Inefficiency rarely arrives as a catastrophe. It leaks out in five-click folder hunts, half-finished phone notes and journals you swear you posted last year. At the recent Growth Club Summit hosted by
The Firm
,
Paul Murray
(co-founder of AccountKit and director at Murray Business Solutions) showed how these drips add up to a flood of lost profit. His cure is a relentless focus on
one-percent improvements
that compound faster than any fee rise.
“Lots of small changes result in big outcomes.” – Paul Murray
Why micro-efficiency matters now
Traditional change efforts chase obvious, expensive targets: move the entire practice suite, rebuild the website, bring in a process consultant. Those moves help, yet they arrive once a decade and demand large budgets. Murray flips the lens. Hunt the everyday friction already hiding inside the tools you pay for. Remove a two-minute snag, repeat it hundreds of times a year, and you reclaim weeks of billable capacity with no extra licences or staff.
Four friction labels to watch
Label
Typical waste
Quick fix
Invisible work
“Where is that job up to?”
Live workflow dashboard with a ready-for-review filter
Zombie clicks
Endless folder surfing in the cloud drive
Surface DMS links inside the job card
Manual déjà-vu
Re-keying inter-entity loans or Div 7A schedules
Auto-post recurring journals and house templates centrally
Lost conversations
Advice stuck in one inbox
Call-note template that syncs straight to the job
Build the habit across your team
• Appoint champions: one for compliance and one for admin. Their task is to bring a single one-percent idea to each monthly meeting.
• Keep tweaks tiny: a change should take under five minutes to roll out. Momentum beats scale.
• Publish the maths: turn minutes saved into billable hours; numbers convince partners faster than anecdotes.
• Normalise safe failure: some ideas will flop. Log the lesson, move on and keep hunting gains.
A simple twelve-month roadmap
Quarter
Focus
Clear win
Q3 2025
Waste hunt
Call-note template deployed firm-wide within a week
Q4 2025
Visibility
Ready-for-review dashboard cuts partner chase time
Q1 2026
Data hygiene
Auto-posted recurring journals and standardised Div 7A schedules
Q2 2026
Culture
Second wave of tweaks led by non-partners, plus a one-percent Wall of Fame
Key takeaways
• Minutes matter: clipping two minutes off a task you touch 2,000 times a year saves more than a new senior hire.
• Exploit what you own first: most firms use only a fraction of their current app stack. Mine the rest before buying new tools.
• Shout about success: public praise turns micro-wins into a firm-wide movement.
• Iterate forever: the goal is not “finished”, it is an ongoing search for the next one-percent gain.
Ready to turn raw meeting recordings into polished notes, action lists or draft blogs without burning fee time?
