Process of eliminAItion — Issue 08 | 28 October 2026

Whenever I finish giving a presentation, I tend to wonder what people actually took away from it. You can spend plenty of time preparing your slides and deciding what you want to say, but you never really know which parts will stay with the audience.

On Tuesday, I spoke at OPEX Week's Business Transformation Summit in Sydney, drawing on my experience in large financial services organisations and, more recently, working with small businesses through eliminAIt.

I enjoyed the experience, received some encouraging feedback and made a few worthwhile connections. I also probably rushed the ending a little, but that's something to work on next time!

What really made my day, though, was seeing a LinkedIn post afterwards from one of the attendees, Lennart Borst. He mentioned a question from my presentation that he was planning to take back to his team:

“Before we add a tool, a control or a process, what can we stop doing?”

That was precisely the message I'd hoped people would take away, and it got me thinking again about why the same question matters just as much to small businesses.

Having spent much of my career in large organisations, I've seen how much effort goes into making processes faster, more consistent and easier to manage. Often that's entirely worthwhile, particularly when the work is important or there are obligations that need to be met.

But I've also seen how easy it is to become focused on improving the way something is done without questioning whether it needs to be done in the first place.

The same thing happens in smaller businesses, although the consequences can be much more immediate. An unnecessary report, an extra approval or information being entered into two different systems might not seem like much on its own, but when you're already juggling customers, staff and the day-to-day running of a business, it all adds up.

One of the things I've noticed since starting to work with small businesses is that having fewer resources can sometimes be an advantage when it comes to making improvements. There's often less room for unnecessary complexity, and owners have a very practical reason to question anything that takes time without adding much value.

That's not to suggest small businesses always have better processes. Far from it. But I do think there's a lesson here for organisations of any size: sometimes the most effective improvement is simply deciding that something no longer needs to happen.

Imagine you run a small service business and every new customer is asked to complete a fairly detailed enquiry form.

Over time, more questions have been added. Some information is needed to prepare a quote, some isn't required until the customer decides to proceed, and a few questions have probably survived simply because nobody has thought to remove them.

You might reasonably start looking for a better booking system or a way to automate the process, particularly if your team spends time chasing incomplete forms or transferring the answers elsewhere.

But what if you started by reviewing the questions themselves?

You might discover that customers only need to answer six questions rather than fifteen. Suddenly there's less for them to complete and less information for your team to handle, without buying anything or introducing a new system.

It's a hypothetical example, but it's the kind of thinking I've been trying to apply in my work with small businesses.

My preferred order is to remove work that isn't needed, simplify what's left, see what existing tools can already do, and only then consider whether automation or AI would genuinely help.

Of course, there will be times when automating an existing process is the quickest and most sensible option. I'm not suggesting we should spend weeks redesigning something that could be improved in an afternoon. The important thing is to make that decision deliberately rather than assuming technology is always the starting point.

Before Friday, choose a recurring task in your business and ask yourself:

What would actually happen if we stopped doing this altogether?

Think about who uses the information or relies on the result, what would be affected and whether there's a simpler way to achieve what matters.

Some tasks absolutely need to stay, particularly those involving safety, legal obligations, financial controls or promises you've made to customers. But you may also discover something that continues simply because it's always been done that way.

If you can remove even one unnecessary task, you've made the business a little easier to run without adding anything new.

And that's a pretty worthwhile improvement.

Until next week,

Rob

Better processes first. Technology where it helps.

eliminAIt Process Partners

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Published from Sydney, Australia by Rob Edgar, trading as eliminAIt Process Partners. Questions or feedback? Reply to this email or contact [email protected].

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