Friction points are not just an inconvenience for your business. They can actually undermine your operations and prevent you from experiencing the success that you deserve for all of your hard work.
In this post, we look at some of the biggest nightmare friction points and what you can potentially do about them. Fixing these can often lead to vast increases in productivity and allow you to generate higher margins even while downsizing your team.
Outdated tech stack
One of the biggest operational issues facing companies in 2026 is the problem of outdated tech stacks. Many companies are trying to get old tools to talk to new tools, and it’s just not working. They’ve got one for customer relationships, another for project management, and then a third piece of software for invoicing.
The way to solve this friction is to consolidate all of these technologies into a single platform. You can either do this natively or through integrations. If you go down the integration route, work with a specialist developer that can do the work for you.
Difficult payments
Don’t get your customers to pay you by cash or cheque unless they want to. Instead, look for the most frictionless technologies now available. A lot of companies make it difficult to get paid and then wonder why their accounts receivable is so full and their cash flow is so bad. Instead, make it so that people can pay you immediately.
For instance, if you have a physical operation, buy a credit card Bluetooth reader. Allow customers to tap their cards or use Google Pay or Apple Pay on their phones.
Similarly, if you have an online checkout system then use a service that allows one-click payments. Most customers now have all of their credit card information saved onto their browsers anyway, so this process is becoming simpler than it was in the past.
Broken onboarding
Think about the jobs and careers you’ve had and how difficult it was for you to get up and running at new companies. Broken onboarding is a massive challenge for employees because it prevents them from achieving maximum productivity early on.
Unfortunately, many companies simply don’t focus on this aspect of their business and then wonder why their churn is so high and their staff retention is so low. You can deal with broken onboarding by creating a buddy system where new employees have a partner who can show them the ropes. This includes things as simple as where the coffee machine is to understanding your business’s systems and how they operate.
Single point-of-failure employee
Perhaps the biggest headache of all, though, is the single point-of-failure employee. This is where your business hinges on the access that a single person has to your institutional knowledge, passwords, and keys. If this person goes on vacation, it can be very difficult to transfer responsibility for the business to somebody else, and you start to lose momentum.
The way to deal with this is to host multiple seats for people on different types of platforms. This way, you can spread the risk and you’re not dependent on a key individual.
