Every entrepreneur at some stage faces the same dead-end situation. Your team is working flat out, orders are piling up, and the solution in front of you is simply to add more resources. However, adding more resources means that this, too, creates other problems, such as training costs, higher overhead, and the time required to integrate new employees.

There is a different approach that smart entrepreneurs are taking first. Before you grow your team, examine if your current infrastructure is really allowing your staff to accomplish at their best. Productivity constraints are most likely rooted within systems that are hindering flow.

Productivity-driven infrastructure reflects a new mindset of thinking about business expansion. The focus isn’t on throwing more people to work on the problems you are facing; it involves investing in infrastructure that multiplies the impact of the team you are working with today. It is all about building a space where people can work in a smart, faster, and frustration-free manner.

Its efficiency can be a multiplying factor in productivity to keep your team members engaged in activities that are of higher value than struggling with inefficient processes today.

Common Productivity Challenges

Walk into most small and medium-sized business operations in Australia and you will find the same inefficiencies happening. Messed-up processes that see employees wasting more time looking for things than doing the actual job. Inventory that is damaged because it is stored inappropriately. Manual processes that occur unnecessarily because the business layout does not allow for efficiency.

These aren’t mere frustrations. These are proactive productivity killers, and they’re compounding every single day. When a person spends ten minutes searching for a product that ought to be right at their fingertips, that person loses ten minutes of labor expenses without any labor achievements. Scale it across your team, across weeks, and you’re losing productivity costs that’ll never appear on a specific report.

Bottlenecks, be it due to poor design and physical systems, are actually quite insidious issues, as they tend to be accepted as simply “the way it is.” Your team adapts and finds a way around them, and inefficiencies become simply accepted norms. Accepted inefficiency, however, is still inefficiency, and it is bleeding you dry every day.

In coaching terms, this is the key insight to keep in mind, because it transforms the way that StartUp entrepreneurs think about such challenges. A new employee might cost you, say, sixty to eighty thousand dollars a year, when you think about the cost of their employment. Why might you consider infrastructure changes rather than more staff? Well, it often costs less, and it always happens faster, because you get the productivity boost right then, rather than waiting months to get it.

Implementing Productivity-Driven Infrastructure

To start constructing productivity-based infrastructure, one must first identify the areas of the current infrastructure that are producing friction. It is important to identify the places within the infrastructure that cause the team to have to pause what they are doing in order to address an issue that shouldn’t be on their plate. At what points are the delays? At what points are mistakes being made? At what points are employees complaining about “how things are”?

Physical organisation is the base of operational effectiveness. When your environment is designed to facilitate effective workflows, everything works better. Your employees can find what they are looking for in their environment. Your products go through their way in your company without extra handling. Your environment encourages people to act in effective ways, not fight ineffective environments.

A good example of this is if your business could use a stillage system, which helps organise inventory and reduce mishandling. With a well-implemented stillage system, your business can maintain a high level of organisation consistently, regardless of which staff members are on duty or how busy the service is.

Productivity improvements are derived from a number of areas. Less time spent searching means that employees get more work done in the given hours. Fewer errors mean that less time is spent on correction and rework. Greater protection of the product means less waste as well as less customer service associated with damage to the product. Fewer accidents mean less downtime associated with that accident.

Of course, technology and automation can certainly find their usage when it comes to improving productivity. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that intelligent infrastructure can often go a long way when it comes to increasing productivity. A well-organized workspace can often find the same amount of productivity increases as expensive technology when it comes to increasing infrastructure.

The entrepreneurs who are experiencing the best success are taking a deliberate approach. They are mapping out their own work flows, looking for where the biggest friction is, and making targeted changes to optimize around those areas of friction rather than trying to optimize every area at once.

Coaching Advice for Entrepreneurs

Try this coaching exercise every quarter: walk your entire business with new eyes, and determine whether your systems are impacting or impeding productivity. Does this system enable my employees to work smarter, harder, and safer? Take brutal honesty when checking what you see.

Watch your team operate, rather than guessing what processes are like based on what you think you know about how they work. Where do they pause, where do they need to MacGyver a solution, where are queues of work building up? Such points of friction are where infrastructure improvements are most likely to pay big dividends with respect to increased productivity.

Discuss these friction points that your team faces every day. People who are doing the work always know more about the operational pain points than anyone in management. They know which processes are time-wasting, which systems are creating issues, and which changes could make huge differences. So, you are showing respect for your team’s expertise and at the same time streamlining your operations.

Try to analyze your present infrastructure from a scalability perspective. Will your present infrastructure be able to handle increased business as you see more and more orders, or will it become an ever-increasing bottleneck? Upgrades you make at this point to enhance present productivity become the building block for infrastructure that will be able to handle increased business in the future with a corresponding increase in staff.

It is better to encourage incremental change rather than keeping everything on the back burner and making a complete change when the timing is just right. Making a few changes will create instant productivity. It is not necessary to spend a huge budget on this process.

Stillage systems are physical systems that serve as tangible and concrete means of improving your workflow without having to hire more employees. These are investments that you could literally see and physically interact with. This is different from improving productivity since the advantages of improved physical infrastructure are clear to everyone in your organization.

Strategic Leverage Through Smart Infrastructure

Productivity-oriented infrastructure serves as the strategic tool by which entrepreneurs can lever their teams. It is all about not working harder but eliminating factors that impede employees from working at their optimal level.

When you invest in infrastructure to optimize processes, it is essentially sending the message to your team about their value to you. You are essentially telling them that their work is important to invest in, so they do not have to work hard to make poor infrastructure work for them. This sends out the right message to good people.

A small investment in smart and pragmatic infrastructure can sometimes lead to leaps in how efficiently your teams are working. An investment of a few thousand dollars in appropriate storage and organization can get dozens of hours every week back on the table for your entire team. These hours can then be put to use in improving customer service satisfaction or delivery times, among other areas.

It is those companies who understand that investment in infrastructure is not a thing to be cut, it is a strategic choice with compound effects over a period of time. Each and every enhancement you do will provide you a slightly more efficient company, and those minimal gains associated with compounds will provide you organizations capable of doing more with the same team.

Think about what you are truly forking out for by not investing in proper infrastructure. The time component of productivity loss is just that, the time factor. There is a much larger concept that comes into play, which is opportunity loss.

What can your business accomplish, for example, if your staff are not struggling to work in inefficient systems? It seems that the competitiveness faced by entrepreneurs in Australia affects all areas. The businesses that are successful and doing well are not the biggest, but the ones that have an operational system that enables them to do the tasks they do.

Before embarking on recruiting more members for your staff, it’s time for you to take on the challenge of getting the most out of productivity from the staff that you have, through optimizing the infrastructure they use. You could end up deriving enough productivity from optimized infrastructure solutions such that there may be no need for hiring more employees, or they would provide employees with an efficient platform within which they can work.

If you are an entrepreneur seeking real-world answers to optimizing your business processes, you might consider the efficiency of a stillage system to safeguard your merchandise and organize workflow effectively. The overall application, however, for whatever infrastructure your business requires, yields a payback measured in multiples of the cost, as opposed to the cost itself.

It is more than about being able to use better tools and better-organized workspaces. It is about making strategic choices that will leverage the power of what you consider the most precious resource you always work with – your time and talent – because when you work with the best infrastructure possible, you make business growth through operational excellence attainable through every entrepreneur’s efforts.