1 Demand Pushback
Many CEOs underestimate how hesitant employees are to speak up when they’ve been assigned to projects they know are a waste of time. Give your team explicit permission to flag you down and alert you—no matter how busy you seem. One owner I know discovered that an employee had been preparing a monthly report the company no longer needed for nearly three years because the owner had never mentioned it wasn’t necessary anymore.
2 Plug Tiny Leaks
Jeff Frushtick, CEO of industrial equipment maker Leonard Automatics, discovered through a consultant that his team spent hours each week hunting for missing tools at the Denver, N.C., firm. They turned up in places like “someone’s tool belt or a work bucket at a different assembly job,” Frushtick says. By storing all gear for each operation on its own cart—and addressing dozens of other comparable hiccups—he has raised profits fivefold since 2013 at the 35-employee firm.
3 Encourage Self-Service
To reduce the four hours his salespeople typically spent closing deals, Steve Hall, founder of the Dallas-based online automotive retailer driversselect.com, overhauled the sales process in 2011. Customers now complete 90% of it -virtually—by chatting with “customer experience officers” first—and it takes less than an hour to finalize sales at the dealer-ship. Profits at the business, which expects 2014 revenue of around $52 million, are up 12.5% year-over-year.
4 Prevent Errors
It costs more to win new customers than to keep existing ones—so don’t let sloppiness drive your accounts away. At Return on Digital, a British digital marketing agency that serves U.S. clients, CEO Guy Levine keeps contract renewals high by having his team use a nine-point checklist to review all documents before clients see them. “We should be finding our own errors and not leaving it to the client,” says Levine, whose firm has about $4 million in annual revenue.
5 Go Lean
Everyone equates this method of reducing waste with manufacturing companies like Toyota (or Leonard Automatics), but according to Guy Parsons, a founding member of the Lean Enterprise Institute, it applies to every type of firm. Identify the four to nine processes that drive your business, and spring for a lean consultant to help you streamline them. In my experience, companies that do this often double their revenue without adding any additional headcount.
Verne Harnish is the CEO of Gazelles Inc., an executive education firm.
This story is from the October 27, 2014 issue of Fortune.
