Thursday, November 12, 2026
You fix the same problem for the third time this year. Here's why most SME "lessons learned" evaporate — and the 70-20-10 rule that makes them stick instead.
Last updated 13 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: United States.
You did the books again on Sunday night. You chased the one client who still hasn't sent through what the accountant needs, then opened the tax portal and felt your stomach drop at a number you weren't expecting. You want your evenings and weekends back from admin that doesn't need to be yours. What you've actually built is a business where "doing the books" is still a job for the owner, every single month, because nobody got around to designing it any other way.
US small business owners now spend around 22 hours a month on financial management and admin, and 56% have been hit by a tax surprise they didn't see coming, according to Xero's 2026 Emotional Tax Return research (Xero, 2026, reported by CPA Practice Advisor). That's not a discipline problem. It's a design problem — the same manual step gets repeated every month because it was never worth anyone's time to fix it once, so it quietly costs everyone's time forever.
Toyota's lean manufacturing method identifies seven kinds of waste in any process, then applies ECRS — Eliminate, Combine, Rearrange, Simplify — to cut them out. Applied to an owner's admin pile instead of a factory floor:
Kevin worked this exact problem with a mortgage brokerage client whose business ran on documents — bank statements, payslips, IDs — all chased by phone and email, one client at a time. The fix wasn't a lecture about organisation. It was moving the whole document upload process online, so clients supplied what was needed before the meeting instead of after. Meetings that actually went ahead with everything in hand jumped from roughly 50% to around 95%. Nobody worked harder. The process simply stopped relying on someone remembering to chase.
Pick your single worst recurring admin task this week and run it through all four letters before you touch it again. Most owners find at least one step that was only ever there out of habit.
"Kevin had a no-nonsense approach and tackled the issues head on. Accountability was the key."
Ashley Berrysmith
Icehouse Coaching Programme
Fixing a process properly takes an afternoon you don't feel you have; doing the task yourself again takes twenty minutes you can find at 11pm. That trade looks sensible every single month and adds up to years. This isn't for you if your admin load is genuinely a few minutes a week — plenty of very small operations are fine as they are. It's for owners who've done the same manual chase more than three months running and keep telling themselves next month will be different.
Eliminate, Combine, Rearrange, Simplify — a lean manufacturing method from Toyota for removing waste from any repeated process, applied here to owner admin instead of a factory line.
Pick one recurring task — ideally the one that costs you the most evenings — and run it through all four ECRS steps before fixing anything else.
No. Software can help with Simplify, but Eliminate and Combine often remove a step entirely, which beats automating a step that shouldn't exist at all.
If you did the books again this weekend instead of with your family, that's the process we redesign first.
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Sunday, October 18, 2026
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