Success in a small business can be summarized in two words: reduce friction.

Make it easier for someone to find your product.
Enable an employee to be more effective.
Reduce the time it takes to sign up.
Make it easy for a customer to re-order.

Sales. Marketing. HR. Operations. Every area has sources of friction. 

Find the friction and then create solutions to reduce it. It sounds obvious but it’s amazing how easy it is to ignore, or be completely blind, to the areas of friction in our business. 

A good way to discover them is to have people outside your business look inside your business. Have a friend go through your checkout process. Hire a consultant to look at your operations. Do thorough exit interviews with your employees when they leave.

Once you start looking you’ll find friction everywhere. So the challenge becomes deciding where to start. 

Solving the ones that create more revenue can (obviously) be the most rewarding. But they can also be the hardest (and most expensive) to solve.

I’m a proponent of the movement framework: movement -> momentum -> motivation. 

Start with small wins to just get moving. Then you build up momentum. Once momentum is achieved, you’ll be motivated to tackle the harder problems.

[They say authors should write the book they want to read. I wrote this post because it’s the one I need to read and implement.]