Where Lean Meets Leverage
Where Lean Meets Leverage
Zack Estes
With Matt Bradley
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Grow or Cut
With the advent of AI, the potential capacity of countless small businesses—including hearth retailers—is skyrocketing.
That means you have a choice: Leverage AI to grow your business, or ignore it and eventually be forced to cut.
Leverage AI to grow your business, or ignore it and eventually be forced to cut.
Because the cost of being overstaffed can get real expensive, real fast. And overstaffing is more than just having “too many people on payroll.” It also means having too many unoptimized processes or too little throughput relative to your potential. It’s excess capacity waiting to be put to good use.
You may think you have your staffing under control, but in many cases, it’s only because demand is robust enough that you haven’t felt much pain yet.
It doesn’t mean you won’t feel it eventually.
In this rapidly changing economy—especially with artificial intelligence now “here” in a very real, tangible way—every aspect of your business is going to feel the push to become more efficient.
It might come from your customers demanding more value per dollar, or from your employees who see the writing on the wall and want to stay relevant.
Either way, the call to adapt is loud, clear, and growing.
And that raises a critical question: Where do you start?
For most hearth retailers, one great option is starting with support staff.
Think about it. AI fits naturally into the work they already do—scheduling, billing, coordinating, communicating—and because they touch every department in your building, the gains don’t stay in the back office. They cascade across your entire operation.
So, let’s talk about integrating AI into your business, beginning with your support staff.
Because if you don’t proactively adopt AI soon, you might be forced to do so anyway—or forced to make cuts before you’re ready.
Overstaffing Is a Symptom
Think of “overstaffing” less as a direct problem and more as a symptom of unoptimized processes or underutilized potential.
Maybe you hired in anticipation of growth. Maybe you just wanted bodies in the building to give yourself a sense of stability. Or maybe you didn’t notice how much your company’s growth in revenue per headcount has slowed.
Regardless, overstaffing points to at least one of these issues:
- Your Processes Aren’t Lean: You have people performing tasks that either shouldn’t exist or that could be automated. In many hearth businesses, this shows up in billing, reporting, admin, or even in the field or on the shop floor.
- Your Team Isn’t Equipped: Employees don’t always have the tools or the training to do more advanced tasks. AI can handle the grunt work so people can acquire new skills or tackle strategic projects—if you invest in that training.
- You’re Not Innovating: Maybe the demand for your products or services is there, but you haven’t pivoted to capture it effectively. You keep adding staff rather than refining processes, adopting new tech, or rethinking the way value is delivered.
- Your Business Model Is at an Inflection Point: If you’re truly not solving a big enough problem, no amount of staff or AI is going to make that better. In which case, your path forward might require a pivot—or yes, staff reductions. But for many hearth retailers, a rethinking of the offering (and the process behind it) can open entirely new markets.
The good news? All of this is fixable. It just requires a shift in mindset.
A Culture of Kaizen
Enter kaizen—the foundational principle of lean management that revolves around continuous improvement.
Kaizen translates to “good change.” It’s a practice that fosters constant, incremental betterment in every process and every team member.
You want to talk about a future-proof culture? Adopt kaizen alongside AI—and let your support staff take the lead. Remember, they touch every aspect of your business. That means they can spot problems no one else sees and fix them across your entire operation.
So encourage them to look at every process—every single day—and ask: How can this be better, simpler, or faster?
Then, pair that question with the new tools AI brings to the table.
This combination works because it treats your support staff as people who can prevent fires, not just put them out. And when you respect them, their time, and their resources, they don’t just feel valued—they perform better.
This combination works because it treats your support staff as people who can prevent fires, not just put them out.
This article is brought to you by RPG Brands.
- Respect for People: When you integrate AI, you free your support staff from mundane tasks, enabling them to focus on high-value activities. The bar for “mundane” is getting higher and higher with AI. It’s not just filtering and tagging emails. It can now multiply one office coordinator who manages scheduling for a single department into a coordinator who manages scheduling across installation, service, and sales.
- Respect for Time: Every process your support staff undertakes has a time cost. Are they using that time as efficiently as possible? AI can handle the repetitive work that buries your team—rekeying customer information across systems, manually pulling reports, chasing down appointment confirmations—ensuring that the hours on the clock yield the best results.
- Respect for Resources: An overstaffed support team might look like a resource-heavy structure. But guess what? When you pair your existing support staff with AI, that “extra” capacity becomes room to grow—room to make more installation confirmation calls, process more work orders, and coordinate more jobs without adding headcount. You turn idle time or wasted effort into productive output that grows the business.
Simply put, you’ll see leaps in your efficiency when you respect the people, time, and resources of your support staff—and that’s the beauty of a kaizen culture. You’re never just content to “keep going.” You’re always looking for ways to get better.
That’s also what adopting AI demands. Because AI itself evolves quickly, your entire team—led by your support staff—needs to develop a habit of continuous improvement. This frees them to pivot and adapt, rather than standing still while the competition sails by.
AI in Action
Once your support staff has adopted the kaizen mindset—once they’re asking how every system and every process across your entire business can be better, simpler, and faster—they need leverage to bring about good change.
That’s where AI comes in.
Whether it’s ChatGPT, Lindy.ai, Zapier Agents, or Motion, AI is no longer a futuristic concept to be filed under “maybe one day.” It’s mainstream, even if you personally haven’t integrated it yet. And that changes everything—especially for the kind of work your support staff does every day. In fact, almost every pain point your back office faces has an AI solution waiting to solve it.
Here are just a few ideas of how that could look in practice:
- Process Automation: Your support staff spends hours on tasks that don’t require human judgment—appointment confirmations, invoice processing, follow-up emails, and work order routing. These tasks have to get done, but they don’t have to get done by a person. AI can automate all of it, freeing your team to focus on customer relationships and cross-department coordination.
- Decision Support: When your team is fielding calls all day, things slip through the cracks—overdue invoices, scheduling conflicts, service requests that should have been prioritized but weren’t. By the time someone notices, it’s already a problem. AI can flag what matters before it becomes one, helping your support staff stay ahead instead of constantly catching up.
- Customer Experience: Homeowners expect fast responses and clear communication. They don’t care that your team is juggling six other things. AI can deliver what they expect—automated appointment reminders, smarter call routing, and AI-assisted responses to common inquiries—elevating the experience at every touchpoint without adding to your team’s workload.
- Project Management: When your team has 200 hours of work but only 100 hours of capacity until the deadline, you need to know that on day one, not week eight. AI can auto-schedule your team’s highest-priority tasks, balance workloads across the team, and predict project delays before they surface. No more last-minute scrambles.
- Communication Management: Drafting follow-up emails, summarizing phone calls, responding to routine inquiries—none of it is hard, but it adds up fast. AI can handle the first draft, generate professional responses in seconds, and keep communication moving. That gives your support staff more time for the conversations that actually require a human touch.
- Data and Documentation: Rekeying customer information, copy-pasting between systems, manually generating work orders from emails—these tasks eat hours every week, and they’re exactly the kind of work that leads to errors. AI can auto-populate records, generate documentation, and eliminate the busywork that buries your team.
- Interdepartmental Coordination: When installation, service, and sales aren’t aligned, things fall through the cracks—and your support staff is usually the one who has to clean up the mess. AI can automatically update schedules, flag conflicts between departments, and keep everyone on the same page. Your support staff stops being the bottleneck and starts being the bridge.
When you use the latest AI tools in these types of ways, your support staff stops drowning in busywork. They stop playing catch-up. They start driving real change—asking better questions, finding better answers, and sharing solutions across your entire operation.
This is how you grow without adding headcount. This is how you build a business that gets better every day.
The Risk of Inaction
At this point, let’s address the elephant in the room: What if you don’t want to change anything?
You’ve got a decent team, you’re making solid profits, and life is comfortable.
Why rock the boat?
Simple: Because when the market shifts, the boat will rock itself.
Your competitors will adopt AI, and they’ll probably start with the mundane tasks your support staff does every day. They’ll find ways to serve more customers more efficiently. They’ll pay for fewer wasted hours and produce more profitable outcomes. And once that’s happening at scale, how do you stay competitive?
Add to that the possibility that your top performers—including those on your support staff—will demand to be at a company that invests in their professional growth. High-value employees want to be on the winning side of technology, not left holding the bag as the last business to figure it out. If you’re not offering them that environment, the best will leave—and they’ll find a leader who will.
And here’s another, often-overlooked angle: In an AI-driven economy, standing still effectively means shrinking. Margins tighten for anyone who isn’t keeping up. And if you’re playing catch-up while your competitors are already on their second or third iteration of AI deployment, you’ve lost major ground.
In an AI-driven economy, standing still effectively means shrinking.
So take action now. Even small, consistent steps toward a “good change” mindset and thoughtful AI integrations can create a surge of momentum. And once that momentum builds, it’s far easier to keep up in the long run.
The Two Paths
In the age of AI, we’ve basically got two paths we can walk down.
The first path is to adopt AI integration and a culture of “good change” to increase capacity.
If your hearth products and appliance services have real market potential in your area, you want to fill that extra—or unrealized—capacity by driving more sales and satisfying more customers. AI helps you do so without necessarily needing to add more staff. You’ll keep the team you have while making them more productive. You’ll refine every process to cut out waste. You’ll shift employees from mindless tasks to those that create more value. And for many hearth retailers, the natural place to start is with your support staff—because they have influence over the entire operation.
The second path is to cut staff to reduce capacity.
If you’re not confident in the demand or if your market is truly capped, you might need to align your headcount with the reality of your situation. That’s a tough call, but continuing to carry staff you can’t keep busy or profitable is a recipe for financial strain. If your market simply doesn’t have enough customers (or you have no interest in pivoting to find them), that’s a legitimate, though disappointing, path.
But let’s be clear: The second path is typically the route for businesses that don’t have sufficient market opportunity or can’t pivot in time.
For the rest of us—those of us in the hearth industry who have untapped demand—the path forward is clear: Build the kaizen culture, integrate new AI tools, and let your support staff lead the way.
That’s where lean meets leverage.
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Zack Estes
Zack Estes is the founder of Lean Dirt, an operations advisory company that helps businesses increase profits by systematically increasing productivity.
