Operational Excellence Is Brilliance at the Basics

OwenOctober 2, 2026 · 4 min read

Ask Steve Lewis, Chief Operating Officer at RB Global, what operational excellence means, and he won’t reach for a framework.

“Operational excellence to me means being brilliant at the basics,” he says. Everybody in the organization knows what’s expected of them, and what comes next.

Every Handoff Is a Trust Transaction

Lewis describes the work at Ritchie Bros. as a relay race. One person completes a portion of the job, then hands it to the next, who has to trust that the work behind them was done right. Multiply that handoff across yards, inspections, listings, and auction day, and the real definition comes into focus: define the agreed-upon outcome, achieve it, and repeat it, over and over, until internal teams and external customers both know they can count on it. That repetition is the point. A single good outcome is luck. The same outcome delivered reliably, auction after auction, is what builds trust: with the sellers handing over equipment they’ve relied on for years, and the buyers who now inspect assets from a screen instead of a job site.

A Symphony, Not a Scramble

At Ritchie Bros.’ scale, volume alone could turn into chaos. Lewis sees it differently: “I think of this as almost a symphony.” Everybody knows the sequence of events, stays on script, and the result is high volume executed without the appearance of strain. Experienced teammates, purpose-built technology, and standard operating procedures work the same process end to end so both internal and external stakeholders get the outcome they expect.

Technology’s Job Is to Extend Trust, Not Replace It

The improvements Lewis is most energized by are the subtle improvements made day-to-day: the inspection app. Clearer video. Richer images. But the reason matters more than the feature. Most buyers today aren’t on-site to physically inspect equipment before they bid. The digital inspection is standing in for a walk-around a buyer would otherwise do themselves, which means the quality of that information is the trust.

That’s a different way to think about technology investment: not as a replacement for operational discipline, but as an extension of it into places a person can no longer physically reach.

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One Ritchie Way: Consistency as a Product Feature

This year’s initiative, One Ritchie Way, applies the same logic across geography instead of
across a transaction. It standardizes how business gets done across every yard: from
signage to how teammates introduce themselves to how a customer’s flow works start to
finish.

The goal isn’t uniformity for its own sake. It’s that a customer who shows up at a different yard, physically or digitally, already knows what to expect. Lewis’s read on trust throughout is consistent: you say you’re going to do something, and you do it, repeatedly, at a high level. One Ritchie Way is that principle scaled across the network.

Planning for the Bad Day Before It Arrives

Operational discipline is easiest to talk about when things are going well. Lewis’s answer for when they don’t is preparation, not improvisation: identify the scenarios, weather events and otherwise, build a pre-planned response for each, and train to it in advance. “That’s where organizations or people can get caught up in a bad position,” he says of teams trying to figure out a response in the moment. When the training is already in place, the team executes instead of scrambling.

The Team Behind the Process

For all the process language, Lewis circles back to the people running it. He compares the dedication on his team to his time in the military — a comparison he doesn’t make lightly. Tenured teammates who know the systems and are genuinely invested in outcomes for customers and the company alike are what make “brilliant at the basics” achievable at scale, auction after auction, yard after yard.

That’s the throughline: operational excellence isn’t a slogan at Ritchie Bros. It’s a relay race, run by people who know their role throughout, handing off to the next person who does too.

See also

Beyond the Bids: Building the most liquid marketplace in the world