As I’ve often remarked, one of the things I love most about my role is that it gives me a chance to get a sense of the themes in the land of aspiring businesses.What I’m seeing right now across several different sectors is that we’re at a stage of the business cycle where there is no more capacity. A lot of businesses don’t want new customers or additional orders because they’re struggling to meet demand right now – they are at full capacity.For many, the only way to increase that capacity is to increase productivity, which means to become more efficient.My sense is that most small businesses are around 20% inefficient, meaning they could get 20% more output with the same level of resources. It does not mean they could reduce costs by 20%.As an aside, I think this might have been at the heart of the failed health reforms of the 1990s (which I was involved in). Numerous studies said that hospitals were 20% inefficient, but what doctors meant was that they could see 20% more people for the same dollar. Treasury thought it meant they could reduce spending by 20%. Whoops.There are some businesses which are less than 20% inefficient, mainly those which have automated their processes.There are some who are much more than 20% inefficient, mainly because they don’t have standard processes, let alone streamlined.Inefficiency comes in two forms – doing the wrong things, and doing things wrong. If you’re doing the wrong things really well, you’re still inefficient.Doing things wrong can be seen in multiple handling of tasks, poor handovers, lack of clarity about roles, inconsistency between teams, poor communication between departments, and a lack of planning. The only way to combat this is to develop a process consciousness, get some help from a Lean consultant, and then systematically go through the business looking for opportunities to standardise, streamline and automate.This has always been important, it’s now becoming urgent: your growth and your current customer retention depends on improving your efficiency.If there is one thing that should get put on a placard and posted on every wall, it’s that: standardise, streamline, automate.Okay that’s three things, but it’s one phrase. In Lean terms that’s called batching:)