You’ve added more steps, documents, and reminders over time because each one solved a problem in the moment. 

But you’re starting to realize that the workaround has become the workflow. And the thing that’s slowing your business down is the system you created to make it easier.

Each of those saved emails, checklists, documents, reminders, and workarounds was originally a good idea. A problem happened, you created a solution. But over time, these all layer on top of each other.

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Assets for a prior version of your business

Once you’ve been in business for a while, you have years of accumulated processes, things like onboarding documents, templates, and project workflows. 

These resources are assets. They represent years of experience, context, and problem-solving. But many of these assets were built for a business you no longer run.

Maybe they’re for: 

• an offering you don’t have anymore
• a kind of client you choose not to work with
• a smaller scale project than you currently take on

That doesn’t mean these assets are useless, but they no longer deserve a central place in your business because they were designed for a business that no longer exists.

And while it made sense to create them at the time, you don’t have to maintain them forever if they are no longer adding value.

Different kind of systems

What’s the difference between a system that supports your business and one that is more maintenance than support?

A supportive system is one that you trust mentally and physically. But a maintenance-heavy system is one that you don’t trust.

For me, I know that a system is maintenance-heavy when I have to refer to multiple places to get the links, templates, checklists, or information I need to do the activity the system is supposed to support.

These small but often repeated tasks are easy to ignore because something else always feels more urgent. But over the long term, these repeated costs quietly take time away from higher value work.

The impact of maintenance-heavy systems

For example, say you decide to make a change to one of your packages. This change has a ripple effect. You have to update your website, proposal template, onboarding documents, email templates, and project notes. The challenge is not making each of the individual updates, but remembering every place where the old information exists.

This plants a seed of doubt in your head because you aren’t 100% sure that you found all the old information. So each time you start a project, you’re mentally scanning to make sure everything is updated.

Or what happens if you have a team and the official process doesn’t actually align with how you want your business to run?

In this case, each team member is going to create their own version of the process that they think matches what you want. Each team member has personal notes, private templates, or an alternate checklist. This might mean that one team member sends an onboarding checklist that’s an old version, another sends one they created themselves.

They’re all trying to solve the same problem: follow what they think the process is. But since the official process doesn’t answer their questions, they have to make it up as they go along. This inconsistency is often a key data point to show that your system hasn’t kept pace with the way you run your business.

Why maintenance heavy systems hang on…

Sometimes it’s hard to spot these outdated systems because the tweaks were made over time to solve a real problem at the time you inserted them.

You remember the problem situation that made you create each of these things, and these workarounds keep layering on top of each other, giving you more and more opportunities to have outdated processes that reflect past versions of your business, not your current business. And eventually, because you don’t trust the system, your workaround becomes the workflow.

You know this is starting to happen when you think or say, 

• “Just remember to check this.”
• “For this type of client, do it differently.”
• “The updated version is the one I sent last month.” 

Using these phrases should be triggers to look for where information lives outside of the official process.

Now, I’m not saying you should document everything.

Information for uncommon situations will always live outside the official processes, but when common situations require someone’s memory to remember the workaround, then you don’t have a system. Your workaround has become the workflow.

The cost of these systems

The cost here isn’t just the few minutes it takes to look something up. It’s the mental cost of carrying all the exceptions in your head, having a dozen extra emails in your inbox to answer the same question over and over, or having to fix mistakes.

These small moments of friction multiply over the course of the week and as the number of projects or clients grow. As your business grows, you often need fewer, clearer systems, not hundreds of complex ones.

Letting go of things that no longer support you is not only mentally freeing, but will make it more likely that you trust the system and use it in the future.

Start with one system

I challenge you to start with just one system that’s currently adding friction to your workflow. How do you spot which one that is? Look for systems and processes that require frequent updates, explanations, or corrections, systems that are spread across multiple places.

The goal is to find a place where effort is being spent without enough return, not to review every single system in your business. Look for friction or frustration points and make a small tweak. Remember, everything evolves in your business, even your systems.

Up next, we’ll cover when it’s time to completely scrap and redesign a system rather than just tweak it.