Where the idea comes from, how to run it on your own process, and why the biggest gaps are where AI pays off.

Most teams try to speed up a process by asking how to do each step a bit faster. That rarely finds the real waste, because nobody questions whether the step should take that long at all.

We asked Magic Safari founder and CEO Philip Joubert, who ran OfferZen for about ten years and was involved in SnapScan and Luno, how he found the waste in planning a luxury safari…

At SpaceX, Elon Musk divided a part’s final cost by the cost of its raw materials. A part costing ten times its raw materials pointed to bad design or a wasteful process, so the team cut the cost or deleted the part. Philip applied the same logic to time: compare how long a task takes today with how long it would take if everything you needed was already in front of you.

“If the ratio is high, you’re an idiot.” Elon Musk, to his biographer Walter Isaacson

Pick one process and list every task in it, however small. Magic Safari did this for planning a safari, where the average trip costs around R500,000 and involves a long chain of bookings, checks and back-and-forth. The detail matters, because the waste usually hides in the small steps nobody thinks about.

For each task, imagine all the information you need is available instantly. How long would it take then? A second, a minute, ten minutes. That number is your raw material: the time the task actually requires once the searching, waiting and chasing are removed.

Next to each task, write how long it really takes now. For a traditional safari company, many tasks that need a minute of thinking take hours of work. The gap between the two numbers is your idiot index for that task.

Stack-rank the tasks by the size of the gap, and work from the top down. For each one, ask how you’d do it differently, and how you’d actually get the information to arrive the way you imagined. That second question is usually where AI and better data come in.

Philip is honest that the last step is months and months of work. It still works surprisingly well, and it isn’t limited to safaris. Any manual process, recruitment being an obvious one, can be measured the same way.

Instead of shaving minutes off every step, you find the handful of tasks where hours are lost to missing information, and fix those first. It also tells you where AI is genuinely worth adding, rather than adding it everywhere.

Philip’s full keynote from The Open Letter Cape Town 2026 is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where he goes further than we could cover here:

You’ll also get access to 40+ masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.

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