was years of workarounds that had become 'normal.'
The Invisible Bottleneck
Revenue's up. Team's busy. Clients are happy. But profits aren't moving the way they should be.
Why?
Somewhere in your operations, there's a bottleneck you haven't spotted yet. Maybe it's the approval process for new hires. Maybe it's how long it takes to get accurate project profitability data. Maybe it's the three-week lag between finishing a project and actually invoicing for it.
One founder we worked with was genuinely shocked when we built them a dynamic monthly cash forecast. They'd been planning their next funding round based on gut feel and historic trends.
When they could actually see the cash impact of each new site opening, they realized they'd been about to raise too early. And give away more equity than necessary.
That's not a finance problem. That's friction masquerading as normal operations.
What It Actually Costs You
Yep, the financial hit is significant. Some research suggests businesses can lose up to £1.3 million annually to inefficient processes.
But the money is just part of it.
Friction steals the time you could spend growing. Every hour spent chasing information, redoing work, or firefighting preventable problems is an hour you're not spending on strategy, business development, or (radical thought) rest.
Team morale takes a beating too. Nothing burns people out faster than feeling like they're working hard but not getting anywhere. Manual, repetitive, soul-destroying admin doesn't just waste time' - it drains motivation.
Then there's decision-making speed. When you don't have clear, accessible data, every decision takes longer. You second-guess yourself. You delay. You end up running the business on lag instead of in real-time.
And perhaps most frustratingly, friction stops you from spotting opportunities. You're too busy managing the mess to see what's actually possible.
How To Actually Fix It
Right, so you don't need to rip out your entire operation and start from scratch.
Start small. Start with one area of obvious friction.
1. Do A Friction Audit
Take a week and actually notice where the friction is. Not in a 'let's fix everything' way, just observe.
Where are people getting stuck?
What questions get asked repeatedly?
Which tasks feel harder than they should be?
Where does information go to die?
Write it down. You'll be surprised how much low-hanging fruit you spot just by paying attention.
Want a template? Good Company members get access to our Friction Audit Template' - it's basically a structured way to capture this without it turning into a massive project. More on that at the end.
2. Fix The Foundations First
Don't automate a broken process. Don't add another tool to solve a documentation problem.
Ask: what would make this process work simply?
Often, the answer is clarity. Write down the steps. Decide who owns what. Delete the bit that doesn't actually add value.
We helped one client spot that they'd exceeded the VAT threshold - something their bookkeeper had stayed completely silent on. That's not a systems issue. That's a 'who's watching this and what are they responsible for?' issue.
3. Automate The Repeatable Stuff
Once a process actually works, then you can think about automation. But be strategic about it.
Automate the high-volume, low-value tasks: invoice generation, payment reminders, recurring report creation. Not the stuff that requires judgment or client-specific nuance.
One business we work with had been manually pulling together monthly reports from three different systems. Every month. For years.
We set up a simple automation that cut that task from four hours to fifteen minutes. Four hours back every month (nearly 50 hours a year) for literally zero extra effort after the initial setup.
4. Document As You Go
When someone figures out how to do something tricky, write it down. When you solve a problem, capture the solution. When a process changes, update the doc.
This isn't about creating bureaucracy. It's about building resilience. So that when someone's on holiday, or leaves, or gets hit by a bus (hopefully not), the business doesn't grind to a halt.
We've had to temporarily fill vacant positions for clients more than once. The ones where we could step in seamlessly? They had documentation. The ones where we spent the first week trying to piece together what actually needed doing? They didn't.
The Takeaway
Installing those dispensers took 20 minutes. It solved a problem I'd lived with FOREVER. Most operational friction in your business isn't that different. Fixing it isn't hard, noticing it's even there is the tricky bit.
So do the audit. Notice the friction. Pick one thing. Fix it. Then pick the next thing. Little wins.
