Here are 26 things that you should eliminate from your business in 2026. And if you don't eliminate these things, you're practically throwing away your time and your money. So, let's get into it.
Number one on the kill list is micromanaging $20 an hour tasks. Andrew Carnegie, the man who became the richest in the world by 1902, had one piece of advice. No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or who wants all the credits.
And he showed this belief in his words when he built a multi-billion dollar empire. You see, every hour you spend on work that you could pay someone $20 an hour to do is you not spending your time on strategy, relationships, business development, or making decisions that only you can make. If your time is worth $200 an hour and you spend 10 hours a week on $20 tasks, that is $93,600 a year.
Think about that. The moral of the story is that you're not saving money by doing it yourself. You're actually spending it recklessly.
So, here's how to fix this. Delegate. And to delegate, you need this one mental reframe first.
Your time is as important, if not more, as your most expensive client. Number two, meetings with no clear agenda. A meeting that has no agenda and has no clear outcome.
People talking for 45 minutes, nothing gets decided, and everyone walks out with a vague sense that time was wasted. You see, research from the University of North Carolina found that unnecessary meetings cost large organizations approximately $100 million per year. And that 70% of all meetings actively prevent employees from completing their actual work.
So, before you schedule a meeting, write the purpose of the meeting in one line and add the specific decisions that need to be made and add what the ideal outcome of the meeting should be. And if you're leading a team, have someone check your calendar invites for agendas to make sure you're holding your entire team accountable for creating agendas and that you don't waste your time going into meetings without one. Number three feels outdated in 2026, but it's surprisingly still happening.
Manual data entry. Every manual data entry [music] process is a workflow that you haven't automated yet. And there is no version of manual data entry where it's the right call.
[music] It's slow, it leaves room for human error, and it signals to your team that you haven't invested in your own systems to help make them more efficient. You see, every hour that goes into manual entry is an hour that doesn't go into anything that grows the business. And the person that you have doing data entry, their time would be much better spent doing something that can actually make [music] the business money.
And implementing this isn't actually as hard as you may think, especially with AI. There are so many great tools out there that can eliminate 90% of your manual data entry in your business within just a week. Number four is workflows that require more than three clicks to complete.
Businesses that have complex workflows that require so many steps to work actually just slow people down, create bottlenecks, and breed resentment among your team members. Having complex systems and workflows sound safe and scalable, but [music] the complexity is often times just friction. And when every step is friction, that friction just compounds, and everyone slows down.
A great pressure test for your workflow is when you hire a new team member. If your new hire can't figure it out within the first week, then it's too complex and you have to simplify it. Remember, simple scales.
Number five non-essential Slack channels. If you have 47 Slack channels, 15 group chats, and who knows how many threads to reply to, all this does is pull you and your team members away from doing real work. And while constant communication sounds great in theory, your team doesn't need more places to talk to each other.
So, audit your communication tools once every quarter. Any channel that hasn't had a meaningful conversation in the last 30 days should get archived. Number six is measuring time instead of output.
I work with so many business leaders who are obsessed with the amount of time that they and their team members worked. They will even brag about it. But if you think about it, tracking hours is a factory floor metric from 1910.
So, why are we still tracking time like we did 100 years ago? The way I see it, the team member who finishes the work in 6 hours and logs off early is more valuable than the team member who stretches the same work to 10, but who looks busy and who's made a lot of sacrifices to work overtime. And the research actually backs this.
Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom studied 500 workers in a controlled experiment at a 16,000 person company and found that when company switched from measuring time to measuring results, productivity increased an average of 13%. So, instead of counting the amount of hours someone works in your business, stick to measuring deliverables, outcomes, and revenue per person. Number seven is one you probably hear about often in your personal life, unused software subscriptions.
People talk about lifestyle creep once they make more money, but there's a different type of creep that most business owners go through, software creep. And it happens very quietly. Someone on your team goes for that great new subscription, but then only uses it a few time and forgets about it, and they move on.
Multiply that across a team, and you're bleeding thousands of dollars per month on tools that you don't even use. And what's shocking is that the average Fortune 500 company wastes 17 million dollars in unused SaaS licenses every single year. That research was from Zylo, and they also conducted a SaaS management index, which found that on average 44% of businesses' SaaS licenses are wasted or underutilized.
So, when you look at your business credit card statement each month or each quarter, audit every subscription. If nobody used it, cancel it. Number eight, manual calendar scheduling.
When you manually schedule meetings by emailing saying does Tuesday work, you're wasting hours every week on back-and-forth communication. And you might think that I'm exaggerating, but the average scheduling exchange takes eight [music] emails for something that ideally takes zero. And research from Harvard Business School found that the average professional spends approximately 4.
8 hours per week managing their calendar. That's almost 250 hours per year wasted on coordination that surrounds meetings rather than actually [music] in meetings themselves. So, instead of manually scheduling, use a tool like Calendly to set your availability and then send somebody a booking link.
Number nine, low-value, high-maintenance clients. We had a client, I'll call her Suzy. Everything was a fire every single week.
Her husband Bob was great and easy to work with, but Suzy created so much chaos and distraction that it infected the team around her and my team. And [music] initially, we hesitated to let them go because Bob and Suzy were well-liked by other clients. But at the end of the day, I didn't care if they took a handful of clients with [music] them on their way out because guess what?
We didn't stop growing as a business because you can always go get new clients. Clients like Suzy are never going to be satisfied. No amount of attention is ever going to be enough.
And you [music] will probably have clients like this. They are low-value, they call you constantly, they drain you and your team's energy, and they are impossible to please. So, just remove these types of clients and instead use your and your team's time and energy on clients who bring [music] more value and money into your business.
Number 10, discounting your rate. Discounting only does one thing. It attracts clients who will [music] leave the second someone else has a lower price than you.
There's no loyalty, there's no value that's being driven. And this slowly erodes your own belief in the value you deliver. Instead of discounting your prices, you should be focused on what value you need to add in order to increase your prices.
[music] For the average S&P 500 company, a 1% price increase drives an 8% lift in operating profits. This is what you should be focused on. So, when you look at your current rates, make sure that they actually reflect the value that your business and your team offers.
But if you have to discount your rates in order to close a deal, then that's not a sales or a product problem. Those are problems that actually deserve your attention as a business owner. But never lower your prices just because a customer is demanding of it.
Number 11 is overcomplicating pricing models. Complex pricing models that need a calculator to explain it to a prospect only make it harder for people to say yes and do a deal with you. And complex is really just the same as confusion, and confusion kills deals.
The best businesses have pricing that is simple enough to explain in one sentence. The customer knows what they are getting and they easily know what it costs, and your sales people can easily sell [music] it. So, if you can't do that right now, simplify your pricing.
Number 12, saying yes to projects that have nothing to do with your actual [music] vision. It's called shiny penny syndrome, and it is a chronic state of distraction where businesses chase new, trendy, or exciting ideas, even tools or projects that result in them abandoning their current goals prematurely. This might look like your new project idea or that side project that seems so interesting to you right now.
And while these things feel exciting and feel like innovation, they are really just commitments that you need to turn down so that you're not distracted from your current goals. [music] And this can be hard to follow through with, especially as your business has more success because you will have more opportunities. [music] So, try this.
Research from the Journal of Consumer Research found that people who say, "I don't. " instead of "I can't. " when turning down commitments are significantly more likely to actually follow through.
So, try that [music] phrasing and ask yourself if the new thing you want to do actually fits into your current goals. And if it doesn't, the answer is, "I can't. " Number 13 is the cost-cutting mindset.
You see, when you cut costs and constantly have the point of view, "How can I spend less? " you're operating from a place of scarcity. You want your business to be lean.
But when you think about it, cost-cutting has a floor, where driving revenue growth doesn't. Every dollar you cut saves you exactly $1, but every dollar that you put into the right things that can return your money can give you $5 or $10 back. And the hard part here that most entrepreneurs don't realize is that the businesses that win are not the leanest.
They're the ones that invest aggressively in what actually produces returns. So, stop asking yourself, "How do I spend less? " and start asking, "Where should I be putting more in?
" Number 14, thinking you are the only one who can do it. It's the mindset [music] that nobody can do it the way I do it. And while you may be right that nobody can do it exactly the same way that you do it, they might [music] be able to do it different.
And what if they can even do it better? You see, the CEO who insists on reviewing every email, approving every hire is actually the bottleneck. And the owner who can't let go of execution never turns into the type of leader that's required to scale a business from 5 million to 10 million or 100 million dollars.
So, you have to stop thinking that you're the only one or the best one for the task. And delegating that task to someone who is operating even at 80% of your level frees you up to do the work that actually scales your company. Number 15, letting low-level decision fatigue destroy your judgment by noon.
Decision fatigue is real and it is expensive. published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences found that Israeli judges granted parole 65% of the time at the start of each session and nearly 0% right before a break. These were the same judges, the same types of cases.
The only variable was the mental depletion after a full day's worth of decisions. When you have to make 200 small decisions before lunch, what that's actually doing is burning your cognitive fuel, which is why you're mentally exhausted by two. And then by the time you need to make an important decision at the end of the day, your brain's running on empty.
So, plan your day to preserve your brain power and eliminate the decision fatigue. Do an audit of all of the small decisions you're usually asked to make each week and eliminate, delegate, or systematize every decision that doesn't genuinely require your judgment, especially in the morning. Number 16, the one thing that has single-handedly produced more failures than anything is perfectionism.
The market rewards timing and showing up, not the perfect product. So many people who have businesses or people who are trying to build businesses are obsessed with having the perfect product, the perfect website, the most dialed-in service before launching. But these perfectionists don't produce better work.
They produce less work later with more stress. Whatever you've been refining for the past 3 [music] weeks could have been shipped 2 weeks ago. You could have collected real feedback and already have improved [music] twice by now.
And there's a negative outcome of perfectionism. A meta-analysis in the Journal of Research and Personality covering 43 studies and more than 10,000 participants found that perfectionism is positively associated with burnout and negatively associated with actual performance. So if you're struggling to have the perfect idea or the perfect product or the perfect business, stop focusing on [music] making it perfect and just launch it when it's done.
Number 17, obsessing over your competitors. Competitor obsession can feel like a business strategy. Checking their pricing, stalking their content, reverse engineering all of their positioning.
All of that time is you not spending on improving your own product, deepening your relationships, or building your team. You see the businesses that actually pull ahead aren't built [music] by watching everybody else. They're built by becoming good enough that the comparison stops mattering.
So take that obsession over your competitors and turn it towards [music] your business. And now you have a real outlet for your focus. You can use this to make your offer better regardless of what the competition looks like.
Number 18, wearing busy as a badge of honor. What are your results? If you can't answer that with specifics, then you're busy being scattered.
effective operators I know don't brag about being busy. They brag about their results because they're busy being effective. That's the difference.
When someone is bragging just because they have so much on their calendar, it doesn't actually mean that they're moving anything forward. It's easy to be busy. You just say yes to every opportunity that comes your way.
But people who are effective, people who can actually drive results, they're focused on the outcome. They're focused on what their time is doing in order to drive a specific focus in order for them to see what those results are going to be and to create a different results inside their business. Business is what happens when you haven't made a clear enough decision about what to focus on.
So, don't book your entire day just because you'll be busy. Number 19 is generic unedited AI content. AI is one of the most powerful tools available to business owners in the past few years, but so many businesses just use it the lazy way.
They just hit generate and then post whatever comes out and they are suffering the consequences of it. A passenger recently posted on X complaining about a JetBlue ticket price that increased by $230 in one day and the official JetBlue account replied, "Try clearing your cash and cookies or booking with incognito window. We're sorry for your loss.
" AI responses are something that people can spot from a mile away because everyone is using AI. Research found that content identified as likely AI generated received 52% social shares and 38% fewer comments than handwritten or heavenly edited content on the same topics. So, remember that your audience follows you for your thoughts and perspective.
Sure, use AI to research, to draft, and to structure and then make it yours. Add your stories, check your work. And if it doesn't sound like something you would actually say, rewrite it.
Number 20, producing all of your own content yourself. You're actively running a business, so you can't also be the videographer, the copywriter, and the social media manager. Content is a growth engine, so it should run like one.
All the parts of the engine need to be a person doing that role. And if you're doing all of those roles yourself, you've built a content operation that will collapse the second that your busy and real business picks up momentum because you won't have time to do those roles anymore. So, get yourself out from behind the camera and sit in front of it.
Show up, share your expertise, and then leave. Everything else is a production task and production tasks should be delegated. Number 21, tolerating C players on your team.
You're telling your A players that it is okay to coast by on minimum effort. It's okay not to produce the best work. I'm not really serious about the goals of the business.
See, we had someone on our team who had been with us from the start and knew the business inside and out, but nobody liked working with him. [music] And people just tolerated it because he'd been around for so long. So, when we finally made the decision to remove him from the team, the area of the business actually started performing better.
You see, C players don't just underperform. They corrode the culture around them. So, your A players have to watch the underperforming person, and they either resent it and leave or start doing it, too.
So, the cost of keeping the C player is never just their salary. It's the A player who leaves because the standard is so low. It's the energy that drains out of every team member that they're in contact with.
If you know you have a C player on the team, get rid of them. Do it [music] today. And what you're going to watch happen is your business is going to improve.
Even if you think they're going to take your best team members, take your best clients, I promise you. If you identify the right person, your business will grow. Number 22, the owner-operator identity.
At $1 million, you're a doer. At $10 million, you're building systems. At $100 million, you're allocating capital and talent.
These are fundamentally different roles, and each one requires you to let go of the one before it. This is one of the most consistent patterns I see. The founder who built something incredible, but can't let go.
They're still in the weeds, still making every call, still exhausted, and wondering why the business has plateaued and is no longer growing. But, because they didn't change their identity at each level, they became the bottleneck. The hardest transition in business isn't hiring your first employee.
It's letting go of the role that made you feel valuable and stepping into a role that makes the company valuable. That shift requires you to stop doing the thing that you're good at long enough to build what you've never done before. Number 23, hesitating in decision-making.
When you as the business owner sit in paralysis for weeks waiting for the perfect moment or the right information to come before making a decision, you're going to fail. The mistake is hesitating and waiting and not making any decision at all. And what successful businesses realize is that the speed of decision-making is the real competitive advantage.
Now, I recognize that not every decision can be made in the blink of an eye. So, here's an example. Jeff Bezos wrote a letter to Amazon shareholders in 2016 where he broke this down.
He said that reversible decisions should be made fast by the person closest to the problem. And irreversible decisions are the ones that deserve real deliberation. So, try setting up this framework for your business decisions.
You can separate this by the level of team member and a dollar amount. Number 24 should be a no-brainer in the kill list. Trying to please everyone.
I stand by the phrase, "If nobody hates your brand, nobody loves either. " And this is why the strongest brands and the strongest leaders surround themselves with people who disagree with them. When people disagree with you, it's proof that they have a point of view, and that's invaluable to a business.
The second you try to appeal to everyone, you stand for nothing. And people who were never going to buy from you anyway aren't your problem. The people who would buy from you but can't find a reason to choose you because your messaging is so safe, that's your problem.
So, in casual words, have some audacity to stand by what you believe. If your business is too safe, it's not memorable. Number 25, hiring for skills instead of character.
Skills are trainable, but things like work ethic, integrity, curiosity, and the ability to figure things out without a playbook, those aren't. When I work with business owners on the types of people that they should hire, I like to say that I can teach someone your system in 90 days, but I can't teach them to care. Care only comes from character.
The worst hires are the ones who checked every technical box. They nailed the interview and then brought zero energy, ownership, or ability to work with team. Hire the person who shows up hungry with the right soft skills that you can teach anything.
Hire the person for who they are and then teach them the skills that they need to do the job, especially in the day and age where AI is disrupting every single person's workflows. Number 26, avoiding hard conversations. Think about the conversation you're avoiding, the feedback you're not giving, or team members underperformance that you're not addressing.
[music] You see, every day that you avoid it, the problem just compounds. It causes resentment to build on both sides. And the hard truth here is that the day that you started a business was the day that you committed to having hard conversations.
It's just part of the deal. Avoidance protects no one and it delays, damage, and makes it worse. So, the moment you feel yourself delaying and procrastinating on a conversation you know will help your business, pause and make that the number one priority in your calendar.
So, those were the 26 things you need to remove from your business this year. And if you want to go deeper on building the kind of business that runs without you, check out this next video.
