Lean Principles for Rapid Business Growth: 9 Strategies

According to research, 99.9% of US businesses are small businesses (with less than 250 employees). And on a global scale, small businesses make up 90% of all businesses and 50% of all jobs.

That means that your agency probably falls into that category. It goes without saying that starting a small business is a massive challenge, but actually keeping it afloat and profitable with limited resources is almost exponentially more difficult.

So how do you make sure that your agency is successful and to keep it growing?

The answer lies in lean principles. To find out what they are, how you can implement them, and more importantly, how you can benefit by applying lean principles, check out the article below.

What Are Lean Principles?

Lean principles are approaches or foundations your agency, company, or business can rely on in order to minimize waste and maximize value. This way, you make sure that your business is more capable of tackling the competitors, especially those that have lower production costs.

Lean principles originally appeared in the manufacturing industry, more specifically the Toyota Manufacturing system, but they have since evolved into a universal methodology that can be adapted to different niches, including software and marketing.

Understanding and implementing lean principles can help your agency optimize workflows and foster innovation. For example, if you are a manager, you can use lean principles to improve processes, cut down costs, improve your customer satisfaction, and boost your employees’ engagement.

As the market becomes more and more competitive, lean principles can prove to be the secret ingredient that gives you that competitive edge.

Let’s get into the details of 9 lean principles that can help your agency grow.

9 Guiding Lean Strategies You Should Know

In order to make the most of lean principles and their methods, start by implementing the following strategies:

1. Optimize the Whole

Whatever your industry you are in, there are two things that will always be a given:

Now, identifying all the moving parts is fairly straightforward for agencies, as these include all of your projects, tasks, and markets you are targeting, as well as all the different ideas, suggestions, and directions your agency should be moving in.

The tricky part is the resources. In the manufacturing industry, resources are the raw materials and tools you need to produce a finished product. But agency resources are most difficult to pin down, as they include employee intangibles such as their time, skills, and energy.

Optimizing the whole means aligning all those moving parts so that you can take full advantage of your limited resources.

And you can only do that by providing the infrastructure first that will enable teams and departments in your agency to communicate, collaborate, and get on the same page when it comes to common goals.

This is the opposite of creating silos and focusing on optimizing each team as a standalone unit. Sure, you should measure each team's success using their own measures, but they should all work together with the overarching goals of your business in mind.

2. Identify Value

This is one of the most crucial lean strategies, and one of the most complex ones, as it requires you to roll up your sleeves and look at your products or services from the customer’s point of view.

What are your customer's needs? What do they consider valuable?

It means adopting a customer-centric approach and searching for value instead of assuming it, so that your agency can offer a superior product or service that meets customers' needs and/or market demands.

How do you do that in practice?

By being in touch with your customers. This includes direct communication, surveys, forms, and feedback, all of which will help you identify your customers’ pain points and needs.

Also, you can apply this to your agency or business by viewing it as a customer. What value do your teams contribute? Start by looking at the end product first.

For example, if you are running a content writing agency, the content that you deliver to your customers is considered a valuable activity. Blog posts, articles, and copy produce direct value, but there are also teams and activities that bring indirect value, such as your team of editors, which improve the overall value of your content.

3. Minimize Waste

Minimizing waste in the context of agency growth is often misinterpreted as laying people off or making budgetary cuts. However, lean principles view waste as processes that create no or very little value to the customer.

For agency, wasteful processes often include:

How do you minimize or eliminate waste?

By developing a system that will enable you to spot and eliminate waste as soon as it starts to creep in. This includes you and your team holding each other accountable for implementing and improving the processes that boost the delivery of value to your customers.

One of the ways you can minimize waste quickly is by automating some of the repetitive manual tasks, as well as by discontinuing products or services that don’t provide enough of a return on your investment.

4. Introduce Quality

Now, before you scoff and say “Wow, why didn’t I think of that?”, hear us out. Building in quality seems like a pretty strategy, because what agency or team doesn’t want to do exactly that?

However, introducing quality into your agency’s work is only effective when it’s done through a disciplined effort, which is often deceptively simple. For instance, in an effort to improve the quality of their content, teams or agencies might go overboard with editing or involving more people than is really necessary in the content production process.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways you can introduce quality without causing delays or overinflating your workflows. These include:

5. Create and Share Knowledge

Another lean principle that seems obvious and simple, but is also hard to pull off in practice, because it requires a lot of discipline on your team’s part. If you want to make your agency committed to learning and sharing knowledge, make sure that that principle applies to absolutely everyone in the company, from interns to C-level executives.

Everyone contributes to agency growth in their own way, but in order for your teams and departments to be able to do that, you need to set them up with processes and infrastructure that will support the collection and distribution of knowledge.

We recommend using a combination of the following tools and techniques:

Also, fostering a supportive and collaborative environment where your team members aren’t afraid to ask each other questions.

6. Faster Time to Market

It’s pretty much a no-brainer that every agency team out there wants to deliver their product or service to their customer as fast as possible. However, if your organization isn’t making that happen, you need to learn what is slowing your team down and why.

Although each agency is unique, some of the most common reasons for slow time to market are:

Now, the solution to deliver value faster isn’t to work longer hours and weekends, run your employees into the ground, or sacrifice quality for the sake of speed. And yet, fast time to market is a must, especially for smaller agencies, as it gives them a competitive edge.

So what should you do?

Teams in lean agencies operate in an environment that enables them to focus, and that means providing the right infrastructure and tools, such as ActiveCollab.

With ActiveCollab, you can set up your workflows in no time, and get a comprehensive view of all the crucial tasks, and milestones, as well as project delays and blockers that are causing your time to market to dwindle.

With ActiveCollab’s productivity workspace, you can manage your resources in a more savvy manner. That’s to its time-tracking features, you can easily spot which team members are able to take on more work, and prevent burnout with those who are juggling a large workload.

7. Respect People

The lean principle of respecting people is arguably the most neglected one of them all, because it often clashes with today’s world where grind culture, burnout, and lightning-fast product delivery rule.

No agency can function or grow without its employees pulling it forward with their momentum and hard work, which is why keeping those same employees around should be non-negotiable.

How do you retain your best employees, keep your team members engaged, and make them feel valued and appreciated? By doing the following:

Also, it’s important to create a workplace where people feel confident to present their best ideas and have their voices heard. Only then can you begin to truly reap the benefits of this lean principle.

8. Defer Commitment

This one may seem a bit counterintuitive since we are pretty much taught to plan each project within an inch of its life, and to factor in all possible outcomes and scenarios. If you want to grow your agency based on lean principles, doing the opposite is the way to.

What does deferring commitment even entail? To avoid confusion right from the start, it does not mean avoiding decisions, but simply making them at the last possible moment. Why? Because then you can make them based on the most up-to-date data.

What does deferring commitment look like in practice? You should:

In other words, you should remain flexible and keep your options open while constantly collecting information.

If you make decisions early on that are based on outdated info, then you might end up with a skewed image of what your customers need and end up delivering a product or service that they don’t really want.

9. Neverending Learning and Improvement

Maintaining growth and keeping your competitive edge is not something that you do once or periodically. It’s a constant journey of reflection, learning, and improvement with each new iteration.

This lean principle is not about achieving perfection, but it is about the pursuit of it. Making an effort to improve processes, minimizing waste, and speeding up the delivery of value can only happen when there is a culture that revolves around continuous evaluation and enhancement.

Try and perform regular audits of your processes, provide training and support for your team members, and gather feedback from your customers to get you one step closer to perfection.

And remember that the pursuit of perfection is just a tool that will get you to reach your actual goals: being able to adjust to the demands of the market and remain ahead of your competitors.

Conclusion - Implement a Lean Mindset Smoothly with ActiveCollab

Lean principles are not just a set of steps or strategies to help your agency grow and become more efficient and cost-effective, but a philosophy that can transform the way you approach running your business.

To experience all the benefits, you will need to adopt an agency-wide initiative and get everyone to think lean. And with ActiveCollab to help you minimize waste and streamline your processes, that undertaking becomes a lot less scary.

Ready to go lean, grow your business and lead it to success? ActiveCollab is the ideal tool to implement those lean principles in no time.

Reach out to us and sign up for our 14-day free trial, or book a demo, and our representatives will show you why ActiveCollab is a must-have tool for growing your business by going lean!