Streamlining business operations isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about reclaiming your time and sanity! In this episode, Tonya Kubo dives deep into the art of simplifying business processes with the brilliant business advisor, Gwen Bortner. Together, they unravel the mystery of how processes get tangled over time, leaving you with a web of workflows that drain energy and confuse your team. Gwen shares her no-nonsense insights on auditing your tech stack, identifying redundant tools, and empowering your team to redesign processes from the ground up. If you’re tired of “we do it this way because we always have” and ready to create systems that truly work for you, this episode is your roadmap to untangling the chaos and amplifying your business impact.
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Simplify To Amplify Part 3: Untangling Business Processes For Bigger Impact
Are you spending more time managing your business processes than actually serving your clients. If you’re nodding your head right now, you are not alone. I am joined by business advisor extraordinaire, Gwen Bortner, who maybe has been there, maybe hasn’t been there, but guaranteed has worked with clients or other businesses that have been there.
Untangling The Chaos: Why Your Business Processes Are Overwhelming You
In this episode, we are continuing our Simplify to Amplify series with part three, which is focusing on streamlining how your business operates. Most business owners don’t realize that they are carrying a heavy burden of overcomplicated processes. These systems grow over time with new tools and steps added whenever a problem arises or something new emerges on the scene, but rarely do we, as business owners, remove elements that no longer serve us.
The result is that we end up with this tangled web of workflows that drain our energy, confuse our team, and ultimately cost both time and money. The goal is by the end of the episode to show you how you can untangle the web in your business and create systems that work for you and not against you. Gwen, you and me were talking before we started about how process complexity sneaks up on most of us. Do you want to maybe just give us a brief introduction of how that commonly emerges?
The Sneaky Creep: How Process Complexity Builds Over Time
I think it happens to absolutely everybody. If there’s someone who says it hasn’t, I’m probably going to just call them a liar, because the truth is, even those of us who are very systems and process-focused, it happens to us too. It’s because we’re in the midst of it. That’s the reality of it. We’re in the midst of using the system, using the process, doing the thing. As we’re going along, we will fix things because things need to be fixed, or we make adjustments or we adapt something, or we pivot in some way.
All of these things are appropriate for the businesses that we do. That happens once, and then it happens twice and it happens 3 times and it happens 4 times. At some point, inevitably, almost always, have now made enough adjustments and pivots that there’s probably 1 or 2 things that don’t need to happen at all anymore but we haven’t really kept track of it and so we still continue down the path. As I said, I had this vision in my mind like a hiking trail where I know you saw this when you worked at university, the paths that are cemented versus the paths where the students walk.
There was a plan for the path and sometimes it was done a for aesthetic reasons, but sometimes it was done to actually be what appeared to be the most direct path. Over time you find this worn path in the grass that is a different path because this building and that building now are being used more by the same students. Before, it was these that were directly across from one another on the cemented path.
Things change over time. I think that that’s really what happens. Unless we make really conscious effort to say, “Let’s do an audit to see. Are all of these things true,” or unless something unusual comes up, which happened with us, but you said, “We can’t do that because we have to do such and such.” It’s like, “Why do we have to do such and such?” It’s like, “It’s because we have to do such and such.” It’s like, “I don’t think we have to do such and such anymore.”
It was one of those things that we had made a couple of adjustments over time that were all very tiny adjustments that were super small, but it meant that we could eliminate 1 or 2 steps that we had been doing before until all of those adjustments had been made. They had been made enough over time that it wasn’t obvious because like I said, they were tiny adjustments. They weren’t these big huge process changes. They were just little tiny fixes along the way.
Red Flags: Spotting Over-Complicated Processes In Your Business
I think what we should talk about next is how can you recognize in your own business, especially if you are in the, “We do it like this because we’ve always done it like this,” place. How do you recognize that your processes are over complicated? One thing you and me have talked about quite a few times, but I don’t think very often on the show is discovering that you’ve got multiple tools that do similar functions.
Yeah. The first thing is, I don’t think you ever find this issue until such time that you actually say, we’re going to look for this issue.
This is the thing that could be a problem that stays in hiding for years because it’s not going to make itself known. You have to go looking for it. I think that’s really helpful for people to know because I think oftentimes, we default to we’re bad business owners. We’re to this, we’re to that. This is the thing that you actually have to intentionally look for. Okay, keep going.
There have to intentionally look for it or it has to be revealed in some obvious way, like the conversation we had. The truth is, if we would’ve looked for it even 6 to 9 months earlier, we would’ve found it back then. It had been in that form for a long time. There was nothing that said, “Let’s go look at it,” so we didn’t. As I said, if anyone should know better, I should know better. We all default to this national tendency. The first I think really is you have to go look for it. You have to say, “I’m going to do,” and I keep using the word audit because that’s the closest word I can come to it. “I’m going to actually do an audit on this piece of the business.”
Don’t try to do it on the whole business because that’s going to be overwhelming. If you just pick one area, one specific piece, it could be, “I’m going to audit my tech stack and see what are all of the functions that each piece that I’m paying for can do. I’m going to see how many I’m actually using and I’m going to look for where there’s overlap between them.
Tech Stack Takedown: Auditing For Redundant Tools & Saving Money
It’s because in this world of SaaS, it is really easy for any software tool to make incremental changes over time in the same way that we’re talking about process changes. All of a sudden, it’s offering a whole function that you’ve been paying another tool for. Sometimes it’s not really doing it as well as it should, so it’s not worth it. Other times it’s like, “Yeah, I really just needed this piece of it. I’m paying for this other tool that also has 48 other functions that I’m not using, but I needed this one piece of it. I can get rid of that. I can eliminate it.”
To me, that’s one of the first things is to say I’m going to pick a thing and audit it and look through it and really ask, “What is this? Why am I using it? What do I need it for?” All of those things. Is that the best answer? Does that make sense for where we are now? Businesses really are living, breathing organisms because they’re involved with a whole bunch of living, breathing organisms. They are going to evolve and change over time.
Just like the parent who often has a hard time watching the child grow, they know they’ve grown. The pants are too short or the thing doesn’t fit, but they don’t actually see them growing. However, some the aunt who only comes twice a year totally sees the growth because it’s not just incremental over time, but that’s what happens with our systems and our processes. They’re evolving incrementally over time, often in very small ways, but you add enough of those small pieces together and it’s like, “These other three pieces we used to do, we don’t need to do anymore.”
I think you made a really good point about like the saas tools, especially now in 2025 when we’re recording this, there are so many saas tools that are being acquired by others.
I didn’t even think about that. That’s a whole another level.
I think of, for instance, we use Kit in your business, which used to be called ConvertKit. I personally started using Kit back in 2016 when it was called ConvertKit. Over the last few years, they’ve acquired several businesses that if you were somebody who was using a tool called SparkLoop, for instance, SparkLoop helped you gamify people referring your newsletter. Kit acquired that business. Now for the price you pay Kit, you get those features, but a lot of people don’t know that and they’re still paying Spark loops separately. Kit now has Tip Jar features, which some people are out there paying for, buy me a coffee tip jar, whatever that is. That’s one thing. Your tools change over time, as you pointed out. I know for me, especially, I never pay attention to software acquisitions because I don’t care.
All I care is the company that I’m doing business with getting bought out. It never occurred to me to pay attention to who they were buying. I only know this because I audited all of my systems and realized that there’s a whole bunch of stuff that my email service provider now offers and includes that used to be separate services years ago.
That’s one piece in when you’re doing what you called this audit. I also think when you were talking about addressing certain aspects of the business at a time, I think we also need to pause and think about what are those aspects. In our business that we work on together, we audited our onboarding first. We started off going, “We have a value of white glove service. We want our customers and our clients to have the best experience possible.”
We spent a good year really focused on the onboarding process and using the right tools for the job, for the experience that we want. Are the tools that we are using, giving our clients the experience we think it’s giving them and all of that. We’ve gone to what is our marketing section. That is our newsletter. What’s the tech stack involved in getting the newsletter out, getting social media out, even producing this show.
We’ve also looked at our operations around our fulfillment. Now we haven’t touched finance, mainly because you do the finances on your end, and that’s not something I have involvement in. There’s the finance piece. What other aspects of business should we be looking at when we’re trying to evaluate these processes?
We often neglect to consider the cost of acquiring a new tool or switching to it. We fail to weigh what we're losing and gaining in the switch. Share on XAnything you do repeatedly. It doesn’t matter. You can do it in broader swaths, like what you were describing, or you can do them in much narrower swaths and say, “We are looking at this particular aspect of fulfillment or this particular onboarding process for this particular product.” You can go as broad or as narrow as you want. Part of it is the question I always think is an important question. How much has this evolved over time? If you know you’ve done some evolution, you probably have some opportunity for simplification. There are probably some things that are still hanging in there that don’t necessarily make sense based on how things have evolved over time.
That brings me to my next point, which I was going to address, which is that the process evolution versus process design.
Evolution Vs. Design: Crafting Intentional Business Workflows
Almost nobody truly designs their processes. Let’s be honest. We don’t even really design our processes. Processes get designed as they’re being developed, and that’s fine in the early stages. What we’re talking about is saying, “Let’s redesign the process once we go in and actually audit it to figure out what actually needs to happen.” This is the place where we want to put everything for grabs, absolutely everything.
We want it to be able to say, “What if we didn’t do that at all? Would it matter? What to do instead? Is this actually valuable? Is it not valuable?” That’s the possibility. I don’t think you want to redesign your processes all the time. I think it’s really looking and saying are we finding lots of blips of, “Yeah, we’re still doing that, but we don’t need to. We’re doing that and we don’t need to. This doesn’t really feel like it’s working as well as it should, but I don’t know quite how to fix it.”
Lots of blips say, “Maybe we start from scratch and say, ‘What if we knew everything that we knew now, but we were just starting today? How would we do it differently? What would that look like?’” That to me is redesigned where we’re actually going through a full design piece. It does make sense once you have something, but designing from the very beginning almost makes no sense because we don’t actually know what we’re doing.
I was going to say, how do you know what you don’t know?
Exactly. Design actually makes better sense after you’ve got something to jump from to say, “I now have enough foundation and structure to say, ‘Okay, now that I know that, now I’m going to design something.’” we talk about that every business works exactly as designed. It gets the result it was designed to get. That is absolutely true for every business, every system, every process. The question is, are you designing with intention? In the beginning, no one designs it with intention because we don’t know what the intention really is. Once we get past the beginning, the very first stages, we can redesign it with intention.
How do we get there, do you think?
To me, that is also the audit piece. It’s first to say, “Is it really working or is it not working,” and asking yourself, “Is it getting me the result I want it to get me?” I say me, but it could be, “Is it getting the result that I want it to get my customers?” It could be, “Is it getting the result that I want it to get the folks that work with me,” but is it getting the result? Is that absolutely the result I want or is it adequate result, not an outstanding result? Is it a get by result as opposed to the result I really want? We have to look at each element and say where can things be improved, changed, updated.
We mentioned this in the last episode, but this is really the point where the more things we can take out and still get us to the place that we want to be, the more likely we’re going to be happier with the result because nothing that we add is perfect. When we’re looking at the reliability, the effectiveness, any of those things, it’s a multiplication equation. It’s process one, reliability multiplied by process two, reliability multiplied by system three, reliability multiplied by person four, reliability, all of those things.
Since none of them are 100%, every one of those things reduces the reliability. It may not reduce it a ton but it still reduces it. Every time you add something else, it reduces it more. Simplification is really the place you want to look at when you’re looking at design. What is the easiest, simplest, fewest steps, Fewest people, fewest processes, fewest technology, fewest anything that I can use to get me to the result that I want to have?
We were talking about this before, before we started recording, it’s the opposite of what you were just talking about. We’ll use Kit as an example. I’ve got this system acquiring things and now it’s got all of these tools.” I keep using Kit and that’s great and maybe I can drop some other tools. The other side is to look fresh and say, “If I was starting today, would I actually choose a completely different tool that I now know has the functions that I know I actually want and need?” It’s a little bit of a good and bad thing, but there’s advantages when you’re only using one tool that does everything.
In the SaaS world, software tools can easily make incremental changes over time. Suddenly, they might offer a whole function that you've been paying another tool for. Share on XOne of the advantages is there’s only one person to blame. There’s only one software to blame. There’s only one help desk call. There’s only one support ticket to put in. They can’t say, “But it’s because you’ve got this other system that you’re linked to. I think they did an update.” When it’s one system, it’s like, no, you can only point to yourselves. That is the only place you can point.
Sometimes that can create additional reliability because you aren’t having to spend lots of time. The downside or the risk is if it fails, everything fails. It’s not necessarily the right answer but it can be the right answer. It’s looking for how much do I trust it, how reliable is it? How confident am I in whatever the tool, the software, the person is? It’s the same problem that we have when we end up hiring or creating a unicorn in our business.
It’s a different version of the same thing, because the unicorn knows how to do the bookkeeping and does great customer support and writes beautiful social media posts, is great with finding new contractors to work with and also seems to be bringing in half the sales calls. Like. A whole bunch of stuff that’s lovely for the business, but the first problem is as soon as they go away, you don’t even know what part actually to work on.
The other part is if something stops working, you’re never really sure was it them that’s not working? Is it the system that’s not working? Is it the. Too many eggs in one basket can be a problem, but early on, that can also be the saving grace of the business that gets you to the next stage. It’s not like you absolutely have to have this or you’re going to fail, or if you have this, it’s going to be a problem. It can go either way, but being aware of it is always, for me, the big piece to say, “Yes, I’m putting all my eggs in this basket and I know I’m putting all my eggs in this basket, so I better make sure we’re keeping a good eye on that basket.” If something changes, make new decisions.
In this audit, I’m trying to think of like what’s the easy first step? I know how my brain works, but my brain doesn’t work like everybody else’s. I would start with what are all the things I pay monthly for annually for this and that. I think the other way to approach it is to actually map out the processes and then having notes on what are the systems or tools or whatever that make those processes possible. How would you approach it if you were helping somebody audit?
Practical Hacks: Simple Steps To Streamline Your Business Operations
This is a classic example of both are right answers, and I think it really is, how does your brain work? Some folks will be, “It’ll be easier to start with, what do I have, what are the technologies,” all of those things. “What am I using,” and then digging in and saying, “What else do they have that I don’t even know that I’m aware of, that I’m not using?” That’s one side, but the other side is to say, “What do I actually need,” and then mapping and saying, “What am I using these things for,” and maybe doing some research to say, “If I was looking for a tool that did A, B, C, and D, is there anything out there that’s one tool that may be in this price range?”
I think both totally work, but I think it depends on how your brain works. I don’t think there’s a right answer on this. I think the right answer is saying, “I’m going to make a conscious effort to do this.” I don’t think the method is the right answer. I think the doing is the right answer.
I can definitely see where that is true. When we’re looking at taking a practical approach to simplifying our processes, it sounds like one step is consolidating the tools and software. You’ve talked about how you can review your tech stack. Is it getting me the result that I want? You didn’t say this explicitly, but it also is part of, I know your natural decision-making process, which is, “What would happen if we didn’t do this? Does the tool get us the result we want? Also what would happen if we didn’t have this tool? How would we get it done that way. If we took this out of the equation, what would that look like?”
We have a shared client that realized that they were using tools because they have been told that they should use tools, but really, all the tools were making it way more complicated than it needed to be, when really the answer was just write an individual. All of us have had email software now for a long time. It’s like, “We need to automate it,” but not for ten people. You don’t need to automate for ten people, particularly when you’re talking to them once a month. You don’t need to automate it for ten people once a month.
Ten people every day, you might want to automate it, but the whole thing was just getting way more complicated than it needed to be. That is the question, what can we eliminate? That always is the question. We finished doing our own quarterly planning process with our clients and one of the things that we talk about is what are all the things that you’re currently doing and what can you delete. Always try to find one thing that you can delete. It doesn’t mean delegate. Delegate is another category. We talked about delegate too. Delete means we stop doing, we stop using. Not that we hand off, but that we actually stop. The same thing is true with processes of technology. Is there a technology I don’t need anymore?
Sometimes it’s because somebody, we’ve already got another technology that does, but sometimes it’s like, “I used to need this, but my business model has changed my whatever has happened and I don’t really need this anymore.” For example, I’m going to pick on Slack for the moment. We use Slack internally. If we had less than 3 people, like 2 people, I’m not sure if I’d want to be able to keep paying for Slack. You’d probably agree with me, but I’d probably say I’m not sure it’s worth it for two people. I think it’s worth it for three. Definitely worth it for 4 or 5 or more. Is it worth it for two? I’m not sure that we’ve got some other tools that are available to us.
I think that’s a prime example and maybe it’s just because this is one that I’m always thinking about because right now in our business specifically, and I think this will help the readers. We use Slack for our internal communications and discussion in anything where we want to go back and forth on something in real time.
Businesses are living breathing organisms. They evolve and change over time. Share on XWe also use Google Workspace for our email and Google has its own instant messaging system. We use Zoom because you use that for your video calls with clients and we use that for meetings. Zoom has come out with its own instant messaging platform. On any given month, I don’t know if you are, but I’m looking at each of them and going, “Does Slack still make the best sense for us?”
Part of what we’re doing, or at least what I do is I go, “In terms of the day-to-day functionality that Slack provides, are any of these other tools better? Are any of these tools better enough that it is worth losing all of our historical record that we have with Slack of past conversations in order to fully move over?” The reason I bring out both of those points is because I think sometimes we stop at does this do the same thing as that? We don’t think about that cost of acquisition or the cost that comes with switching, what we’re losing, what we’re gaining in the switch.
It’s a piece that you have to play into it and say how much does the change happen. I went from one calendaring system to another calendaring system. I had used the one for a long time. I was a very early on person under the one. When I moved, there were challenges. There were some things. I knew there would be. In this case, it was about support, about being to get support when something wasn’t quite working. There were a few little niggly things that back to it wasn’t a good experience for my customers. It was like I’m willing to suck it up and do what needs to be done. With most things, sometimes we overthink that and we say, my gosh, it’s going to be weeks and months and all of that.
I think even you may have said it’s like, “That’s going to take like a month or two to do.” It was like, “No, that’s going to take me like one night,” and I did it in one night. Sometimes we also make things bigger than they need to be and so we put off because it’s like, “It’s going to be a big deal.” It’s like, “No, just do it.” Both back to both sides have to be considered. It’s not an absolute, but I will say if there is any belief that you can eliminate something, you will probably be ahead probably for pretty fast.
From a practical perspective, when we’re looking to simplify processes, we can start by consolidating our tools and software. I think we look at our documentation. Our documentation, a lot of times, hides things that we don’t necessarily know. I think sometimes, we make the mistake in how we document. I have seen documentation before that is very reliant on the how. You use this tool to do this and this tool to do that and that tool to do that.
I have found it’s much more effective if my documentation focuses on what it does. What and why independent of who or how because I think what we’re really talking about when we’re talking about simplifying these processes is the who and how are variables. They’re not always 100% true that this person has to do it or this thing has to be accomplished in this way.
Really looking at your documentation and getting to the what and the why behind the processes, and then figuring out the how and the who after the fact. Gwen already talked a bit about strategic automation. A lot of times, it does make sense to do things manually for a while so that you’re automating the right aspect of a process and you’re not overcomplicating a system by adding automation where it doesn’t really bring you value.
Now where I want to go from here, Gwen, before we run out of time, is we have readers who have teams. We’re talking a lot from a business owner perspective, doing things differently. I think there’s another layer when you are what I call moving people’s cheese and you are changing how they do their jobs. How do you recommend engaging your team or your staff in simplifying processes?
Team Empowerment: Getting Your Staff On Board With Process Changes
The first thing is, when you’re bringing new people on, this is a beautiful time to look at optimizing your systems and your processes because they don’t have all of that historical reference coming in. Often, if you’re focusing what you were just talking about, the what and the why, and then letting them run with it, what you’ll find is they’ll skip 2 or 3 steps because the 2 or 3 steps that they’re skipping aren’t actually needed. They’re back to historical pieces.
They’ll be asking questions like, “Why are we doing that?” As you start to explain it, it’s like, “I’m doing this because I had hired someone who was incompetent and I had overcompensated for their incompetence by adding these three steps.” It’s like, “I don’t need those three steps because you’re actually bringing your whole brain to the game. You know that we go from A to B and I don’t have to remind you, C, D, E, and F here in the middle between A and B.”
Letting them see it and own it and understand the what and why. It allows them to start streamlining Yeah. Bringing their best pieces in it. If we’ve got existing employees that do know the history from the beginning of time, and the stone tablets that it was originally written on, that becomes a different problem because some of them want to want to hold onto that. This is where we often in our simplification realize that the person we hired to start our company is not the person we need now in our company. Sometimes, we have to make some hard choices there, but other times they’ve just been waiting to make it better.
If you open it up to them and say, “We are trying to streamline this,” if we were to say the phrase I used earlier, “You get to know everything you know now except we’re starting from scratch. Today is day one of the business, how would you do this?” Often they’re like, “We would just do A, F, D, in that order, what and why, “and then we’re done. You start walking through and it’s like, “That’ll totally work. Because we used to need to do D because of this other thing, but that’s no longer true. Now it can be after F and it makes better sense because now that eliminates these six other steps that we were having to do.”
It allows people to be able to be empowered. To me, empowering your people to help be a part of the change and direct part of the change if you’ve got existing people is the best way. As I said, there will end undoubtedly be at least one person over time, it may not be this time, but at some point, who just fights it. If they fight it, then they’re probably no longer the right person for you and your business where you are now. Although it feels tough to let someone who’s been really good to go, I always say let them go be successful for somebody else who needs all of that same thing at their stage of the business, which is not where you are anymore.
Good advice. Hard to hear, I think, depending on where you’re at, but important to know.
Every time I’ve seen a client deal with that in really like those very specific situations they’ve been with them for a long time, they’ve been a good employee and realize they have to release them because they’re just not the person they need, they always find another role that you can tell they’re way happier in. They only leave you either because they also have their own version of misplaced loyalty, so they’re going to be slightly miserable staying with you because they owe it to you.
The misplaced loyalty. That is a whole other episode. I’m making a note right now because we do not have time to go into it, but it’s another thing.
That’s definitely a whole episode.
I’m going to bring us to a close. I just want to thank you for reading. Thank you, Gwen, for walking through this process of simplifying processes because honestly, going into the episode, it seemed like a much more direct step-by-step process than you have helped us to unpack because there is a lot of different variables that are dependent on what type of business we have, our business model, and also how many people are in involved in the business.
If you are still reading up to this point, I hope you recognize that simplifying your business processes really isn’t just about what is efficient. It’s about creating the space for what truly matters. Whether that is your own peace of mind, whether that is how much you are spending in overhead, or whether that is the level of excellence with which you can deliver the services you provide to your clients.
When you reduce unnecessary complexity, you are freeing up mental bandwidth for creativity, strategy, and actually showing up and serving your clients well. The goal that we have here and the goal that we’re trying to communicate to you is not that you should be able to perfect a process right out of the gate. It’s just start with one area where you see complexity causing the most pain, apply these principles and then build out from there.
I would say if you don’t already have a process in place by which you’re evaluating your processes, start a couple of times a year, maybe spring and fall, and then work up to quarterly because consistent improvements add up to significant transformation over time. If you are ready to dig a little bit deeper with Gwen with us, I would highly recommend you check out Insight to Impact. It’s our weekly premium accountability subscription.
It could be the right next step for you. What it does is provide you with a thought-provoking question every single Friday. If you choose to respond, you get an equally thoughtful, personalized response back from Gwen, sometimes from me, that’ll help you examine your business and maybe even evaluate what could be simplified. No automation whatsoever. Head over to EverydayEffectiveness.com/impact to learn more.
Mentioned in This Episode
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
