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[2025 Audit] How Systems Keep Your Business Small
In this 2025 audit lesson, Ray reflects on a hard realization: Overemphasizing systems and efficiency too early can quietly limit growth.
Founders often jump straight to scalability.
“How do we automate this?”
“How do we make this efficient?”
“How do we systematize this?”
But there’s a problem.
If you systematize something before proving it works — and before understanding what it actually takes to make it work — you end up building infrastructure around quicksand.
Ray shares how this showed up in his own business:
- Building high-volume content systems that scaled distribution but didn’t drive engagement or revenue
- Falling in love with elegant processes instead of the results they were supposed to produce
- Trying to optimize implementation before validating effectiveness
The lesson is simple, but not easy: First prove it works.Then learn what makes it work. Only then should you systematize and scale it.
This episode is about resisting the temptation to scale prematurely — and why sometimes the manual, inefficient, unscalable work is exactly what unlocks leverage later.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why premature system-building can stall growth
- The difference between efficiency and effectiveness
- How scaling the wrong thing amplifies wasted effort
- Why manual execution often reveals the real process
- When to bring in systems — and when to stay scrappy
- How to avoid falling in love with the “how” instead of the outcome
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This episode is part of the 2025 Audit series — lessons learned, relearned, and unlearned.
This podcast is where Ray thinks through hard decisions — especially when the usual playbooks stop working.
If that way of thinking is useful, that’s what continues here.
New to the show? Start with the “Start Here” playlist:
https://player.captivate.fm/collection/a7577a6f-15da-4521-b214-35e4e47f320b
Transcript
And the headline here is, I believe systems and overemphasizing efficiency are over leveraged too early. And because of that they keep businesses from growing, including my own.
Like, so I've, I've done this and until I recently understood this lesson in its entirety, it's, it's been a bottleneck, one that I wasn't even completely aware of most of the time. And, and here's what it comes down to. Like a lot of times we have a specific result we want to achieve, right?
So we start thinking about how to achieve that goal or how to do it and we immediately go to, well, that way of doing that thing to get that result isn't scalable. We can't systematize that.
So we jump ahead and we spend all this time figuring out how to do the thing more efficiently and in a more air quote, scalable way and thinking about the system that's necessary to do it before we've even really taken the time to determine a, does this thing even work? And B, what does it take to make it work? What does it take to make it really good?
If you jump to systematizing things like I've done and making things more efficient before you've established that critical premise, like does it work and what does it take to make it work, then you're building on quicksand. And I'll use an example from my content from example because it's like a really common one.
You're one that I, I seem to like, looking back on, seem to have learned this lesson multiple times. It just didn't click. I would come up with like content strategies that allowed me to get a ton of distribution at scale, right?
Like, so I could get a ton of volume and a lot of content out.
And between like automation, AI, different tools that I, that I had access to, I'd figure out like a number of ways to scale, scale content really efficiently. And I could look at them like high volume of content was capable of going out into the universe. That's good.
The problem was I had all of this content going out really efficiently and I was really proud of the system. It was a really cool system. Like I've had a couple of these and been like, man, this is Epic.
And I walked through the whole thing but, and every one that I built they were really good at getting that part of the job done. The volume. Here's the problem. It didn't increase follower account, it didn't increase engagement and it didn't drive more business.
So what I'd basically done was build a really cool system to do something at scale that fundamentally didn't work and it didn't accomplish the goal that I really wanted. Right.
Like I got the how part done but like the result that I really wanted was, wasn't being achieved and it was because I was trying to skip the manual laborious part of like this.
Sometimes you just got to roll up your sleeves like get in there and do manually, do it inefficiently and in a way that you know, like it's, you know it's not going to scale but it's, it's going to help you prove that this thing works and help you learn or me in this case help me learn what it takes to make it work.
And once I do those two things, once I have that premise establish established, I now have the information that I need to determine if it makes sense to create a system and scale it and what kind of system is really going to be necessary.
And if I look back at the earlier stages of my career before I really understood scale, I was somewhat ignorant to scale and in this sense it benefited me.
Before I had scaled anything, teams, businesses, anything like that, that ignorance helped me a little bit because if I wanted to hit like a revenue goal for example, I would just set my sights on it and I'd just like attack it and I would just do whatever was necessary to hit the damn goal.
And more than once I had an operations team, they come to me after the fact and I'm like Ray dude, you, you could have just told us you were trying to do this. Like we can segment this, these lists and we can tag it in the CRM and we can automations work and we can do this and we do that.
And I was like oh that's sweet after the fact but it was after I had established that something works.
So the ops team that took this stuff that I had done manually and scaled it and like one of these things like looking back it was, it was a, became like a multi seven figure stream of revenue. And there was an example I've shared before.
Like I, I spent all night like sitting in my office manually scrolling through spreadsheets like individual records and looking at sales history of particular accounts like this this customer base I was going through figuring out who we were going to target in the fourth quarter so that we could make up the deficit and hit the fourth quarter, that goal that we needed to hit. And it was, it was like two nights that I went up there, like scroll and scroll and scroll and looking at a whole bunch of variables.
It was a ton of manual work. It wasn't scalable at all. But I hit the fucking goal, right?
Like, I, I got the targeted lists, I got, got exactly what I needed to, to get that to the team. And no, it wasn't efficient, but I actually got the job done. And that's, that's one of the things that the OPS team came to me after the fact.
Hey, Ray, what are you looking for? Like, when you sift through the spreadsheet, you're kind of sorting through. Walk me through it. Tell me your thought process.
Said, okay, well, and we sit down and I, I walk them through the whole thing. And, and by that time I had established that it worked and I had figured out what it took to make it work, even if it was kind of in my head.
I had created like a, somewhat of a process of going through these things that I was looking for that they could then turn into a system that could be scaled and scaling it would scale the impact. And because we knew it, got the results, we said, okay, that's something that we should look at doing more efficiently.
There's no purpose in trying to determine how to do something efficiently before you determine that it's effective, though.
And that's the thing I'm going to continue to remind myself, because now that I have the tools for scale and now that I have the tools for building systems, that being the first thing that I jump to actually creates like a limitation within the business. And like you, it's easy. I do this like I fall in love with the system that I'm building as opposed to the result that I want to achieve.
And it's really easy to end up scaling and systematizing things that don't work at all and don't even need to be done right. So, huge lesson for me. It's establish that something is going to work first.
Determine exactly what it's going to take to make it work and make it good. Then look at systematizing that and making the implementation of that solution more efficient. Hope it helps. Adios.
