When costs rise and work slows down, the instinct is often to cut. Cancel a tool, reduce the marketing budget or let a good team member go. Some expenses genuinely need to disappear, but cutting first can leave the real problem untouched. If you want to reduce trade business costs without weakening the business, start by finding the friction that wastes time, creates rework and keeps your best people from producing their best work.
Matt Jones speaks with innovation expert Nils Vesk, founder of Ideas With Legs, about becoming a more resourceful tradie. The goal is not to be cheap. It is to make better use of the people, knowledge, equipment, customers and processes already inside the business before spending more or cutting blindly.
Nils has joined The Site Shed several times to explore innovation and reinvention. This conversation brings those ideas down to the operational level: the handover that is always incomplete, the task only the owner knows, the recurring mistake nobody has turned into a checklist, and the process everyone follows differently.
Reduce Trade Business Costs by Substituting Before You Eliminate
Traditional cost cutting asks, “What can we remove?” Resourcefulness asks, “What could work better instead?” That distinction matters because elimination can reduce capacity without improving the way work flows through the business.
Before hiring another person, buying another platform or cutting headcount, look at what you already have. Which skills are sitting inside the team? What equipment is idle? Which previous customers could refer, rebuy or provide proof? What knowledge is trapped in the owner’s head? Which task gets repeated because nobody has simplified it?
Substitution creates alternatives. A weekly meeting could become a three-line update. Constant interruptions could move into one scheduled check-in. A complicated quote could become a simple template. A manual handover could become a checklist supported by photos. A recurring error could be prevented by one better question at the start of the job.
This builds on Nils’ earlier conversation about using innovation to grow your business, where better thinking creates growth without relying on more of the same inputs.
Run a Friction Hunt With the People Doing the Work
A friction hunt is a structured way to find what makes the job harder, slower or more frustrating than it needs to be. Bring the team together and ask what wastes their time every week, where jobs are held up, what information is usually missing, what customers repeatedly misunderstand and which mistakes keep returning.
Nils gives a practical example: removing one clunky process could save a team member four hours each week. That saving is easy to miss because it does not look like a line item on the profit and loss statement. Across several people and a full year, however, those lost hours become a serious operational cost.
Do not make this a one-off transformation project. Find one recurring frustration, choose an owner and fix it. Then invite the team to bring the next point of friction to the following meeting. Small corrections compound, especially when the people closest to the work help design the solution.
For more background on turning ideas into repeatable operations, revisit creating innovative business models and processes.
Solve the Cause, Not the Symptom
A slow team is a symptom, not a diagnosis. The actual cause might be unconfirmed materials, an unclear scope, an incomplete handover, a decision with no owner or a quote that created the wrong customer expectation. Blaming the team can hide the process failure that made the delay almost inevitable.
Nils groups causes into three areas. Behavioural causes relate to motivation, capability and the prompts people receive. Logistical causes involve time, money, resources or a process that is absent, broken or outdated. Environmental causes come from the physical or operational setting in which the work happens. The categories stop you jumping to the first explanation and help you test what actually needs to change.
This is also where customer experience and operations meet. A better question, clearer scope or photo-supported handover can reduce rework for the team while making the job easier for the customer. Nils and Matt explored that connection in their earlier episode on creating an innovative customer experience.
Use SCRAMBLE to Generate Better Options
When the obvious answer is “cut it”, a thinking framework helps the team find alternatives. Nils’ SCRAMBLE model prompts you to consider what could be substituted, combined, reversed, adapted, added or automated, modified, magnified or minimised, broken up, leveraged or eliminated.
The value is not the acronym by itself. It gives people a series of useful questions when they are under pressure. Could a different material deliver the same finish without compromising quality? Could two steps be combined? What happens if you reverse-engineer the job from the customer’s desired outcome? Which tool, skill or asset used in one part of the business could be leveraged somewhere else? Elimination stays on the list, but it comes after the team has examined better options.
Get the Process Out of the Owner’s Head
You cannot improve a process that is not written down. This becomes painfully clear when an owner wants to get off the tools but remains the only person who knows how the work should be done. A version 1.0 process does not have to be perfect. It only needs to be visible enough for the team to test, edit and improve.
Nils recommends building it collaboratively. First, list the benefits of a great process and the risks of operating without one. Then ask everyone involved to write the steps on notes, arrange them in order, identify decision points and check the draft against the benefits and risks. Trial it for a defined period, gather feedback and update it.
Because the team helped create the process, it becomes their process rather than an instruction handed down from the office. It also turns the business owner’s knowledge into an asset that supports training, delegation and, eventually, a more valuable business.
Turn Mistakes Into Business Assets
A mistake should leave something useful behind. That could be a checklist, one-page process map, photo guide, customer question, quote inclusion, script or training video. The point is to prevent the same issue from relying on memory or good intentions next time.
Nils distinguishes between a slip-up, a lapse or blackout, and a real mistake where the wrong action is applied to the wrong situation. Understanding what happened helps you choose the right prevention. Instead of asking who to blame, ask what asset would make this less likely to happen again.
Key Takeaways
- Before adding or cutting resources, ask what people, skills, equipment, customers and knowledge you already have.
- Substitute before you eliminate. A simpler process can reduce cost without reducing useful capacity.
- Run a friction hunt and remove one recurring frustration at a time.
- Diagnose behavioural, logistical and environmental causes instead of treating symptoms.
- Document version 1.0 with the team, then test and improve it.
- Turn every costly mistake into a reusable checklist, script, guide or training asset.
Leaner does not have to mean smaller. It can mean clearer handovers, fewer repeated mistakes, better use of existing resources and a team that spends more time on productive work. Listen to the full conversation with Nils Vesk to identify the bottlenecks draining your margin and start fixing them without damaging the capability your business needs.
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