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April 30, 2025 32 mins

Rich Ermlick: How to Build Scalable Business Systems

Rich Ermlick joins Rob Oliver on this episode of the Learning from Smart People Podcast to talk about how to build “boring excellence” (a.k.a. Scalable Business Systems.) As the founder of Boring Excellence, Rich helps leaders develop simple, stable, and scalable systems that reduce chaos and produce consistent, sustainable results—in business and in life.

Here are some of the main points as Rob Oliver and Rich Ermlick talk about how to build boring excellence:

    • Rich’s journey from factory work to corporate consulting through Lean Six Sigma
    • The principles of operational excellence can apply to your personal life, too
    • True improvement isn’t about fixing problems—it’s about building on stability
    • The difference between recovery and real innovation
    • Root cause thinking: how to dig past surface issues to find what’s really in the way
    • Why excellence is often invisible—and how that’s actually a good thing
    • “Make the process boring so you can live fabulously”
    • Every persistent business problem is a personal issue at scale
    • The three personality traps that keep leaders stuck
    • The six-phase improvement cycle Rich teaches: from clarity to reflection

    Rich is offering two free 30-minute “bullet sessions” to the first people who comment on this episode on LinkedIn. He’s also providing a downloadable one-page framework outlining his improvement process—see below for the link!

    You can learn more about Rich Ermlick and Boring Excellence by connecting through the website or accessing the download below.

    Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1szUCPVt9P6wzva5zCGlB7suRwzuzESVW
    Connect:http://BoringExcellence.com

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