🎙️ Optimize processes by shifting ownership—so your business evolves without you stepping back into the weeds.
There’s a moment most business owners recognise.
You’re deep in something operational.
You spot a clunky process.
You think, “This could be so much better.”
So you fix it.
And yes—on paper—it’s a win.
Time saved. Fewer moving parts. Better experience for everyone.
But later… a heavier thought lands:
Why was I the one who noticed this?
And why was I the one who fixed it?
That tension showed up for me recently.
Not because the improvement wasn’t worth it.
It absolutely was.
But because it revealed something deeper about how easily leaders slip back into being the optimiser—
Instead of building a business that optimises itself.
Most inefficiencies don’t come from bad people or disengaged teams.
They come from a culture where tasks get done—but rarely questioned.
Things run.
Repetition sets in.
Weeks turn into months.
And work that should have evolved… hasn’t.
This is where many founders get quietly stuck.
Delegating more.
Hiring more.
Carrying more cost—without creating more space.
In this week’s episode, I share the moment that stopped me—and the lens I returned to with my team to reset how we think about work itself.
Not to add pressure.
Not to demand more effort.
But to make improvement part of the role—not an optional extra.
If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking,
“I shouldn’t be the one doing this…”
This conversation will land close to home.
🎧 Listen to the episode.
Because freedom comes from building a business that knows how to improve—without you stepping back in.
KEY TAKEAWAYS: How To Empower Your Team To Proactively Optimize Processes
- Stop Being the Only Optimizer: If you’re the one spotting and fixing broken processes, your growth is capped. As the leader, your real job is to build a team and culture where everyone is always looking for better, faster, simpler ways to work.
- Optimize with EASE™: Get your team using a simple lens for every recurring task – Eliminate, Automate, Streamline, Enable. Ask: Do we need this? Can a robot do it? How can we make it smoother? And how do we document it so others can run it without me?
- Use a Simple Rule for Automation: If a task takes more than 1 hour a week, which is 50 hours a year, it’s highly likely to be worth automating. Even a few hours invested to build the automation usually pays back quickly and then keeps paying off, year after year.
- Make Improvement a Habit, Not a One-Off: Every month, use the EASE™ technique to optimize at least one task on your team’s board so everyone regularly reviews their own work, eliminates low‑value tasks, and finds automation and streamlining opportunities.
BEST MOMENTS: Rethinking How You Optimize Processes
04:13 – 💬 “If those people (you delegate to) aren't really mindful of what they're doing, and asking if there are opportunities for this to be either eliminated, automated or streamlined, they can end up just doing things like a robot.”
10:24 – 💬 “I've got to be sure that actually, it's not just cheap and easier and more effective just to get a human to do it, and it's not automating for the sake of automating.”
12:56 – 💬 “We eliminate, we automatically streamline, and we enable, and you can get your own copy of this so you can implement this in your business.”
TIMESTAMPED OVERVIEW
00:00 “Empowering Teams for Optimization”
06:04 “Streamlining Repetitive Tasks”
08:49 “Eliminate, Automate, Leverage AI”
11:13 “Optimizing Tasks Through Automation”
Episode Transcript
Please note: This transcript was generated using automated transcription tools and may contain typographical errors or inaccurately captured words or phrases.
Dr Steve Day: This morning I spent a couple of hours automating a task that takes about an hour a week to do. That means going forward we\'re gonna save about 50 hours a year. That\'s pretty cool. However, my reflection on this was not so good. Why was I the one that A, spotted this needed to be done and B, ended up doing the automation myself?
It\'s something I fall back into sometimes. And what I wanna talk about today is the frameworks I have put in place that should be working in my business. That needed a bit of reminding with my staff.
I wanna explain what that framework is, how you can implement it in your business to ensure that your team are optimizing their tasks. And also how to use events like this as opportunities to reinforce great behaviors. And installing a culture of continual improvement and systemization within your business.
So the story behind today\'s episode, it\'s all about our community platform. We have an event calendar in there. And we sync that with our Google calendar, and then we share that with our clients. So they can have it in their calendar. It\'s a lot of synchronization and duplication. And it was pretty clunky to say the least.
The reason it was set up like this is because it was just the easiest thing to do at the time. When we started with this new platform, there was 101 things to do. So we just did whatever we thought was the best at that moment in time. That was about 18 months ago. Yet this process hadn\'t been changed updated much since then.
It caused loads of problems along the way. And it should have been identified as something that needed to be optimized. But for whatever reason, it was missed. I spotted this today. I was doing some updates and I realized, look, there must be a better way of doing this. So I sat down, I spent about an hour thinking about how to reorganize everything.
Just get rid of stuff that wasn\'t relevant anymore. To streamline the whole thing and then to automate as much as possible. The result is that this entire process is fully automated now. Meaning that we\'re saving around 50 hours a year, which is an absolute awesome win. It also means that our clients are served better. Because there is at least less confusion about where they need to go to find our events.
Also, the recordings are automatically added to our community after each event is finished. Meaning they get access to recordings quicker. And the whole thing is just complete revolutionized the way we\'re doing this simple part of our business. The real takehome on this though was not like how, wow, this is an amazing thing to have automated, but it was. But that isn\'t actually what the point of today\'s episode is about.
The point of today\'s episode is when I was sharing this with my team, I realized a couple of big things. Firstly, it should not have been me that spotted this process needed to be optimized. Secondly, it shouldn\'t it really be me that actually did the updates and automation itself, either. Although I love doing this kind of thing, it\'s not what I should be doing in my time. And I should be empowering my team to do this for me.
So today I wanna share a framework that we\'ve had in a company for about four years, maybe even longer. And it\'s one that I have to go back to and reinforce time and time again with my team. To try to install a culture of continual improvement. And that systems thinking that every business needs in order to minimize the work that\'s done to streamline what\'s going on.
And to make sure that we\'re continually automating and optimizing everything we\'re doing. To ensure we\'re not bloating in terms of the number of staff we need to do all these tasks. Because inevitably, as our businesses grow, the number of tasks we do or the number of times those tasks need to be done will increase.
Just the sheer fat that we have more volume of traffic coming into our business, more clients to serve. We end up doing more social media content, whatever it is we\'re doing. There\'s more, more, more as our businesses grow and develop. So if we\'re not careful, we can simply delegate work down. Which is arguably the easiest way to offload it from a manager or a business owner. And give it to people to do.
But if those people aren\'t really mindful of like what they\'re doing. Of, is there opportunities for this to be either eliminated or automated or streamlined? They can end up just doing things like a robot. And that means that they are taking up their time doing stuff that maybe they shouldn\'t be doing. Or maybe it could be done quicker. There is costs involved in that in terms of the wages for those people.
But more importantly, in the opportunity costs of all the things they aren\'t able to do. Because they\'re bogged down doing things they shouldn\'t really be doing. This framework is called Optimize With EASE.
You may have heard me talk about the Sharpen With EASE process in earlier episodes, if you\'ve been following this for while. And this is pretty much exactly the same things. I\'ve just updated a few things over the years. And now it\'s called Optimize With EASE. Because I felt that was a more appropriate name.
Optimize With EASE is a recurring task that I get my staff to do. Where they look at their tasks, look at the work they\'re doing. And identify which of their tasks or their processes could be eliminated, automated, streamlined, or enabled.
Now, over the years, some of my staff have absolutely loved this. They\'ve jumped on it. They\'ve gone above and beyond. They\'ve just continually thinking about this. And those are the people that I absolutely find priceless. Because they\'re continually reducing the amount of time they\'re spending on doing the the tasks in their work. In order to free themselves up to do even more systemization or more valuable work for me.
However, there are the others who really struggle with this. They see it as an optional thing that they, you know, they\'ll do when they find time. And sometimes it gets pushed back by month by month. And no improvements ever get made. But this is the catch-22. The reason these guys are so busy is because they\'re not doing this task. And so they\'re not finding time to the one thing that they need to do in order to free their time.
So this, as a leader, as a manager, is something that I keep on going back to. And today was one of those opportunities to do that. I was able to share that like this task has gone on for 18 months. This task regarding the calendar synchronization, et cetera. And it was just the same thing happening every single week. We were posting recordings, we were updating calendars, we were syncing things.
And it\'s like literally just the most mundane, repetitive work going on and on with no changes whatsoever. And these are the ideal tasks for automation. In this case, I was also able to eliminate some of the parts as well. By just sitting down and really thinking through like what was necessary? What would make this as simple as possible?
Are there any parts this we can just get rid of entirely? To make it easier maybe for our clients or definitely for our staff to actually work with. And therefore, we can just take away some of the work. And then the work that\'s left, we can either automate it or streamline it. So after doing this exercise, I present this to my team to let them know the updates. Because it\'s changing the work that these guys are gonna do on their daily basis.
In that meeting I realized like, why was it me that spotted this? The reason I spotted it was because I was looking at something else. It sort of came up and I just noticed like, you know, there was X, Y, Z that was happening. And I was like, surely we can do this better, and I sort of got my head into it.
And it was early in the morning when I get up sometimes and do some deep work and some thinking. I just got a bit carried away. It was a cool thing to do. I enjoyed it. I love automation. I love to master around with technology. I love, like optimizing. That\'s like one of the most my f most fun business activities to do.
But also it, was like, why am I doing this? I\'m the business owner. I shouldn\'t be spotting these things. I shouldn\'t be the person that\'s like saying, hey, hold on a minute, why is this so boring? Why is this so repetitive? Why is this taking me so long to do? Like, sure, there must be a better way.
And so I use this as an opportunity to put back to my team the importance of doing that Optimize With EASE task on a regular basis. I\'m gonna walk through the Optimize With EASE process now. So you can see exactly how you can apply it in your business. And then finally, I\'ll share how you can get your own copy of this so you can start using this in your business.
So first of all, optimize with the EASE is about Eliminating, Automating, Streamlining, and Enabling tasks. So let\'s just work through each of those four components. And why each one is so important and how they sort of flow into each other.
So first off, can we eliminate the task? Now, this is the. Obvious, easy win. Like if you don\'t need to do this task anymore. Maybe it\'s just something you started eights ago that you just don\'t, haven\'t actually seen any value in. Like for example, we had some friend request process that was going on in our Facebook for a while. And it was taking around 10 minutes a day. We also did birthday greetings. That was taking about 10 minutes a day.
These are things like we either just need to get rid of them. Because I was not seeing any direct value. There\'s no actual clients coming from these activities. There was no evidence to say they were actually doing anything positive. So we either needed to, in the case of the friend request system, we actually got rid of that. And then, regards to the birthday greetings, we just automated it. So that was a great example of just being able to get rid of something in free up time.
So eliminate is always like the number one. It can we just stop doing this, we\'ll actually make any negative impact. If not, let\'s just either pause it for now, measure the impact, or just eliminate it altogether and be done with it.
The next part is about automation. Like could this task be done by a robot? Because if you feel like a robot when you\'re doing something, the likelihood is a robot or an automation could do it for you. Especially now we\'re in the world of AI. So many things which would difficult to automate before are becoming easier and easier to do that.
Because we can use AI to do the thinking part. The sort of like the evaluation part. Which used to have to really have humans involved or have complex logic gates and things. And it was just too clunky and too easy to break when you\'re building automations using very rigid structures.
Whereas now they can be very fluid and dynamic because of the use of AI. So our opportunities for automation are growing exponentially, in my opinion. And this is something that may be tasks in the past which weren\'t really candidates for automation are becoming more strong candidates far, far earlier and far quicker and far easier than ever before.
However, there is a cost involved in automating tasks. It takes time. Like I spent three odd hours this morning building this automations to actually fix these things. That\'s three hours I could have been spent doing something else. So I\'ve gotta be sure there is a positive value, like a gain in me doing this work. And I\'ve gotta be sure this is something we want to do for the long term. I\'ve gotta be sure that actually it\'s not just cheap and easier and more effective just to get a human to do it.
And it\'s not automating for the sake of automating. In this example, because it\'s a partly, process improvement, I eliminated certain parts, I automated certain parts. And I\'ve ended up with a completely hands-free system of something that\'s essential to our business. It was an, I think, a really, good candidate for automation.
As a rule of thumb, I typically say if it\'s taking more than hour a week, that\'s, you know, roughly 50 hours a year. That\'s a good candidate for actually spending some time automating it. Because even if it took you 10 hours to build an automation for something. And that\'s pretty rare for most simple tasks. That actually is still now, the net game over the first year is still a five x game, so it\'s probably a valid thing to actually think about automating.
And the last thing about automation is automation doesn\'t stop. When we automate, we\'ve gotta have some sort of process of actually how is this being documented? So therefore it can be maintained and improved and revised later on. Because automation will do whatever you\'ve told it to do.
When you\'ve built it. It will never think, oh, I should be improving myself. Maybe with, you know, advanced machine learning and AI that. Change things, but right now you\'re still gonna have humans involved. The next part of EASE is streamlined and can we make this task more efficient? Is there a better way of doing it?
Even if a human\'s involved, can we automate a bit of it? But maybe a human does some, can we add AI to augment the human, to make the human faster at doing stuff? Could we just improve? The way we are structuring the work or the order in which we do stuff, like there\'s so many ways you can optimize tasks with just sitting down and thinking them through.
Because often when we delegate work out, it can be done quite haphazardly. It could be done quite quickly. It could be just like just getting something off your shoulders and not really thinking about like how well you\'ve handed it over and actually just spending some time you or one of your staff spending some time thinking about how to improve that. It can make a huge, huge difference.
Now the last part is enabled. Enabled is about how I take a streamlined task and document it to capture the best practice, to capture the best way of doing it. So therefore I can delegate it to somebody else and it to be done to a similar standard. I can scale because I\'ve now captured the best way of doing it in the business, and therefore I can get more people to do the same thing at a high standard.
And also it means it\'s protecting the business because of locking that knowledge in into documentation to. Ensure that if that person leaves, we don\'t lose that knowledge.
So that\'s the Optimize With EASE process. We eliminate, we automate, streamline and re enable. And if you wanna get your own copy of this so you can implement this in your business, I recommend you assign this at least a monthly basis. If you\'re using a task matrix or task board system, it\'ll pop into your monthly column and then you get your staff to actually start.
Thinking about process improvement, about optimization of their tasks on a regular basis. If you head over to sys.academy/guides. That\'s sys.academy/guides. You\'ll find a link to download the Optimize With EASE framework so you can start using this in your business form today.
Hope you found that helpful. Please do hit subscribe for more episodes like this and how you can improve your business, make it more streamlined and automated. And ultimately live with more purpose, presence, and peace.
Thank you very much.
VALUABLE RESOURCES
- Get free access to our Optimize With EASE™ Framework now—here's the link to our best Guides, Frameworks, and Templates: https://sys.academy/guides
LINKS TO CONNECT WITH THE HOST
- Podcast: https://www.systemizeyoursuccess.com
- Website: https://systemsandoutsourcing.com/
- Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/systemsandoutsourcing/
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/systemsandoutsourcing/
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/systems_and_outsourcing/
- YouTube: https://youtube.com/@drsteveday42
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drsteveday42
ABOUT THE HOST
Steve moved to Sweden in 2015 and transformed how he ran his businesses—switching to a fully remote model. A former NHS doctor, with a background in computing and property investing, he now helps overwhelmed business owners systemise and outsource effectively. Additionally, through his courses and coaching, Steve teaches how to automate operations and work with affordable virtual assistants, freeing up time and increasing profits. He runs his UK-based businesses remotely with support from a team of UK and Filipino VAs. He is also passionate about helping others build scalable, stress-free companies using smart systems and virtual support.
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