One question saved Elon Musk tens of millions of dollars. The same question found nine hidden hours a week inside a family business I work with.
The question sounds almost too simple: what is this actually made of?
In the early 2000s, Musk wanted to buy a rocket. The price was $65 million, and everyone treated that number like gravity. Instead of accepting it, he broke the rocket down to its raw materials: aluminum, titanium, copper, fuel. Those materials cost about 2% of the sticker price. The other 98% was “the way it’s always been done.” So he built his own rocket, and SpaceX was born.
That’s first principles thinking. You break a problem down to its unbreakable truths, the LEGO bricks, and rebuild from only those. Most of us do the opposite. We reason by analogy, which is a fancy way of saying we copy the picture everyone else is copying.
The change order with more signatures than a mortgage closing
A second-generation in-home care company came to me, frustrated. Their caregiver change process had eleven steps and required four signatures. Employees sat idle waiting on approvals. Clients got annoyed. The office manager spent her mornings chasing signatures instead of doing work that mattered.
Here’s the part that gets me every time. Nobody could explain why most of the steps existed. One approval was added in 2019 after a single pricing mistake. Two steps existed because their old software required them, and the software had been gone for three years. The rest was “just in case.”
Nobody designed this process. It accumulated like junk in a garage.
So we asked the Musk question. What is a change order actually for? The answer took one sentence: the customer agrees to the new scope and price before work continues, and the change is documented for billing. Those were the bricks. Everything that didn’t serve those bricks was habit wearing a badge.
The rebuilt process had five steps and one signature. The owner got his mornings back, the employees stopped waiting, and the office manager nearly cried with relief. Nine hours a week, recovered from a process everyone assumed was necessary.
What to do with this
You don’t need to build rockets to use this. You need three questions.
First, ask what the process is actually for. Not what it does, but the outcome it exists to protect. If your team can’t answer in one sentence, waste is hiding in that gap.
Second, ask what must be true for that outcome to happen. The customer need, the legal requirement, the safety step. This list is almost always shorter than your current SOP, and the difference between the two lists is your 98%.
Third, ask what would survive if you rebuilt the process from scratch today. This is the scary one, because the honest answer usually cuts the process in half.
Why this matters more right now
Every unnecessary step costs you in three ways. It burns time nobody bills for. It frustrates the good people you’re trying to keep, because nothing drains a great employee faster than feeding a process that serves no one. And it quietly blocks your future because AI can only accelerate a system that makes sense. Bolt AI onto a bloated process and you’ve just automated your waste.
The businesses that win over the next five years won’t be the ones with the most sophisticated systems. They’ll be the ones whose systems are built from bricks, not habits. Magnetic systems, the kind your team actually uses, because every step earns its place.
Fresh eyes plus the right questions can save you nine hours of time, what you’ve walked past for years.
If you want help finding the 98% hiding in your systems, that’s exactly what my Systems Jam Session is for. A five-minute survey, a fifteen-minute call, and we find the friction together. Just fill out my contact form, and I’ll get back to you in 24 hrs.
