#293: Work Less By Solving these Inefficient Problems With Nick Sonnenberg, Author of Come up for Air

So many people are short sighted and they try to cut corners and just get things off their plate as quickly as possible. And when everyone is doing that for themselves and they're not trying to help their colleagues or even themselves, because sometimes you need to retrieve that information, you might save a couple seconds on the front end. It might take you 30 minutes in a week to find that thing. And that's really the key to making your team or your organization exponentially more efficient.

Come on this journey with me each week when you join me, you're going to chase down our goals, adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close up. Hi and welcome back. I'm so excited for you to meet my guest this week, Nick Sonnenberg. He's an entrepreneur, he's an ink columnist and guest lecturer at Columbia University. Boom. He's the founder and CEO of Leverage, a leading operational efficiency consultancy. Oh my gosh, that's a mouthful. That helps companies implement the CPR business efficiency framework outlined in his new book, Come up for Air. This is the culmination of Nick's unique perspective on the value of time, efficiency and automation, which I know nothing about. Which stems in part from eight years he spent working as a high frequency trader on Wall Street. The CPR framework consistently results in greater output, less stress, happier employees, and the potential to gain an extra full day per week of work and productivity per person just by using the right tools in the right way, at the right time. Nick and his team have worked with organizations of all sizes, across all industries, from high growth startups to Fortune 10. Nick, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Heather, thank you so much for having me.

Nick, I want to get into your story first because I'm super interested to hear how someone goes from Wall street to now, you know, diving into this whole CPR framework. Give it to us, Break it down for us.

Yeah, everyone gets baffled. Like, why did you go from high frequency trading into business efficiency consulting? I've always been obsessed with time. Ever since I was young. I always felt time is our most valuable asset. Everyone, you could be Bill Gates or Nick sonnenberg. You have 24 hours in a day and it's really about how you maximize and utilize it. So I've always been interested and fascinated and obsessed with saving time. And even as a high frequency trader, where, in case you don't know what that is, I'm building, I'm a mathematician by background, so I would build algorithms and code computers to trade stocks at super high frequency. We're looking at nanoseconds and microseconds and trying to capture fractions of a penny. And I trade billions and billions of dollars worth of stock, all automated, all built off of my algorithms. And so in that job I did that for eight years. One, it's all automated. So I built that muscle. But then also in that business, microseconds mean millions. And so I also developed this interesting muscle of really looking at details like down to like the microsecond, literally to celebrate a win. And so I brought that mindset into the business space. And when I launched my company, I knew that it might not be easy to find a 10 hour win, but I might be able to find a thousand one second wins. And at scale, looking at things through that microscope, it can really add up to millions and millions of dollars. Cause it's like if I save a second a day, 60 times a day, that's a minute a day, five minutes a week, 20 minutes a month, what's that, four hours a year just for me. And if I have a team of 10, that's 40 hours. So I, you know, I think that a lot of people don't look at things through that lens. And so, you know, so there's a lot of opportunity under the hood that people aren't realizing. But you know, when I left high frequency trading, I launched my company and you know, again being obsessed with saving time, the company was originally a, a virtual assistant company. So we were doing tasks for people in order to save them time. And we launched the company in two days. I was having dinner with my ex business partner and we had this idea and I'm like, look, I'll build the backend in a day. You get five clients, we'll launch on day two, fast forward a year, we're doing seven figures of revenue and we have 150 people on the team. And it sounds great and people are really impressed when I say that. But there is a lot of pressure problems with the company. We got kind of over our skis and scaled too quickly and there's a lot of problems under the hood. And one day in October, like years ago, we're at a co working space, having a coffee and he taps me on the shoulder and he tells me he's leaving. Not in two weeks, not in two days, he's leaving in two minutes, he's out. And we had all this superficial public facing success, but at that moment when he gave me the two minutes notice and literally my hands are sweating and I'm going white. I'm going white. Because we were growing at 20% a month, but we had 15% churn. So we had good marketing masking a bad product. He was the marketing, he was the face, I was the behind the scenes guy. So he left. The marketing goes to zero. I'm stuck with 15% churn. We had almost a million dollars of debt, losing a bunch of money, literally. Clients and team members didn't know who I was. So at that moment that he's leaving, fast forward from there three months, we've lost 40% of revenue. I've cashed out my 401k, my father's took a second on his house to loan us money for payroll. We literally were almost bankrupt. We were as close to bankruptcy as possible. And I had to make a decision, do I just bankrupt this or do I try to fix it? And I really saw an opportunity to fix it. Like there were some clear problems with how we operated the business. And I was always more interested in how a company operates than what it does. Like, you know, for me it could have been like a lemonade company. It's really just like, how do you build this well oiled machine? That always kind of fascinated me. Like, and we were always remote. Which regardless of remote or not, like, it just adds another dimension to the problem of how do you run this well oiled machine. And so I ultimately decided, I think I can turn this around. You know, the mistake that we made, well, we made so many. But a common mistake that we made that a lot of people make is when you need more bandwidth, there's three things you can do. The worst thing you could do is hire more people to get more bandwidth. That's what we did. Hiring more people. You have to pay for recruiting, you have to pay for onboarding, you have to pay for training, you have to pay for payroll. Then you have to hope that it works with that person. And in the best case scenario, you've still, no matter what, added exponential complexity. Because every person you add to your team, there's exponentially more ways that information can get transferred. So the more people you hire, the more it gets exponentially more complicated and more management. So that's one way to increase bandwidth. The second way to increase bandwidth is you ask people to work harder. And it's like, well, just increase your plate. You have a full plate, cool, increase it. Then you get people complaining that they're drowning, that they're getting burnt out. Culture gets impacted, team members quit. So that's kind of sucky to Tell people, okay, well, just work a hundred hours a week. And then the third way, which is what I was mostly interested in. And then what ultimately my book is about and what we are is about now as a company is how do you just get more out of people? How do you get more efficient, right? How do I avoid having to add more people and go through that headache and that expense and that complexity? How do I avoid just asking people to work harder and get burnt out? How about we just get an extra 20, 40% out of everyone and avoid all of that? And so in the, in the forthcoming months after he left, I was really just mapping out what it's going to take to fix this. And I started realizing kind of there are these buckets where we were, where we had big opportunities to improve. One was how we communicated, right? I had 150 people now just reporting into me. It was a cluster. Like you can imagine. I was getting emails.

Oh, that must have been horrible.

Slack messages, like, so I was like, okay, there's a lot of communication. We need to put some guardrails on how we communicate, right? Then I started realizing, like, hey, it's not that easy to just know what's the status of a project? Or, you know, I asked someone to deliver something by Friday, did they do it or not? Like there wasn't that easy to go and look in one system and know what's past due. What did I ask to get done? Did it get done? What's the status? I had to ask too many people. So I'm like, okay, we got to clean up how we do our planning, how we manage our projects, our tasks. And then I started realizing there's a lot of stuff that still wasn't documented. We did a pretty decent job actually at documenting process before my partner left. Had we not we, we definitely wouldn't would have been bankrupt and I wouldn't be here speaking to you. But I realized, like, there's a big opportunity to do even a better job at documenting your knowledge, right? So when someone leaves, they're not leaving with all that knowledge. When you hire someone, it doesn't take three months for them to get up to speed. Maybe it takes three weeks or three days. So I started focusing on these three buckets. Communication, planning, and what I call resources. So that was the genesis of this framework. CP&R, which is the core framework in my book, come up for error, you know, cpr, come up for air. So it's all kind of congruent. And then as I'm cleaning this up, And I'm reducing team member size, but making them more efficient. Through this, slowly revenue started to come back and profit started to come. And also simultaneously, people started reaching out to me, asking me to consult them on their operations. Word got out on what was being done and people started asking for help. And so I worked with financial advisors that are doing seven figures vet hospitals. I worked with large poop spray companies, large condom companies, large, you know, Fortune 10 tech companies. Like all these random people started reaching out. And what I found, Heather, is you could be a pet hospital, a financial advisor, or a multi nine figure or billion dollar company that does poop spray. And you need the same things from an operational efficiency standpoint. All of these companies, regardless of industry or size, needed to communicate, they needed a plan. And they had these resources, they had knowledge. And so that's when the light bulb went off. And I'm like, huh? This framework's not just helpful to me, it's actually helpful to every business, regardless of team size and industry. And so then I started refining this framework, building content, building trainings, even things as simple as email, which is a communication tool. I started seeing like, actually, even if you've used it for 30 years, no one's using email, right? A lot of people think they are, but you know, they got too many folders. They're not snoozing, they're. They're marking things unread instead of using the archive and all like all these different things to get to Inbox zero. And we could get into that later. But I started realizing every tool was misused, starting not even from how to use the tool, but starting from when to use the tool and not having alignment on your team in terms of the purpose of email versus Slack versus Asana or whatever your tools are that fit those buckets. It caused this massive scavenger hunt. And teams were losing over a business day a week per person. And so to me I'm like, wow, this is costing like billions and billions and billions of dollars, probably trillions in efficiency lost. And it's not rocket science to fix. So I started building all this content and then we slowly started shifting away from doing tasks for people and now leverage my company, we do training and consulting for businesses on best practices, not just of how to use these tools, but when to use these tools. And so that was the genesis of writing this book. Cause I ultimately, my mission is to save millions of hours of people's time across the world. And I feel like having a book out there is going to help me achieve that mission and help remove a lot of pain and frustration and friction that happens inside of teams. Like when I ask people how's it going? Everyone's drowning in work. The shift to remote work on the back end of the pandemic, it really forced people to start using some of these tools if they hadn't and people just weren't ready for it. And it's not rocket science. It's actually quite quick to teach people best practices and save a business day a week. So that's that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

When you want more Start your business with a Northwest Registered Agent and get access to thousands of free guides, tools and legal forms to help you launch and protect your business all in one place. Build your complete business identity with Northwest today. Northwest Registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U s with over 1500 corporate guides. Real people who know your local laws and can help you in your business every step of the way. Build your business identity fast with Northwest Registered Agent and get access to thousands of free resources for forms and step by step guides without even creating an account. Sign up for a free account to begin managing your business hub with lawyer, drafted operating agreements, bylaws, resolutions, membership certificates, bills of sale, and more. All at no cost. Northwest is your one stop business resource. Learn how to build a professional website, what annual filings your business needs to stay in good standing and simple explanations of complicated business laws don't wait. Protect your privacy, build your brand and get your complete business Identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit www.northwestregisteredagent.com confidence free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest registered agent@www.northwestregisteredagent.com confidence free. If you're like me, you're always looking for ways to feel stronger in your workouts, recover faster from working out, have more energy during your day and preserve your health, mobility and strength as we get older. And Mitopure Timeline is giving me that life and it's happening right now and I want it to happen for you too. This supplement really can help you because it supports your health at the FAST foundation by encouraging cellular renewal. Mitopure is a precise dose of the rare postbiotic Urolithin. It works by promoting an essential cellular cleanup process that clears out dysfunctional mitochondria, AKA your cell's battery packs might appear is the only urolithin a supplement on the market clinically proven to target the effects of age related cellular decline. Hello. With regular use you are going to see and feel the difference in the form of improved energy levels, better workouts, faster recovery, more endurance, all of which are helping you achieve your New Year's goals and making you Feel your best. P.S. might appear shown to deliver double digit increases in muscle strength endurance without a change in exercise for the win. Cellular health is a foundation of well being and longevity. Mitopure recharges your cells supporting any goals by helping all of your system work better. I'm excited to share that you can now get 20% off your first timeline purchase. There's never been a better time to experience the benefits of Mitopure. Use my code Confidence at checkout. To receive 20% off today go to timeline.com confidence that's T I M E L I N E.com confidence.

You think so differently than most people, certainly than myself. And when you're explaining all of this, I mean the amount of time I spend looking for documents in a week is a complete and total nightmare. And I don't have a large companies, you know, and I've been part of a large company before. And to your point, the miscommunication has been one of the biggest issues, you know, and knowing the lack of follow up and follow through and clarity and transparency. So where do you begin? What are the important tools that people should be using and what needs to be defined?

Very most important thing is it's not necessarily people get hung up, oh, what's the best tool for this? That's like a lot of initial discussions. There's a lot of tools that can solve these problems. Obviously we've built partnerships with what we feel is in general best in class, but different scenarios might influence what's best for you. The most important thing is you have alignment in terms of the purpose of each of these tools and you have alignment with the so people need to know when should I use? Let's say you're a Microsoft based company. People need to be on the same page when you should use Outlook versus Microsoft Teams versus let's just say your project management tools. Asana, we're partners with Asana versus using Asana versus the next tool. Like people need to understand for this scenario we use this tool. For this scenario we use this tool. Otherwise it just becomes a scavenger hunt. Right? And then you have to look in email, you have to look in text, you have to look at Microsoft Teams. You have to, you know, is it was it a DM A group chat or a. In a channel. So if you don't have alignment, these tools sometimes can hurt your business. But if you do use it right, it can completely transform your team or your organization. So you need alignment, you need to shift the mindset. Probably the underlying principle in my book is shifting the mind. And this is subtle but really profound and distinct. You have to shift the mindset of everyone in your company or team from optimizing for transferring information quickly, like playing hot potato. Here you go, Heather. And like, you know, this is, you know, text, email, whatever, it is quickest in the moment. You know, most of the time a text is the quickest, right? So that's why text is so popular in communication within teams. Right? So you want to shift the mindset and not have people trying to optimize for transferring stuff quickly and instead optimize for retrieving stuff quickly. Which means you take pause and you put things in the right drawer that it belongs. Now, I'm guessing that if I asked you how you did your laundry, you don't just take stuff out of the dryer and throw it all in one drawer. You probably take your socks and put it in one drawer. Your shirts put in another drawer. Right. Your underwear put in another drawer. And you do that not because it's the fastest way to be done with doing your laundry. The fastest way is you just take it and you throw it all in one drawer, but you separate and you organize it into drawers. Because tomorrow or next week, when you want to put an outfit together, it's more organized and faster to put that outfit together. It's the same thing in work. You put things in the right drawer. So when you need to go and find that document or that piece of information, it's much easier. So so many people are shortsighted and they try to cut corners and just get things off their plate as quickly as possible. And when everyone is doing that for themselves and they're not trying to help their colleagues or even themselves. Cause sometimes you need to retrieve that information. What you've saved on. You might save a couple seconds on the front end. It might take you 30 minutes and a week to find that thing. And that's really the key to making your team or your organization exponentially more efficient.

I love that analogy with the laundry because you're right, no one would ever just dump everything into one place because they speed was, you know, critical in that moment. Or if you even just did put it in a, in a bucket somewhere, you're going to come back and you're going to do it the right way before you go to bed or in the next day. However, with work to your point, there's plenty of times I just dump things to get it off of my plate. And it's not because you're not being thoughtful of someone else. You just, you have so much to do. So how do you get employees? Once you clearly define what the tool tools are, once you clearly define when and how to use them and how do you ensure they're actually doing it?

This needs to come from the top down and it's a self perpetuating issue. It's like you're in quicksand because the more you're drowning, the more and work, the harder it is to take an extra 10 seconds to do something. So that's why it's so important that the sooner someone gets onboarded into a company, you get them onboarded with the right knowledge so that before they're too busy, it's hard to train them in these things, you know, in general, email is the most misused tool that saves three to five hours a week per person. Like one of the most popular offerings we have at Leverage is training people in 30 days. How to get to Inbox Zero and how to stay at Inbox Zero. Inbox Zero is when you look at your email and you've got less than say 20 emails read or unread in your inbox.

That's never happened in my life, Nick.

I'm telling you, I've done this with some people that I'm not going to name names that you've heard of that have had hundreds of thousands of emails and we've gotten them to zero. It is totally possible and most people think it's an impossible feat. We show you in a very short amount of time how to do it and how to stay to it. And that alone saves hours a week. So usually in nine out of 10 cases, that's a pretty logical place to start. Because what you need to do when you're going to do any change, whether it's operational efficiency, whether it's culture, when you're asking someone to invest their time and they already don't have time, it's a big ask. And so you've got to give them the gift of more time and create that additional bandwidth so they have more capacity to make future changes. So starting with Inbox zero, usually it's a minimal commitment of time that within a few weeks they've already gotten back that time, plus now in perpetuity have an extra Three to five hours a week. Then now we can reinvest in whatever the next training is. And so that's usually a pretty solid approach. You also need to have your leaders and managers on board. This doesn't work when this is like a do as I say, not as I do. And you've got some people doing it one way and some people doing it another way. You know, email's one thing where it's like, even if you're the only one following email properly, you're still gonna benefit. So that's another reason why email is usually a good start. Cause it doesn't matter if your team hasn't yet adopted it, you're still getting the benefit. But when it comes to a collaboration tool that only works, you know, collaborate co, you know, requires more than one person. You need everyone to be speaking that same language. And, you know, you have to have a commitment. You can't have some people on board, some people not. And usually it's easier to start with a closed system. So start with kind of one team and get that one team using it and then move on to another team.

It's that time of year again. Everyone knows that the holidays can become overwhelming quickly. So the sooner that you get things done, the better. For both shoppers and businesses, the best time to score great deals during the holidays is Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. Whether you're an established business or someone who is going to experience their first first Black Friday Cyber Monday this year, you know that the most important thing you need is a platform that can handle everything that's about to be thrown at you. You don't want to find out that your inventory is off as orders keep coming in, or that your point of sale system cannot keep up with the requests, many from new customers who are buying your products for the first time. You need to make sure that your tools and platform are ready for anything that comes your way during the busiest weekend of the year. And that's why you need Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to entrepreneurs who will be participating in their first Black Friday Cyber Monday this year, including your girl right here. With creating confidence in everything that we put through Shopify, the one platform that manages it all, you don't have time to spend hours pouring over every little detail. Me neither. Shopify has thousands of templates and tools to help streamline website creation, making sure that your site isn't just aesthetically pleasing, but functional at the same time accelerate your content creation. Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product description pages, headlines and even enhance your product photography to help increase your reach during the busiest time of year. You can also stress less knowing that Shopify's award winning customer support teams on standby 247 to help with any issues that arise, allowing you to get back to business as fast as as possible. This Black Friday. Join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today@shopify.com monahan that's shopify.commonahan go to shopify.commonahan and make this black Friday one to remember as the air turns crisp and the holidays draw near, comfort becomes the best gift of all. Quint delivers layers that last, sweaters, outerwear and everyday essentials that feel luxurious, look timeless and make holiday dressing and gifting effortless. Quince has it all. $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters made for everyday wear, Denim that never goes out of style, silk tops and skirts that add polish and outerwear built to take on the season. Perfect for gifting or upgrading your own wardrobe. Honestly, Quint's Italian wool coats are at the top of my list. The cuts feel designer and the quality rivals high end brands, but without the high end markup. By working directly with ethical top tier factories, Quince skips the middleman and offers prices 50% less than similar brands. I mean if you want to look like you are wearing the highest end clothing out there without those huge price tags, Quince is is the answer. Literally there's something for every single person on your list. The Mongolian cashmere sweater is the softest sweater I have and it is my go to every day. If you want to elevate your look without paying more, Quint is the answer. Step into the holiday season with layers made to feel good, look polished and last from Quint, perfect for gifting or keeping for yourself. Go to quint.com confidence for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I n c e.com confidence to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com confidence.

You had mentioned asana and for anyone listening that doesn't understand project management tools or asana. Can you give us a little bit of color into why that's important and helpful?

Yeah, I mean like the purpose, like the communication tools are for communicating. I'll give you another example similar to like my to my laundry one. If me and you were to go camping in the forest together, and we're deep in the forest, we would need walkie talkies to communicate with each other and we'd also need a map to navigate out of the forest. Right. So email or Slack or teams, those are like walkie talkies, you know, like, how's it going? Are you hungry? Whatever. It's not going to get you out of the forest, though. You need to be looking at a map and knowing what you need to do, where you need to go. That's the purpose of a tool like Asana, which is a work management tool. You can capture all your tasks, all your projects. You can click a button and know what you need to do today. You can click another button and know what's the status of a key project. You know, so it's just solving a different problem. It doesn't replace email or these other tools, but it's a, it's a core need of every team and every organization in any company. You need to be you. You have tasks and projects and you need to capture those and use a tool like Asana or Monday or Wrike or, you know, one of those.

Do you run into issues as you're talking about this? I'm thinking more and more about the age of a person and the longevity in a company and how that might present different challenges.

Yeah, I mean, different people have different levels of tech savviness and willingness to change, you know, and I think that with, with these things, change management is ultimately the hardest part. And that's a function of people's one, willingness to change, two, their bandwidth and how underwater they are, and three, their tech savviness. So all of that needs to get taken into account. And, you know, those three things really are key factors in determining where the best place to start is. What you don't want to do is try to fix everything all at once. You know, like there's probably hundreds of things to fix in your team or in your organization. You only get a benefit if it's properly rolled out and everyone's aligned. You'd be better off just doing one thing, one thing right where everyone's aligned than like, oh, we rolled out Asana and we rolled out Slack and we rolled out this. And like, you try to do too much and people haven't had the time to fully adopt it. So in general, one thing at a time, another thing too, which is an easy thing to fix that doesn't require even additional technology, is almost a tie for number one in terms of big waste in Companies is how meetings are run. Meetings are one of the most inefficient things in companies. And it doesn't mean that you shouldn't have meetings, it's just how they're run needs to change. For example, most people don't have agendas for meetings. So things just go off topic on tangents. Have an agenda, stick to it. And not only that, but having an agenda means now people have a place to not distract you on a Tuesday with some random idea. Don't email me that idea, don't text me that idea, don't slack me that idea. If it can wait till next week's weekly meeting, just add it to the agenda, we'll talk about it then. Now you've avoided a ping and a ding, right? So, but people, your brain is for having ideas, not holding them. So you need to give people a place to brain dump so that they don't get stressed out that something's gonna get lost. So a large amount of volume of communication can go into next week's agenda and not distract you from today. Another thing is meetings have too many people involved. You should audit your meetings. Do those people really need to be in there? When you start thinking about the hourly rate of every person times the length of time and you start looking at meetings with a total cost on it, you'll see that actually meetings are one of the biggest expenses inside of a company. So does the meeting need to be that long? Does it need to have that many people? Was there proper pre work? And also like I said, meetings, does it need to be that long? A lot of meetings default to an hour, maybe it could be 45 minutes and you force people to work a bit quicker. Maybe it could even be 30 minutes. And you have people do all the report outs, you have them send a video of themselves talking about something that's just a report out that you can listen to. When you're in the back of an uber at 2x speed and now you're saving valuable time on Monday morning, time isn't all worth the same too. You have to understand. So if you bring an hour meeting from 9am to 10am down to 9 to 9:30, that 30 minute slot on Monday morning is probably 10 times more valuable of a slot than 6pm on Friday when you're in the back of an Uber and you don't have your laptop and you're tired from a week, right? And so it's not just about saving time, it's optimizing time. And so if you can remove some of the time in those live meetings when your brain is at full horsepower and you put it into lower value time slots that you're not even properly utilizing. Those time slots, like the back of an Uber where you could watch a video and watch that person's report out, that's really. Those are a couple tricks you could implement right away without adding another tool that could completely fundamentally change the productivity of your team.

Can we please also get rid of. Let's circle back on that in a meeting. That is the most annoying and biggest time waste I've ever seen in my life. When I was in corporate America, there was a lot of, you know, let's discuss that. Like, let's continue things on without resolution. What are some of the hacks to make things finalized?

Well, one, you have the right people on a meeting. Two, you could set the goal of the meeting. Look, the goal that we have 30 minutes. The goal of this meeting is we need to make a decision on this. Just like sometimes 30 seconds at the beginning of a meeting where you set some context is important. Two, if a decision is made, it should be logged somewhere. That's where that R and CPR comes in. Like you should log it in a knowledge base that's documented somewhere. You should have a note taker. So people are like taking notes about decision, like what's going on here. And if a final decision can't be made, then before you end, you should probably put another call on the calendar with the right people, with the right length of time. I would try to do it not too far in the future because you don't want. What you don't want is it to be in like six months and then like you forget all the details of the call and you're starting from scratch. So you've just invested all this time, you got to a certain milestone or stopping point, you know, you want to do something, you know, not too far in the future so that you can get it over the finish line.

I love that. Thank you for sharing that. I'm definitely going to implement that. Okay, so what are some of the hacks or takeaways that you can share with people right now in addition to these ones that you've given us, that can give them a little bit more insight into the book and what they're going to get from reading it?

Like I said, utilize video as much as possible. And asynchronous communication to optimize how you're doing meetings. Optimize for speed of transfer versus speed of retrieval. Celebrate small wins. So that was what we talked about at the beginning, you know, sure, there are tricks like Inbox zero that saves three to five hours a week, but also be happy if you save a second or two seconds and try to look for a lot of those. You gotta get the book and see all the rest of the tricks. But there's so many little tiny things that, you know, screenshotting tools. Like, there's so many times where you wanna show someone something with an annotation. So there's a lot of tools that you could use for that. I don't want people to get overwhelmed, though, with. With tools necessarily. I really want people to take away from the book the principles and concepts, because tools will change, but these principles won't change, and you don't need to roll out a million tools all at once.

One of the things I found interesting, especially with the immersion of and growth of AI, is how do you know when you should be transitioning a tool? You know, how do you make those decisions? Or is this, you know, we've got people using this tool. Let's just stick with it.

It's a hard question to answer. I mean, like, that's kind of one of the things that we're doing at Leverage is like, we'll advise someone like, are you on the wrong tool or not? It's a tricky question because a lot of people will say that they hate a tool and it's not the fault of the tool, it's how it was rolled out. A lot of people, when we're talking about some of these tools I mentioned, they say they absolutely hate that tool. That tool sucked. It didn't work for my company, but it wasn't the tool's fault. It was the way that it was rolled out. It wasn't properly taught to people. They didn't know when to use the tool, how to use the tool. The team wasn't aligned on it, they were the only ones using it. So people weren't responding, but yet they still say that it's the tool's fault. So one thing I would say is if you hate a tool or if a tool didn't work, I would really question whether it's the tool's fault or if it was the way it was rolled out. That's one thing. Now, maybe there are cases where a tool isn't working and people are using it, you know, perfectly or not. You know, odds are people aren't using these tools perfectly, and you should start there. But I don't know, I just start Googling like competitors to that Tool and then doing some feature set comparison. It's not just about the features of a tool. How's the customer support? How much funding did that company get? Because the more funding a company gets, the more they can invest in product in the future too. When we make decisions about tool stack to use, we're looking at a lot of different factors, one being their funding. Usually we have conversations with either the CEO or someone on the executive team to get a better sense of the culture in the company. You know, does it have an integration with Zapier, which is an automation tool which really unlocks a lot of capability? If it does have an integration with automation tools like Zapier, and also like something that you don't really think about that is important is how's their customer support? You know, does it take a week to get a response? You know, I got good at a lot of these tools because I hounded customer support to the point like where not in a rude way, but like I'd be asking weird questions like, hey, I'm trying to do this, this and this. And I was really trying to think of out of the box ways to use the tool to solve an interesting problem. And then that actually got me to build relationships with a lot of these companies and you know, if it's a good company, like they'll respond to you. So I would, I would also advise people to utilize the customer support of these tools and ask a lot of questions and see how they do without answering your questions.

So where should people start? Should people start with your new book, Come up for Air?

The book is really meant to be that employee manual that you never got. And so it's like speaking a language. When you get hired, if you speak French and your colleague speaks German and another speaks Chinese, it's going to be hard to collaborate. So the purpose of the book is really to be an employee manual, not one that tells you about vacation days and health insurance. But this is how we collaborate. And the book is more valuable the more people on your team have read it and all speak that same language. So the very best thing is get a copy for yourself and for your team so that you're speaking the same language. And we have a website come up4air.com and we've got some special packages right now for the book launch. The other thing that we offer@getleverage.com, that's our training and consulting company. So if you want additional help and you want to go through a program to help you with email or rolling out Asana or any of these tools. We've got a whole bunch of different programs and offerings on that side to help people if they need additional help.

Nick, I've got one last question I have to ask you before I let you go. What happened to the ex partner? Is he so bummed out that he. He left?

I haven't spoken to him in over five years.

Oh my gosh. I'm always so interested about how things take shape. I mean, ended up. It was a difficult moment for you, but ended up being a blessing because you were able to completely reimag in this business. So kudos to you.

Totally. I'm. I'm grateful for it. You know, it really forced. Without that, the CPR framework wouldn't have been created. We wouldn't be talking right now. I wouldn't have a book coming out on the CPR framework. So in the end, even though it was a hard time for a while, I'm grateful that it got me to where I'm at right now.

Well, I hope that that story of reinvention, overcoming adversity gives everyone listening the confidence to move through through whatever challenges you're dealing with. And now you've got some amazing hacks, some tools for increasing productivity efficiency and go get the book. Come up for air. It's going to be the manual that you always wish you had on day one. At least you're going to have it now. Nick, thanks so much for the work you're doing.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right, until next week, guys. Keep creating your confidence. I decided to change that dynamic.

How do you like their map?

I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.

Come on this journey with me.