One Hot Minute - A Quest for Efficiency and Profit

"Most small businesses don’t make money in their first 5 years…"

At least, that’s what heard repeatedly until I believed it.

But when I started Three Mills, I had an unconventional theory and a huge motivation to prove this idea wrong.

The result?

We were profitable from week one.

This concept completely shattered those stupid business one-liners we’re encouraged to subscribe to. That it’s okay to not make money in the beginning. 

Turns out it’s complete garbage.

I realised it's more about protecting egos and covering up the fact that most people are just winging it. 

I can tell you that our first year of operating was our most profitable by far. 

But today's not about that. It's about the opposite.

I've always had moments of shitting my pants that the tide can change at any moment.

And for us, it started to a few years in. 

The more we grew, the less efficient we became.

We started having months and quarters where we would even go backwards. 

There are dozens of reasons for our declining net profit.

Some are okay and explainable, others were super dumb and we should have known better.

But today I wanted to talk about one thing we did last year that produced insanely awesome results and helped us turn a spiralling year into an okay one.

Let’s dive in:

I was reading about a waste management company called the City Bin Co which has an incredible story. 

They were using themes for their quarterly objectives to make them more fun and easier to implement. 

The founder, Gene Browne, began asking:

“What is the single most important thing going on in the business in the next 90 days”

At the time, they came up with “Life Begins At 40” to raise profitability while recovering from the recession. 

Their goal was to increase the company’s profits by $40k per month through recurring revenue or savings. 

All employees were encouraged to submit ideas to raise cash or cut costs. 

I remember looking at Three Mills and thinking, we're not even close to being organised enough to use 90 sprints or quarterly objectives… I thought they were things that big companies with offices did that small businesses didn’t.

But we jumped in and tried it. 

We ripped the whole idea off and applied it to our efficiency problem a year ago. 

We named it One Hot Minute. 

Yes, from The Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

The idea was for everyone in the organisation to find a saving of at least ONE minute per day so we could get more done with the same or fewer people. Ie continue growing without onboarding and still maintain quality and culture.

We called many meetings to explain the problem, outline the challenge and discuss the ideas. 

We doubled down on the enthusiasm and focused our daily briefings and high-fives around the progress each team was making towards saving minutes.

We gamified it and momentum started to build. 

We printed One Hot Minute notepads like this to capture ideas:

We even came up with this massive thermometer that was filled in as ideas were implemented and the organisation became more efficient. 

(Don't ask me how I found it in storage earlier this week)

Some of the best ideas were things like:

• Workstation redesigns to minimise the number of steps taken.
• Staff coffee ordering app to limit wait times for staff coffee.
• Processes and workflows overhauled.
• Product lines deleted.
• Shorter meetings

It transformed what would have been a typical corporate discussion about saving money into something that every person was happy to work on. 

There are plenty of tiny things I’d consider doing differently next time I run a themed quarterly. 

But if I had to pick one it would be:

Be more patient. 

Orchestrating any type of organisational change takes an age but it's worth it. The first time you run something like this it's going to be clunky. 

 And that's okay.

In hindsight, I should have run it for 4 or 6 months and worked hard to maintain communication, share results and celebrate wins to make sure concepts were bedded down. 

Fast forward a year, and last week our senior leadership team met to discuss our objectives for 2025. 

Over the next month, we plan to have three themed quarterly objectives ready to roll out.

I highly recommend you try it out.

That’s all for today.