The Most Expensive Phrase in Business (And Why You Hear It Every Day)
‘This is how we’ve always done it.’
Five words you hear in offices every day. Often said casually, sometimes with a shrug, as if they are stating a fact. But those five words might be the most expensive phrase in business.
Not because they are intentionally harmful, or because the people saying them are resistant to change, but because processes tend to build up quietly over time. What once worked well becomes layered with workarounds, manual steps, and habits that slowly turn simple tasks into daily frustrations.
The real issue is that most businesses do not realise what those five words are costing them until they start asking why.
The Familiarity Trap
One of the biggest problems with ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ is that it stops questions before they begin.
Processes that have been in place for years often go unchallenged simply because they feel familiar. Manual steps are added ‘just in case,’ and documents exist in multiple versions. Printing happens for reassurance rather than necessity, email inboxes slowly become a filing system, and staff end up acting as the glue holding together systems that do not properly connect.
This is not a reflection of inefficiency or poor performance on your team’s part. In most cases, it shows people compensating for processes that have not evolved as the business has grown.
Many inefficiencies do not show up as major breakdowns. They are subtle and easy to overlook because they feel normal. An invoice sits in someone’s inbox for three days waiting for approval. A new starter has to enter the same information across multiple forms. An accounts team spends hours each week searching shared folders for documents.
Each step feels small. But when those steps repeat across departments and weeks, they add up. The result is a team that feels stretched, even though nothing obvious appears to be wrong.
It’s Not the People. It’s the Process
When pressure increases, the instinct is often to assume people need to work harder or move faster. In reality, it is rarely a people problem – it is almost always a process problem.
Clunky processes create invisible work. People chase approvals, reformat documents, reprint paperwork, re-enter data, and correct errors that should not exist in the first place. From the outside, this can look like productivity. From the inside, it is anything but.
Actual efficiency removes that hidden effort. It allows people to focus on meaningful work rather than compensate for systems that slow everything down.
The paper itself is not the issue – print still plays a vital role in many organisations. The problem is what happens around it – each time a document is manually handled, duplicated, re-entered into another system, or printed again unnecessarily, time is lost, and errors are introduced.
Smarter processes do not remove print entirely – they reduce unnecessary handling and friction.
The Real Cost
One of the big issues with ‘This is how we’ve always done it’ is that a lot of what it costs your business will never appear on your balance sheet.
You will quietly be losing hours that are spent on tasks that should take minutes. Money slips away through delays, rework, or missed opportunities, such as early payment discounts. Morale suffers when teams feel bogged down by repetitive, frustrating work. Errors increase as manual data entry introduces mistakes that spread across systems.
Opportunities are missed because people are too busy maintaining broken processes to move the business forward.
Most of these costs remain hidden until someone steps back and starts asking the right questions.
Starting With Better Questions
It’s easy to think that all of this can be solved with new software, but actually, before that, there is an even more critical step – and that is better questions.
Why does this step exist?
Who actually needs this document?
Where are people filling gaps manually?
What is being done out of habit rather than necessity?
What would simple look like here?
Without understanding where work slows down, technology alone will not fix the problem. It will simply add another layer on top of processes that are already struggling.
The moment familiar workflows are questioned is the moment real improvement begins – that invoice that takes a week to approve does not have to, the new employee who is bogged down by paperwork does not need to be, and the accounts team spending hours searching for documents can also become a thing of the past.
Breaking Free
If work feels harder than it should, that is not failure – it is information.
It is your processes showing you where attention is needed and where small, impactful changes could make a big difference. Before adding more people, more tools, or more pressure, it is worth challenging the phrase that might be holding you back.
‘This is how we’ve always done it’ only exists if no one asks why – and the moment you do, that is when things start to change.
Who We Are
At Parallel, we help businesses take a practical, common-sense approach to print, devices, and workflows. We work with organisations that know something is not quite right but do not want unnecessary complexity or technology for technology’s sake.
Our focus is on understanding how your business actually works day to day, where time and effort are being lost, and how small changes can create real improvements. That might be through more innovative print management, secure document workflows, or better visibility across your devices and systems.
We are not here to overhaul everything overnight. We help you question what no longer serves you and build processes that support your people, not slow them down.
If you are ready to move beyond ‘this is how we’ve always done it’, we are ready to help you find a better way.