It’s important to run an organized and optimized business. Bad processes will cost time, resources, sales, customer dissatisfaction and loss of team moral. So you need to constantly evaluate the biggest pain points at each stage of your growth, because these constantly change. Then you have to create the processes that fuel your success. But you can't let perfect be the enemy of good. And 80/20 is an important principle in business and life that prevents you from getting bogged down and never reaching your goals, i.e. sometimes 80% is good enough and the remaining 20% from good to perfect costs too much without enough ROI.

At each scale, you have to prioritize different things, and that means you may do things manually or less efficiently for a while, because the cost of automating them is too great. That’s okay, because you need to prove the market, prove the need justifies the investment in automation. But when you reach each new level, the ROI equation changes, the manual work becomes too much, and the payback for the automation work is better.

So you need to regularly listen to the groaning of your team (which requires you to be involved and have an relationship that encourages constructive criticism). Find out what’s causing the most pain. Encourage your team to think about what things are ripe for improvement right now, what things will pay back more than they cost. And then make lists, prioritize, create plans, and then address the low hanging fruit with the biggest ROI.

Don’t worry when you suddenly realize your systems are inefficient. Once that fact becomes obvious, it means it’s now the right time to optimize and automate. It’s good that you didn’t do it too early.