104: Hilary Corna - The Benefits of Kaizen
28 Jan 2026 · 40 min
Podcast episode (Scaling Up Business Podcast) in which Bill Gallagher interviews Hilary Corna (former Toyota Asia senior executive, author/speaker) about Kaizen — its literal meaning ('change for the better'), how it differs from Lean and Six Sigma, and how to implement continuous improvement in growing companies. Corna shares Toyota-origin examples (pilot 'Pika Pika' dealership, on-time delivery improved from ~75% to ~93% in six months, then scaled), and client engagements (Flyte: discovered AR issues quantified at ~$180k then ~$120k; another client reduced churn from 22% to under 4% in six months). She emphasizes documenting processes, making Kaizen about process not people, assigning a Kaizen champion, short 30–60 day projects, and embedding improvements into performance management and meetings.
Chapters
Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxataalent.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out today. Are you getting better every day? Is it part of your culture? Change for the better is a rough translation of Kaizen. We're going to talk today about Kaizen in depth. What is Kaizen vs Lean or Six Sigma continuous improvement? How do all these things relate and how are they relevant to you in your business? How can they help you in the journey of scaling up, creating a more profitable and healthy business? Listen in. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and Gazelle's business growth coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Hillary Corna. We're going to talk all about Kaizen. Kaizen. What is it, how to use it, how is it relevant and how's it different from Lean? So I have them somewhat collapsed in my mind. I know, continuous improvement. But what is all that? So we're going to dive into that. We're talking with Hilary, who's a past speaker at our Scaling up summits. That one was in San Antonio, right, Hilary?
Yes.
And you're in Austin today.
Yes.
So you're all around Texas gal. Coincidental that Hillary is a former senior executive officer for Toyota Asia and she's a best selling author, keynote speaker. Right. She speaks on the big stage and talks about Kaizen operations. She works with companies implementing Kaizen practices. So hi and welcome to the show.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, I'm glad to finally get you on. So why don't you tell us a little bit how you got into this world, how you ended up as a senior person in Toyota Asia. Give us your background.
Yeah, absolutely. So back in the heyday growing up in Columbus, Ohio, my family came from the military and my grandpa had spent quite a lot of time in Japan. Seven years. So my grandmother, thus as well as my mother, spent seven years in Japan. So when I was growing up as a young child, going to my grandparents house, they always had these ornate artifacts on the wall. I had to take my shoes off at the front door, my grandma made really weird food. And I was always curious as a young kid, like what is this vast world you call Asia? And so that was where it first started, my curiosity and fascination with the Japanese culture. Regretfully, it wasn't until I got to college that I had the opportunity to actually study the language. So I studied Spanish for seven years, was fluent in the language, did really well with languages. And then when I got to college, I told the dean of the business school, really want to study Japanese. And he thought I was crazy. He said, why don't you study Chinese instead, you're better off. And I was like, no, I want to study Japanese. And so I went against his advice, took my first semester of Japanese, totally geeked out and aced the class, aced every subsequent class and I just loved it. I soaked it up. So I ended up focusing my business degree on international business with a dual major in Asian Pacific Studies. So I really went deep into the culture and understood more of the business side of things for the Japanese culture. And it wasn't until my junior year that I was only going to get better with the language if I went abroad. So I studied in Japan for six months, lived with a homestay family, spoke the language from morning to night.
What city were you?
Osaka. The university was Kansai Gaidai and loved it even more than I could have ever expected. And that was when I knew like, if I'm going to go abroad and work abroad, I'm going to go right after college. So I actually had a couple job opportunities in Japan that would have allowed me to stay for the summer as an intern and unfortunately I turned those down for relationship reasons. And that's when I came back to the States and I was like, I've got, I gotta get abroad. So upon graduation, against everyone's advice, I bought a one way ticket to Singapore and decided to focus on Singapore. For anyone that knows anything about the country, it's very safe, it's very clean, it's English speaking, first world, very Westernized. So there was more opportunity, it was safer. And I figured that was a good place to start in Asia. But I didn't have a job and I spent six weeks interviewing, hanging out with diplomats and the high elite of international business folks. And within six weeks secured five job offers and the last one was from Toyota. And I waited and waited and Waited as long as I could and. And went through a daunting, horrifying process of onboarding the company. But I got in and it was just from then on got better and better. So when I joined the company, I was entry level, unfortunately. Well, fortunately for me, at that time the company was restructuring a lot and they were changing their Kaizen activities from the sales division to be in the service division. And at that time there was a manager that got reassigned that was supposed to be between me and the gm. And so basically the GM came to me and said, we need you to step up and be an acting manager. We don't have anyone else to serve in this role. Do you want to go run a project in the Philippines? And I was like, oh my God, yes.
So.
It was a pretty crucial. I think we all have moments in our career where we realized that that one decision changed everything because essentially I.
Went from having, you know, just being a support to actually leading a role. And for the next year and a half, I traveled to the Philippines, ran a project between the headquarters, the distributor and the frontline dealership with 10 people on my team reporting directly to the president of the distributor in the Philippines. And that's how it all started. So at that time, we worked in the area of on time delivery for Toyota. They had a big issue in the Philippines in terms of getting the vehicles delivered on time. They had huge stock issues and that was really successful. Essentially our role was to develop new operations within what we call a Pika Pika dealership, which is a shining dealership in Japanese, basically like a pilot program. So we would develop new operations. If the operations worked and we got the results we wanted that were directly related to the bottom line of the dealership, then we would standardize and make mandatory for all of the dealerships, which we call a network. And then if it worked as a network, we would bring it to other countries. So the Philippines project, we were able to increase on time delivery from what used to be when we started around 75%. We were able to increase it to 93 within six months. And then we standardized that and spread it to the rest of the dealers. And once we got it to the rest of the dealers, we took it into Indonesia and into Canada as well. So that was the first project.
Right. A couple of things to think about. So first of all, the notion that you would test something and then roll it out regionally and that you'd scale the rollout and not just go like, oh, this is a good idea, let's put all our resources behind it, I think is really helpful for companies trying to scale up. You want to do testing and iteration and then scale rollouts if you want something to do. Well, most of the folks that we deal with aren't taking something to a global audience. The whole company is scaling up. But even then, sometimes they'll have an idea like, oh, this is the perfect thing. And then they'll put too much resource, time and money into it. And then obviously there's something off with the model and they'll drop it then before they've iterated and developed it the right way. And then just to give people an idea of scale. Right. Indonesia. Well, I don't know the exact current things, but is a country from a population standpoint that's roughly the size of the United States and it's distributed among hundreds of islands. So, I mean, there's a couple of bigger islands. But this is not a small rollout, right?
No, no, not by any means, but it did. But it did start small. I mean, that was a year and a half, two years later, after we started with the frontline Pika pizza dealership that we chose to work with. So typically the initial improvement would take about six months. That's the average lead time that I find when I work with my clients. The starting point is typically one to two months of just discovery and understanding where the company's going, what's their vision, what's their five year, three year, one year plan, where do they make the assumptions are the biggest pain points, and then gathering data to understand what actually are their biggest pain points. Because most of the time either the assumptions are incorrect or they don't have the data to back it up. So then we have to go and find that information and make sure that we can quantify the problem. That's the biggest step that I see missed. People just react day to day or week to week, putting out fires because they think problems are existing, but really those are just symptoms from many other problems.
So now you've rolled something out across Toyota and your career trajectory has changed a little bit. Right. And then you branched off on your own or how did that go?
Okay, so, yeah, I mean, back to your point about the projects, I see that one of the biggest things people do, it usually comes down to technology. They see a problem and they think, oh, well, a certain software will fix it. And that's one of the biggest mistakes a company can make. We had a rule of thumb in Toyota that we would always work with either a paper or free system until we could prove results. And the fact of the matter is that that's not sexy. I mean, there's nothing cool about testing a process with paper or anything else. But it's really cool to buy new software and get all these users. And so I think that's one of the things I see companies make the biggest mistakes is they just want to implement something. And Kaizen's not about that. Kaizen is about trying to find the root caus within the process as early on in the process as possible to prevent it from becoming a problem ever again. Most problems are just problems of problems of problems. Right. My boss gave me once an image he drew on a napkin when we were in a project in India. And that's like a whole other story. But it was a tree and it was basically a tree with the trunk of the tree with the leaves. And he said as most people look at the problems in their business, they're just pulling off leaves and they think that these leaves are actually solving problems. But it's not until you get to the trunk that you see there's a bigger problem hidden deep inside. And that's what Kaizen helps you to really look at is it really helps you slow down in order to speed up so you're solving problems effectively rather than just band aiding.
That's outstanding. I think when you think about human interactions, key business processes, a lot of times I totally can see like we put out the fire and we don't stop to do the root cause analysis and figure out what was the source of that. I think we see it frequently whenever we talk about personal productivity and integrity for human beings. We see again and again people say I'll do better next time or I'll try harder. I screwed up on this one. But I'll. And you know that you're going to hear that again. Even if you don't recognize it consciously. We know it subconsciously right away. Whether it's us saying it or somebody saying it to us. We know that this notion of we'll try harder, whatever is kind of a morality based conversation that produces no shift, no difference at all. Because we haven't stopped to think about where did it go off, why did I fail to do that, why did that effort not produce the expected result? We haven't done any of that work.
Yeah. So we have a rule of thumb in Kaizen that when you make it about the process and you document the process, which scale up all of the books out there that are internal operating systems for companies, they all say document the Process. Why document the process is because when you, when you make it about the process, it's not about the people. And that's the big significant difference is that it's really easy to look at a job not getting done or a process or a role not getting completed and say, well, that person's, it's their skill set, talent, know how morale, dedication, all this other stuff. And it's actually not, when you do Kaizen, it's like, okay, what was wrong in that process that didn't allow that person to, to do that job or that part of the job? So it really, I don't know how many times I've said the word process in my life by now. You get your people to shift from a mindset of pointing fingers and to a mindset of process. And when you get your whole team to a mindset of process on all levels of the organization, you're just constantly generating new ideas to make the processes more streamlined.
So first, before we go much further, distinguish for us if you would, Kaizen and Lean.
Yeah, absolutely. So I'll go ahead and take that a step further in terms of Six Sigma as well. So Kaizen comes directly from Toyota when you join the company. And every company has these core values and illustrations that show what their company is all about. And culture wise, when you join Toyota, there's this little image that looks like two Greek pillars and one pillar is Kaizen and the other pillar is mutual respect. And this core prince, these core principles of Toyota are just, they infiltrate the whole company. I mean, you see it everywhere. They talk about it, bosses refer to it. It's a philosophy. Now my belief, and many people in our discipline's belief is that Kaizen is far more powerful. Now the core difference Between Lean and Six Sigma Lean actually was a term coined by a PhD at MIT. Lean has nothing to do with Toyota. Lean is all about the value of the value stream. So specifying the value, identifying the value stream and then implementing flow, pull and perfection, these are the key ideas presented in the Lean thinking modality. It's not right or wrong. Many people have different perspectives. If you're in the manufacturing world, Lean makes sense, then Six Sigma and Lean are very similar, very close. Six Sigma Lean are both all about reducing waste. And in the world of continuous improvement, there are seven types of waste, which we call muda in Japanese. So the goal is the same. The core difference between Lean and Six Sigma is their theory as to how you get there. Lean believes. How you get there is by streamlining the value stream. I'm streamlining the value in the process. So it's all about streamlining. Whereas six sigma is all about reducing variation of the process. So six sigma is more from a statistical analysis, Lean is more from a process and value stream analysis. Now why is Kaizen far more powerful? Kaizen is more of how to develop human thinking and capabilities for improvement. It's about empowering the front line to communicate ideas up. Because there is a core belief that the people who know best about your customer are the people that deal with them and the people who know the best solutions to the processes are the people who do the processes themselves. So with Kaizen, you learn how to balance stakeholders, interests. You eliminate, say do inconsistencies, you challenge belief systems and assumptions about process. You reduce illogical thinking, you eliminate common decision making traps. All of these things that have more to do with human thinking and capabilities is why Kaizen is making bigger beast than Lean. Lean is just go in and how do you cut waste and streamline the process? That's easy. Changing people's mindset and getting them to share their ideas, to test their ideas, to try again when they fail their ideas. These are very, very different challenges. And Lean doesn't teach these on any scale or a level that Kaizen does.
Got it. So it's broader. Is there a maybe you said it already and I was elsewhere. What is the meaning of the term kaizen? Is there a translation?
Oh yeah, absolutely. So I love that you asked that question because in the world that we live in the U.S. we use this term continuous improvement. And that comes from the idea that most companies go about their day to day operations and they don't think about changing a process until something drops.
Right?
Until traffic drops or complaints increase. It's not until something drastically changed. They're like, oh no, we need to do something. The idea of continuous improvement is that over time, if you're incrementally changing small amounts but consistently, that you ultimately be ahead of your competitors in the business. And that's why Toyota spent the money that they did to employ people internally to do operations development. Now the direct translation is way cooler. So Zen, many people have heard the word Zen, like Zen Buddhism, Zen actually means for the better. And kai in Japanese means change. So the direct translation of Kaizen is change for the better. It's not continuous improvement, that's just our adaptation of it.
Aha. So improvement in for the better sound related, but continuous implies something different than simply change. Yes, change for the better. It's interesting how much is formed by the language. Okay, so continuous change. So why don't you talk about some of your work in the companies? You've got great stories about it. I knew you shared one in preparation of an Ohio based company doing some work in one department. It. Why don't you start there?
Yeah, yeah. So what's really fun about Kaizen is that it allows your team members to be creative. It allows a space to really just play a bit and really dive in in a way that when you're in normal business day to day, you don't have time to do it. You're just executing. And I worked with a company out of Ohio called Flyte and Flyte is in the technology point of sale industry. So they do essentially they're an msp, a manage service provider for anything technology in restaurants, bars and hotels. You can imagine online ordering, loyalty programs, security, gift cards, point of sale payments. And what was really neat is they insisted they had an issue with accounts receivables and surely they did. Within the first two weeks we found out that first of all they weren't even measuring their accounts receivables. It was an assumption that their receivables were poor. And this was a company doing several million, having never taken funding, so just a bootstrapped company, but did really well. So he knew he had a problem in accounts receivables, but he didn't know how big of a problem he had. So within two weeks we were able to realize that or we were able to actually quantify the problem that based on his current data, it was around 180,000 in receivables that they were due. So for a company doing a few million, that's a big chunk of cash not in their pocket. What was funny is that their data was wrong. And then although the number was lower, it took another two weeks just to get the accurate number which was around 120,000. So finally after about a month we were able to actually quantify the data that their receivables that they were actually due was around 120,000. Well, when we went and digged into the process, one of the first things I do with my clients is document the processes. So we follow the front line. Anyone who carries out the processes from the time the process starts till the time the process ends and we identify problems in the beginning to end. So he had this assumption that it was well, we just aren't collecting are receivables. But in the world of technology and point of sale, it's essentially a system is ordered, a system is fulfilled. So there's the fulfillment process and the invoicing process, which overlaps quite a bit, and then the payment process. Well, they had problems just in every single process. But at the core, we were able to narrow it down to that. The biggest contributor to the delay in receivables was an incorrect way of collecting information within the invoicing process. So although I can't go into too much detail for proprietary stake, but essentially they were asking the wrong question in their invoice. So that when it came to the receivables, the customer was getting the wrong information and the accounting department was dealing with the wrong information. So this little tiny, I mean, it was literally like one line on the paperwork was creating just fulfillment, not getting delivered on time. Customer complaints were through the roof. Hardware was getting ordered incorrectly. So it created inventory problems and many other things that happened. And then receivables. So I like to share that story is that like, often we think of this problem as just kind of siloed. And the beauty of doing kaizen and process work is that you see how these processes work within each other. And it creates more teamwork, more camaraderie, more mutual understanding that your job affects someone else's job. And they work together to come to the solution. Because again, it's a process dealing with many people. It's not just a silo result. And so that was just a really fun project because when I left, they had an action plan for like six months of the next things that they.
Were going to tackle tie back to our world of scaling up and our tool set. I want to remind folks that we've talked before and we'll talk again about two specific areas that are directly related. The first one is the cash conversion cycle. We'll talk about that tool and that review. So we look at the process of selling things, of making them, of creating the inventory or creating the capacity in a service business, of delivering them and of invoicing and collection. All of these parts, the sequence that they occur in and where are the delays and the errors. And a lot of times we find a lot of value. I mean, thousands to millions of dollars of value in the first few minutes of doing that kind of work. Because everybody knows, oh yeah, well, there's a problem over there. And it turns out that the form is structured wrong. So people write down incomplete or inaccurate credit card information, right? And then they can't process the order or whatever from their trade show orders, as one example. So much of that, like, oh yeah, there's always a Little hiccup there that takes an extra day. And until you stop and look, you've. But you begin to find that of course you're taking it a lot deeper. The other way that we do, looking not just at the flow of money through the company, but is our process accountability chart. So we take the leadership team, say what are the top processes for the company, especially those that cross departments. So when I hand something from one functional department or stakeholder to another, what happens to that? What are those key big ones? So we'll narrow down a number of the top processes and then establish what are the appropriate metrics for them and give them an owner. So now something's got a metric and an owner, then we get into mapping it, figuring out which one to tackle, how it's doing, like that. But first is actually just identifying them. Right. And then of course you're getting into mapping them, finding them the problem areas and like that.
Yeah, and I appreciate you pointing that out because a lot of people, I find when companies reach out to me to engage in some kind of process improvement activity, to be very frank, most of them don't even have their processes documented. And so then I say, listen, you want to do a six month project, but we have to spend another two to three months just documenting because you, you don't have the current situation in a place where people can see. And so I don't. All I know is based on assumptions and most of the time in situations like that, people within the company are doing things very different ways. So yes, before you can do Kaizen, you absolutely hands down have to document the process. That's just the, I mean you can't do Kaizen without it.
When you say change for better Kaizen though, that impression that implies like education, the way we conduct meetings, that our training, our learning, the broader perspective.
Right, yeah. So the core components that we work with when we, when we tend to start Kaizen activities, whether at Toyota or even now, we tend to start with the company strategy. So we look at where the company's going, what's the direction, what's the niche, who's the client, and then we definitely deal a lot with Toolbox. So what are the softwares they use, what are the current leadership programs they're using, if they are using a scale up coach or others. We also look at organization structure. So how information is flowed. Are roles and responsibilities clear? Sometimes in younger companies we have to take another step back and first document roles and responsibilities. And we also touch on performance management. So once we do actually Implement Kaizen and get results. We go back and sink that into the performance management processes for hr. So how can we encourage the people to develop their ideas more based on performance? So we'll include it into their reviews, into their systems, into the, into the monthly meetings, the quarterlies, the weekly huddles, etc. So Kaizen starts to infiltrate more of the culture than just these external improvement activities.
So what are the first steps for folks to get started? What do you recommend for people who want to bring a culture of change for the better to their organization?
Great question. It's really easy to get overwhelmed in the lean Six Sigma Kaizen world. And it's just I like to say that I'm helping bringing Kaizen back to the basics because it's just problem solving. And the value of doing Kaizen is standardizing the way your people solve problems, getting everyone on the same page to use the same words, to talk about problems at the same time in the same place and prioritize. Because we can't fix everything at the same time. Right. So I would say to make it as simple as possible, find someone within your team that you can assign as what we like to say, like a Kaizen champion. So this is typically a coo, head of Ops, director of ops, something in that role. Not always, but sometimes. Often I also see it as like a CFO role. But you can build into their role, actually facilitating Kaizen activity. And you obviously probably have to cut out a little bit to make space in their schedule. But assigning one person, getting them onboarded with some pretty easy quick training. So there's a company that I have never seen any better online training for Kaizen in the industry. The website's called golean6sigma.com they offer one hour kaizen training. I think it's like $49, super cheap. That will give them initial understanding of what the Kaizen process looks like to running and facilitating a project. And I would say pick one theme that has a direct relationship to your bottom line. So for example, on time delivery, if you don't deliver cars on time, you lose customers. Or I'm working with a client right now and their big issue is they're in the food services business. So their big issue is food costs. So select a theme that has a direct relationship to the bottom line and then set a time frame. And typically I would give them between 30 to 60 days and let them have at it. Let them go deep in the process and the little online training will help them, help guide them on how to do It Exactly. But I would advise to start by documenting the process. You can do that by paper, it's super easy. By Excel. Keep it simple. If you want to elaborate, the online tool that I highly recommend is a company called Process street that digitizes that, but is highly unnecessary. And then in 30 days, maybe 60, if it's a longer issue, I would ask for a report on where they see areas for improvement and with a prioritized action plan. So if you're going to solve this problem, how are you going to solve it? And then carry out a weekly meeting to check in with them and see where they stand in solving the issue. And if you do that over and over and over, meaning with new activities or new projects and new themes, you'll eventually start solving problems left and right, and then you'll start involving more people and you'll solve problems more effectively.
You know the thing, as you're sharing these tips, I think the thing that really comes to mind is that if the leader is not going to embrace this and address this and deal with this, you can't assign it to a manager if you're not in your own skin going to work on it and embracing this journey, this challenge yourself.
So the role of the leader of the company is not to understand the ins and outs of Kaizen. Their role is to make time in someone's schedule to do it. Their role is to show importance, to show up to the meetings, to set a standard meeting, to be there on time, to end on time, to allow a person to create their own ideas instead of giving the solution. Their role is to forgive the person when their idea does or doesn't work. Their role is more in coaching and allowing that person the space and forgiveness to test their ideas. That's all the CEO needs to do with Kaizen. They don't need to know all the lean tools. Kanban just in time. They don't need to know that.
I think the other thing is, can you connect it to your current value? So I have a value in our company today, which is never finished. And it's the idea. I mean, we're kind of a growth and development company around the growth of a business. But the idea that we'll still be learning and developing until we die and so never finished is the value. And in our last company, it was doing things as they were meant to be done. And I remember one time somebody called BS in one of the meetings and said, we don't do that. Our shipping's terrible. And they didn't mean the way we Shipped or packaged things up. They meant that we were late or not shipping full orders to people, not what people wanted. Right. So we're leaving money on the table and leaving people unhappy. And so we said, okay, well, let's measure it. And our systems couldn't tell us what was the case or not. It was really a problem. But so we did a back end kind of tracking first. First we just had a clipboard in the shipping area and we would write down the order amount, the original amount and all of that that our system couldn't seem to correlate the data. But it was really on the paperwork because it left the door. So they just wrote it down. And then we started compiling that in a spreadsheet. Eventually it got into our systems. But we told very quickly, quickly the story of, yes, we're shipping late and we're shipping short on more than 80% of our orders. So we struggled with that for a year. And it's not that our values had changed. We were not living up to them. We had a problem in our process and in our business model, it turned out. So we nicked away at aspects of it for a long time, making small improvements to it, but not really solving it. Until one day we changed our business model as a result of a variety of economic and other factors in the background. And not realizing that actually that was the thing that changed everything. And from then on we shipped 95% perfect orders on time, complete like that. And everything shifted. So from the beginning of that, but it was a year of working at it and being humiliated, upset with how badly we were doing on something. We're still in business, right? We were still going along, but it was not consistent with what we are committed to. It's really great.
Yeah, that's a fantastic example. And often, I mean, that's why I say you have to slow down to speed up. It's really just creating space to solve problems more effectively. It's really easy to get caught up in day to day and not worry about the core problem because money's coming in. I was working with a company recently and they were losing customers left and right. Their churn was 22% and within six months we were able to get that down to under 4%, which was phenomenal. But it was very funny because after the project they had their action plan for what they were addressing next. It was only a couple months ago I saw a message from the owner saying, you know what? We're not taking, not bringing back any lost sales, lost clients until we fix our Quality issue. And I was like, oh my God, it's taking you nine months to realize this, that you had a quality issue. I've been trying to tell you since the beginning when your sales are coming in and flow is good, you can really not see that you have really core problems in delivery. And that can go in services industry, a product industry, tech industry, it doesn't matter when sales are good, you can really easily ignore the fact that you've got huge issues. Essentially money was coming in and money was going right back out.
A modest amount of top line growth hides all kinds of business problems. A lot of top line growth then will also highlight them or any slowing or shrinkage of will really surface them fast.
And those tend to be, those tend to be the people that receive Kaizen the most is when they've either had some pretty disruptive competition or a drop in sales or they just plateaued at the 3 million mark or the 10 million mark or the 30 or 300 mark. Those are typically when they don't know what else to do. And going in to streamline the processes is what helped you scale because you can't do business business at the same way, when you're selling 3 million versus 10 million, your processes won't hold. It's just, it's your foundation. Right. So that's why acknowledging the opportunity to solve problems in their own space is so valuable and sets you apart as a company. Because if you do that from the beginning, you're way ahead of your competitors years in.
Well, at each stage of growth there's new challenges. I think you've given folks plenty to start to think about and how to become a company that's forever changing for the better and implementing this. So let me just acknowledge, say thanks Hilary Corna for coming on the show. We'll put the links to the tools that you mentioned into the show notes as well. So people can go. Of course they can find you@hillarycorna.com and thanks again for coming on the show with us today.
Yeah, you're so welcome. And you can reach out to me directly. It's just my name, so. Hillaryillarycorner.com 1l in Hillary. Everyone's spelling my name wrong these days with the former presidential run. But yeah, I would say on a final note that Kaizen is about the people. And when you put the people first and you realize that there is just a wealth of ideas in their brains that are just waiting to be tried, that is when you can really achieve exponential success from these kinds of activities. Is really when you just let people try their ideas.
Lovely. Thanks so much. Thanks everyone for listening. Once again, reminder we'll bring these episodes Thought leaders, gurus, authors, coaches, CEOs with great stories about Scaling up, stories, tools and ideas to help you scale up and grow your business. You'll find those here on the Scaling Up Business podcast wherever you go, subscribe and like. But you can also go to our website and there find free tools, worksheets, instructions for running your team meetings, getting your own strategy and plans going, the one page strategic plan and all the rest of our free tools@scalingitbusiness.com and love to have you come follow us there and and find something new. We'll see you next week. I want to give special thanks again to our original growth guru, Verne Harnish. Our show is produced by Nio Bade with audio production by Podfly Productions. Audio editing is done by Albert Burge and our show notes are compiled by Ein Kodina with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of our show today, please share it with somebody else and let us know the parts that you love by dropping us a line, email, carrier pigeon, what have you. Thanks again for listening and keep scaling up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill Gates one more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.




