The Barnacle Problem: Why Your Business Keeps Slowing Down | Lazy Leverage #82

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Nov 20, 2025

Explore the intriguing challenges of business growth, likened to barnacles slowing down a ship. Learn how outdated processes and irrelevant marketing create frustration within teams. Discover the concept of Chesterton's Fence and why analyzing existing structures is vital before making changes. Delve into mapping tasks by identifying outputs, inputs, and transformation processes, helping to uncover hidden inefficiencies. Lastly, understand the importance of focusing on high-value roles, balancing workloads, and creating meaningful job descriptions.

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INSIGHT

Barnacles Slow Your Business

Small operational cruft accumulates like barnacles and slowly drags performance down.
You must periodically scrape the important barnacles on a cadence that matches their impact.

ADVICE

Respect Chesterton's Fence

Do not remove legacy processes until you understand why they were created.
Ask multiple people and only strip things out when no one can explain their original purpose.

ANECDOTE

AirTable Scare Taught Caution

Jon shared a real Airtable scare where removing a blank column broke automations.
The outage took days and taught him not to touch fragile legacy tables.

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Jon and Peter dive deep into a problem every growing business faces: team members saying "I'm too busy" and processes accumulating like barnacles on a ship's hull. More than just a matter of workload management, this issue is about the fundamental architecture of how work gets done.

So what exactly makes up these "barnacles"? According to Jon, it’s threefold: outdated forms, irrelevant marketing copy, and processes that solved problems from three years ago but nobody remembers why they exist.

Peter connects this with the principle of Chesterton's Fence. That is, never remove something until you understand why it was built.

To begin solving this problem, establish what you want this person doing at their highest level.

That’s their "zone of genius."

For a CFO, that's strategic planning rather than transactional bookkeeping. For a business owner at $2-4M revenue, it's growing revenue and developing leadership instead of fulfillment work.

It also helps to do a detailed task mapping exercise. List every output, identify inputs needed, describe the transformation process, and define triggers.

Jon's framework adds complexity and time assessments to identify "high time, low difficulty" tasks. Those are the lowest hanging fruit for delegation. Peter had the revelation that this exercise is often unintuitive for team members who can't articulate where their hours actually go.

Finally, avoid fragmenting roles too much (increasing internal transaction costs), but recognize that labor specialization is actually a sign of operational maturity. Both Jon and Peter hate documentation and SOPs. But they hate being tied to their desks even more.

As George Soros said: "I work furiously because I am furious that I have to work."

Key Topics:
(04:00) The Barnacles Analogy
(09:04) Understanding Why Things Exist Before Removing Them
(12:06) Define Their Zone of Genius
(14:58) Task Mapping: Outputs, Inputs, Transformation, and Triggers
(21:12) Difficulty vs. Time: Finding the Low-Hanging Fruit
(27:11) How Specialized Should Your Roles Be?
(39:32) The Pain of Transformation vs. The Golden Ring of Freedom