Sun Tzu 4 Small Business | Strategy and Tactics, Technology and Leadership, Management and Marketing for Small Business Owners · James Eling | Entrepreneur, Marketer, Strategist

39 - Top 20 Small Business productivity tips

·32 min·2 clips

James says he is “always looking to kill off the worst 10% of our processes.”

James keeps this practical. He opens by pointing back to the AI tools episodes, especially ChatGPT and Midjourney, because that interest has clearly spilled into the business. Around 30 businesses showed up at Xtreme Networks for the seminar, which he takes as a pretty plain signal: small business owners are curious about AI tools. Then the episode gets more useful. The best example is a customer problem after hours, with most of that customer's PCs stopped and the team needing to move fast. Six people worked across two countries. Microsoft Teams kept the troubleshooting visible, the next jobs obvious, and the communication tight even though nobody was still sitting in the office. That's the point. Productivity is not some grand strategy slide; a lot of it is just removing the waits, guesses, and repeated work that slow people down. Training gets the same plain treatment. James argues that every team member needs to understand the processes, technologies, and normal way the business works. Customer service counts. So do manufacturing, professional services, and any workflow where the same job should lead to the same kind of result. Rework is the killer. If someone spends five hours doing a job wrong and someone else spends three fixing it, the business has turned a five-hour job into eight hours. That hurts the team, and it can leave the customer paying more for less value. James keeps tying productivity back to hiring a strong team, building a great product for customers, and keeping enough margin to reinvest. This is part one: seven tips used inside Xtreme Networks, with the rest coming next week.

As heard by us

A practical take on productivity that keeps tying the work itself back to profitability.

James from Xtreme treats episode 39 as a practical look at productivity as a small-business problem, moving from AI tools and inflation into the day-to-day realities of Teams, training, and rework.

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Why you'd press play

You want productivity advice that starts with tools and ends with profitability.

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