Lean companies get ahead by remaining open to change and optimizing processes and schedules for the people performing them. By remaining introspective and measuring time spent versus the ROI of every activity in the business, brokers keep their agencies agile without getting attached to inefficient processes and sunk costs.

Any job that requires discretion and intelligence is best left to a person. Assuming that humans have nearly unlimited potential, there is always a way to optimize someone's workflow and increase their value to the company.

4. Customer insights over intuition

One of the biggest insights to come from the lean startup methodology was the concept of the minimally viable product paired with a cycle of iteration. Lean startups understand that as an organization building something, you don’t always intuitively know the best way to solve your customer’s problems, because you don’t live their problems every day. Instead of investing time and resources up front to build something “perfect,” agile companies build a minimally viable product — a product that will solve a customer’s basic problems — and then innovate and iterate based on customer feedback until they create something people love. Gathering customer insights rather than acting on intuition is critical to this process.

Brokers must provide HR tools that give employees the power to fix issues on their own. No one has time to make phone calls and wait two business days to get an answer on a benefits question. Brokers need to spend their time bringing in new business, negotiating better products for their groups, and recruiting and retaining top talent. Better systems have higher upfront costs, but the opportunity costs of wasting time in outdated processes are much higher.

The most competitive benefits advisors learn from the most innovative startups of our time: the ones that have always been lean and work hard to continually get even leaner. You can weave lean practices into your consultancy services and enable the companies you work with to get lean as well. Be introspective, go paperless, optimize your people, and value your customers’ insights so you can spend more time growing your business.