095: From Scavenger Hunts to Speedy Retrievability with Nick Sonnenberg

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What I realized over time is the bright mentality is you optimize for speed of retrieval of information and you encourage a culture where they take pause, they spend the extra 10 seconds to put stuff where it belongs so that in a month or in a week or whenever, it's faster to find whatever it is you need to look for. If every person has that mentality, you can save hours and hours a week. Like we're seeing 20 30% productivity lift per employee in a company. When you start implementing this mindset.

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Hello hello my friends. I am very excited to be here today with Nick Sonnenberg. Nick is someone who we met through a mutual friend, Petra Kolber. She heard him talking about his love of operational efficiency and thought I have got to put these two in touch. So Nick and I both remarked when we talked for his podcast about how we never meet anybody where this is their state of passion. He's the founder and CEO of Leverage. He's an Inc Columnist, author of Idea to Execution. He hosts his own Leverage podcast as I mentioned, and he's a former I don't even know if I'm going to say this right, Nick, because I didn't write it down, but algorithmic stock trader. So you have a background in quant and algorithmic systematic thinking and now you've shifted toward running running your own business with certainly a bigger team than mine, but helping other businesses of all sizes. I love the way you describe it. Optimize and aim for retrievability that like one of your rules of thumb, one of the ways that you determine the health of a business's systems is retrievability of information. Can you say a little bit more about why you think that is the linchpin.

Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the show and love jamming and geeking out on all this stuff with you. It's a small community that play in, so it's always nice to meet someone else in it. And the whole team size thing, I think that it's a benefit to be small. Like people sometimes get this like kind of false conception of like it's better to have a big team. Like for me, revenue per team member is like one of the key metrics that I look at because complexity scales exponentially with team size. So every person you add, it's exponentially more complex. Which is also why I'm so passionate about efficiency because it really helps reduce the pressure of having to add staff and team members to the team. More people, more headache.

You really hone in on that. The crux of your work is retrievability. And yeah, you're the first person that I've heard put it so succinctly that the measure of health of someone's systems is retrievability. So I'd love to hear more.

I had it wrong. At first I really thought that a company could really only scale as fast as knowledge could be transferred. That was my thinking process for a long time. But then after consulting with so many different companies, as you mentioned earlier, like some of them are massive, some are small, different industry. Actually when you optimize for speed of transfer, that is what causes what I call the scavenger hunt issue. Because if everyone in a company being efficient or being productive as an individual is necessary, but it's not sufficient for a team to be productive. It requires collaboration, it requires coordination. And sometimes you have to sacrifice your own productivity for the greater good of the organization. And, and it's this collaboration and this kind of common mindset that people have to adopt to really get an organization or a team to be high performing. And when you're an individual, it's kind of a local optimization to optimize for speed of transfer of information. Typically the fastest way to get something out of your head or to someone is a text message. But when you have everyone kind of just being selfish and optimizing for themselves, Net net, it hurts in the moment, it's quicker for you, but you've just slowed your team down because you could have put it say in Asana or some other tool that's better to be better organized. So by you optimizing for yourself selfishly, you've just heard a team member now if everyone thinks like that, it's going to come back to you. And now when you have to go and figure out, you know, what your priorities are, where's that document? It's going to be 10 times harder for yourself because everyone has optimized for the short term, not the long term. So what I realized over time is the bright mentality is you optimize for speed of retrieval of information and you encourage a culture where they take pause, they spend the extra 10 seconds to put stuff where it belongs so that in a month or in a week or whenever, it's faster to find whatever it is you need to look for. If every person has that mentality, you can save hours and hours a week. Like we're seeing 20, 30% productivity lift per employee in a company. When you start implementing this mindset and.

You and I share a similar practice to put this in practical terms around this, which is instead of just telling someone the answer, send them a link to the process doc or for external client, send them a link to a page on your website like do not let information just go to die in email and slack channels.

Totally. And also one of the hardest things in a company is to keep a knowledge base up to date. You know, knowledge bases and wikis are, you know, I think everyone would agree that's really important and sounds great to have everything documented. But in practice when you're busy, it really falls to the side. Updating these knowledge bases, they quickly get stale. So having policies such as trying to only answer questions with a link to the knowledge base article really forces people to stress test and constantly refresh the knowledge base.

I'll link in the show notes to a great conversation you had with Shannon Waller of Strategic Coach. You mentioned this thing of sometimes people, they get overwhelmed by the workload and so they hire somebody without realizing. I think some of us certainly as free timers, know the headache that that can bring and it actually just multiplies problems and complexity in a big way. I mean, especially if these types of systems aren't dialed in. The other part I wanted to ask you about, you're the first person that I've really heard talk about work levels. When I used to use Asana, I saw in there that you could assign a level of effort to a task and be able to gauge the entire team's work level, so to speak. I would love if you could just share with us so we have retrievability of information being a measure of a healthy system. But also this conversation around work levels is really interesting. That either the owner is maybe doing too much low value work or how you've kind of gamified it with team members to not just know what the work level is, but always be striving to take on higher and higher level tasks. But I'm wondering how you gauge. I always thought it was kind of ambiguous. I never knew what to assign the work. I mean, some things seemed big, some small, so I never really stuck to it. And I'm just wondering how you really got into this idea of work levels and how that relates to the roles that you need and the ones that you don't.

Well, how I got into it is like how I get into everything. I suffer and I have pain in something with the way I operate. And then being an engineer by trade, I then start thinking, how do I solve this so I never have to deal with this again? And so basically all of my ip, my thought leadership, it's always created out of pain and frustration that then I try to convert into something positive that could fix my problem and help others. So kind of back to what you were saying, like, how do you define a healthy operation of a company? One factor in one element is optimizing for speed of retrieval versus transfer, but another is, you know, tying this to work levels. I want as much as possible to have a company where everyone is working in their unique ability, which is a strategic coach term and, or things that they get the most joy from. So imagine if you have an organization where it's super fast to retrieve whatever, everything that you need is at your fingertips. Everyone's working on stuff that they're relatively best at and, or stuff that they really enjoy doing. You know, pretty much if you can cover those things, you're going to have a high performing organization.

Yes, absolutely.

So the unique ability and joy factor, the backstory is I have overworked for a very long time. As efficient as I am, I'll save time because I've automated things or found some tricks. But then I just go and fill that time up with other stuff that sales or other activities. Maybe I'll do podcasting or I'm writing a book. Every second I free up. It's not that like I'm going and sitting on the couch, I'm just putting it back into just higher level things. But you can burn out. So as I was kind of auditing for my own sake, where am I spending my time? I started realizing that not all of my activities were of equal levels of difficulty, levels of impact, tapping into kind of what I'm Relatively best at. They weren't all the same kind of level of interest in terms of what I really enjoy doing. And so as I started trying to audit my own stuff, I started really rethinking, kind of like, what is my role? Well, I'm the CEO, but that doesn't really tell me everything that I'm doing. So for me, I started rethinking what is a role in a company. Could be the director of marketing, the head of sales, whatever. In any role, you have a job description when you get hired. But still, that doesn't really tell you the nitty gritty specifics. And if you rethink what a role is, it's the sum of a bunch of micro responsibilities. And these micro responsibilities are dynamic. Your business is dynamic. So the responsibilities are dynamic.

And.

And a job description is static. Like, you don't refresh. You got hired three years ago. Like, you haven't gotten multiple new refreshed job descriptions, right? So rethinking that a role is the sum of micro responsibilities. And each of these responsibilities carries a different weight. Could be that as a CEO, I have to do financial forecasting and I might have to plan out all of the kind of IP for the year, or I might have to be involved with establishing partnerships with some of these software companies we deal with. Now, each of these things might have a different kind of level to it, so to speak, like level being like level of complexity. So, you know, we have this concept of work levels one to five, one being the easiest, which you could basically outsource. And it's, you know, for the most part, it's just, here you go. I did exactly what you said all the way up to a level five, which would be more of like a CEO level person who's kind of setting new territory, coming up with new ideas, establishing partnerships, and then you got two through four in between. And, you know, these work levels, each of the things that I do has a different work level. So as a CEO, I'm overall a work level five person, but I might be doing some work level three activities, some work level fours. And so the delta, you know, I'm a five minus a three. Let's say that activity has a delta of a two. If I were to say do my own scheduling, that would probably be a work level one activity. So that would be a delta of five, minus one is four. And so when you start rethinking this, you can get for each employee in your company, like a total delta. And you might want to think about when you're doing your quarterly planning. Maybe you want to set goals around how much of that delta you want to reduce. We have found that people are saving multiple, multiple, multiple hours a week and are happier because we're freeing up their time, doing a bunch of things that aren't the best use of their time, and we're able to kind of refill their capacity with things that are higher and best use.

And just so we have a sense, tell us a little bit about your team. How many people do you have now.

In total employees and contractors? We're about 45.

Okay. So to me, that's ginormous. Not in venture backed startup land, but that's a significant amount of complexity in people. And you said that's including free time and contractors.

Full time and contractors.

Yeah, full time. Oh, did I say free time?

It's all right.

It's really funny. Yeah. Yeah. That's like, you know, I have post launch brain.

Yep.

As I was preparing for this conversation, I was thinking, because I get this question a lot like, well, this is what you love. You know, I must be so good at all of it. Same as you. When we talked for your show, I remember thinking, oh my God, this guy's brilliant. You consult other companies on operational efficiency and you have written books on it and you're writing another one. And I am so curious, Nick, like, even though this is what you love and you're a pro, business is dynamic, as you said, and it is complex. What do you feel is your Achilles heel? Like, even within. I don't know, it could be within business more broadly or what's something that you're struggling with now under this umbrella of operational efficiency that people might assume comes easily for you?

I mean, I have a lot of challenges all the time. Probably boundaries is one. So theoretically, I know what's good for me. I know that probably setting kind of themed work days and having kind of Monday be my internal days and knowing that the mornings my brain is fresher than it is later in the day. So kind of blocking those morning slots for deep work and real important stuff that needs to get done. Maybe not taking calls on a Friday, things like that. We hear these things and we know that those are good for us. But then in practice, it's hard to keep those boundaries and great opportunities pop up and you start kind of bending your own boundaries and rules. Because different, this massive potential client for a lot of money, they can only meet at that time. So, okay, we'll make an exception. Or hey, I really like this podcast. They want me as a guest and it's like massive audience, but there's only these time slots. It's like, okay, well, I guess I'll compromise. So finding that balance of I think that boundaries are good. I think that when things are too strict and too constrained, you know, that can cause problems. But the balance of kind of having constraints and to what degree do you stick to em, I find personally to be a big challenge.

I think that's really interesting too. And you mentioned this delta, the gap on work levels. There's also a knowing doing gap. Like I know I would benefit from making these changes or having these boundaries, but then doing it is something else altogether, as you said, because your team probably wants things from you, your clients want things. And I can see how that's tricky to navigate.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Do you feel like you have a sweet spot in terms of the size of your organization? Are you somebody who you want to grow to meet the demand in the market, almost no matter the size? Or do you have a sweet spot as a business owner and a leader of where you like to keep things?

I don't have a sweet spot. It's basically just as small as possible for as long as possible. We were a totally different company in the first year, but we got to 150 people the first year and it is exponentially harder to manage 150 person team than say like a 50 person team. It's not three times harder, it's like 30 times harder. So we get to 10,000, that's fine so long as we really need that 10,000. And it's not that we could have had 5,000, but we were inefficient so we had to hire an extra 5,000 to make up for inefficiencies. You know, as long as you have proper way that you're running the company and you have proper lines of reporting and org structure and you're following kind of like objectives and key results or whatever goal framework you want, I think that it makes it not as scary. Like for me, it doesn't sound that scary to go from 50 to 100 because we have such a strong foundation that we're building off of. It's when you don't have that foundation, people don't know when and how to use the tools to collaborate and they know nothing's documented and people don't know where to go to or who to go to to ask a question. That's where it gets scary to really grow. But if you've got the right foundation, it's not going to be nearly as painful or scary.

Within the role of CEO, you and I both gravitate towards the system side of things and problem solving. I'm wondering, is there part of the CEO role, as we know, like you said, it's dynamic that you love and is there part of it that you have delegated or like basically gotten off your plate that you used to think only you could do?

Well, now the operational efficiency consulting, I used to think that that could only be me. So I used to be the only consultant, you know, would charge like a fairly large amount to do kind of like a day with the client thinking, okay, this is not something I could ever train people. Now I basically don't do any of the consulting. I've got a team that's doing all of it. I'll still be involved and I'll audit the calls with the team and give them feedback or I'll help to create the content and IP for what we're delivering. So I shifted a lot of my time away from being client facing and more behind the scenes trying to be more of a coach. And that wasn't overnight. It took quite a long time. But that puts us in a position to really scale because like, we can't scale if it's all relying on just me.

It seems like another aspect that you've done really well and that you honed, partly because you mentioned an earlier iteration of this business was almost as VAs, right? You were hiring a bunch of VAS and doing increasingly complex project work for end clients. But it seems like you have your hiring process dialed in to a really good place. And I've heard you talk about this on your show. What do you think are the biggest mistakes people make when hiring? Even if it's hiring somebody part time, even if it's an outside contractor and then if there is like a linchpin to your process, I would be so curious to know because I know we could have a whole separate conversation on hiring process, but just love to get your take.

I think it matters, the role that you're hiring for, et cetera. But one thing that I learned is in general we don't out of the gate hire people full time anymore. We put them on some type of like say one to three month test run and we really spend time to co create like a game plan. What are we trying to achieve in that time period? And we spend the time to really build out what does success look like so that we can in 30 days or in 60 days looking back, what are we celebrating? And you have something to kind of measure the progress against another thing that we do. And again, this is all based off of pain and making mistakes, right? So this is after seven years of trial and error. I do an exercise of how to best work with me and what drives me crazy and I share that with the people that are going to be directly reporting to me and I have them do the same exercise so that we're just on the same page. I might say it drives me crazy when people are really long winded and say things in 10 words that could have been three and someone that I'm interviewing might be like, man, this isn't going to be a good fit. Because my whole life I've been told I'm long winded and nothing wrong with that. There's not a bad person, it just might not be a good fit. So just kind of laying everything that you can on the table up front because the deeper you go with someone, the more kind of time investment, cost investment and it's just harder and harder to unwind. So just more upfront work on figuring out is this a good fit. I found to be a good practice.

Okay, now I have two follow ups. One, what else is on your really annoys you pet peeves list?

Leading by example. I hate when people start say something like hey, let's do it this way, but then they're not even following their own. I don't like being cut off. So I feel like I I'm a fairly good listener and most of the time on a call, depending on the context of the call, obviously this call I'm doing a significant percentage of the talking, but in general I default to speaking less. So it's a trigger for me if I get cut off and someone was talking already 80% of the time and I say three words and then I get cut off. That's a trigger. People have to follow kind of the best practices that we've established for using systems. So if someone doesn't follow the Inbox Zero framework that we teach for email, or they're not using Asana in the way that we teach our clients and have agreed internally, that's just not going to work. Everyone's on the same page. We've invested so much time building the best practices. And I also don't want to be one of these thought leaders where it's kind of do as I say, not as I do. I really don't want to be one of those places where we're teaching clients how to do things, but under the hood we have a mess. So I want us to be kind of in high integrity with that. So that's another kind of requirement that I lay out up front among a handful of others.

I know one of my pet peeves is a lack of attention to detail. So like, yeah, little things getting missed or sort of easy or obvious that could have just with a second pair of eyes. It could be misspellings in an email to a client, but it could also be, yeah, the what you're saying, not following a best practice. Like previously, we figured out solutions and ways to document things and finding things that are out of date and they don't need to be. It bothers me. It's like.

Just keep your side of the street clean. Like, we all need to do that. We all need to keep it up to date. So that would be one of mine for sure. Along those lines, sometimes I find myself, I wonder if you experience this. It's not really fair, but I'm just going to go ahead and say it anyway. Sometimes I will see very easy, obvious solutions for inefficiencies in the business that could have easily been automated or set up a different way or optimized. And I will sometimes get frustration even a year after the fact going, why am I the first one that caught this? Or if I hadn't gotten way back down into the business, as happens during times of transition, I go, what on earth? Like, why am I seeing this? Catching the mistake exists and then figuring out how to automate it into a far more elegant solution. And that frustrates me. But I sometimes then will tell myself, well, that's not fair. It's what I love. It's one of my unique abilities. Do you experience that same frustration and. Or how do you teach your team and empower them to solve problems systematically. And do you think that that's something that can be taught or is it that some people, their minds think that way and then some they just don't?

I think some people think that way, some don't. The dynamic role optimization exercise to a certain degree helps with this because anything that, with your kind of lens and thinking framework, anything that you're going to find has the ability to be automated most likely is a work level one task. It's probably something that people don't get joy from and it's probably not something that's super high level. So in general, all those automation things that you'll find are going to be work level one activities that they tease out in the DRO exercise. So if you do that exercise, you'll see that the things with higher deltas have most likely a higher chance that there's a opportunity to use a system or optimize or automate to some degree. So those are ways to kind of catch it. But I think that you need to hire people that have this operational efficiency mindset. And also sometimes it's an art meets science. Like I've had people on my team that were really good at using tools like Zapier and stuff, but their approach to solving problems is different than mine. Sometimes they're trying to optimize or improve a process that really should just be blown up and completely rebuilt from scratch. So yeah, I think it's a really tough one, but the DRO at least gives you a bit of a start.

Speaking of Zapier, I get this question a lot and I'm curious to hear your take. Sometimes people do get zap happy and they create zaps for everything. And that's cool. But then also sometimes the zaps start falling apart or they get out of date or something's broken or they're overly complex. Like, yeah, like you said, maybe at an even higher level, something needs to be reconsidered. In your business, you must have a ton of automation set up in various places, not just through Zapier. How do you maintain those knowing that everything is subject to entropy and breaking and getting leaks and getting bloated?

Yeah, no, it's a great question. Well, Zapier now has functionality that helps with this as opposed to like five years ago. So you can do some certain level of documentation on a zap. You now can do branching so you don't have to have as many zaps to maintain because you could have, you know, a different kind of if else conditions. So you might have a trigger that you charge someone's credit card in stripe and if it's less than $1,000, you want something to happen. If it's between 1,000 and 10,000, you want something else to happen. And if it's above 10,000 you do something else. So in the past you would have to do three different zaps. Now you could just do one with the branching so it makes the maintenance easier. You definitely need to have someone in the company kind of own the various tools. So someone has to be ultimately the gatekeeper of Zapier. But also as you grow your business and mature, Zapier is a great tool and is a good starting point. But as you kind of grow and start using more enterprise level tools that solve specific problems, a lot of them have workflows or integrations native into that tool. So like take Slack for example. We used to use Zapier a lot with Slack to post automated messages into different channels. We still do that in certain cases, but now they have a workflow builder that you could use for certain automation built in. So over time or you might have upgraded to an enterprise level tool that just has everything kind of out of the box built in and you don't need to do any of the kind of hacked automation.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I debate sometimes because we use Help Scout for our team email inboxes and you can create workflows in there and then even guided responses. But I've always used textexpander for those because it's app agnostic. So even if we switch the service we use for our email inbox. So I get worried about storing too much in a piece of software where I might change off that software and then it's all stuck in there. I'm sure you've had this too. In fact, here's a question for you. We know switching costs and cost fallacy, all this, but sometimes a new tool, a shinier object really is shinier. It comes along and it's actually better. And there's so much innovation happening in all of these SaaS services. So when do you decide? Like for us, you know, we moved off of Asana onto Notion and I had to kind of get some buy in from my team, like, hey, is this okay with you? This software so powerful, they ended up being really excited about it. But I can imagine that sometimes it's not an easy decision, especially as your company is bigger and more complex or you have way more history in something. So how do you decide when you want to actually jump ship and go to a new tool in any given area?

I mean, we've done this before. Like we switched from Salesforce to HubSpot after we had sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into the rollout of Salesforce. So what we did to evaluate was we took a step back and we kind of listed out all of the requirements and functionality that we're looking for in a solution, right? And we went really micro, kind of like the level of micro that we were talking about in the DRO exercise. So for example, for us it was important that all the emails that we write to clients get logged in a system. And another thing is that not just the full time people and the salespeople, but all the contractors and freelancers can access a client's contact record and see all the emails and activity. And there's like a whole bunch of other things. So once we listed that out, then we kind of put the icon of the current tool next to the ones that it was able to support and then you could kind of see kind of where there's gaps in the current tool and then you would evaluate it against the shiny object or objects that you're trying to compare it to. And then you put their logo on those rows and then you could just get a nice visual of what's supporting what. But it doesn't just stop there because you also have to be thinking future forward. So things that you have to consider. Cost is usually the least important thing to consider, obviously depending on various things. But with all these tools, if it can save you an hour a week. That's going to be 10 times more valuable to you than whatever the delta is of the cost. So people though don't take enough weight into how good is their customer support. Do they have a zapier integration? Do they have an open API in case you need to do some custom stuff? But also they're not looking at the roadmap of that tool because just because maybe the current tool you're on isn't as shiny of an object you don't want to switch. And it was next quarter that they were rolling out not just some new shiny objects that the other tool has, but ten other shiny objects. And now that tool is actually better. So part of the evaluation also has to be trying to get a hold of whatever you can with regard to the roadmap of those tools to have a real kind of long term thinking strategy.

Yeah, that's so interesting. I didn't even think about that aspect that it could already be on the roadmap. I also get frustrated with software that's too old and clunky like Salesforce not to talk.

You know, the design makes a difference.

I know. And then some of these legacy systems, it's just the nature of the beast. They're trying to maintain such a complicated infrastructure. That's how I felt with Zendesk. I mean, I feel bad. I love, love, love everyone, but I felt like it was too much. It was like too heavy. It was just actually weighed down by too much. And I experienced that there was always a level of friction and just seemed like unnecessary complexity. So yeah, I don't know. I'm just always going for these elegant, streamlined solutions wherever I can. Can you tell us? I know you're working on a new book. You don't have to give too much away. But what's the gist of all the books and the productivity and operational efficiency and systems in the business world? What do you think is missing? And tell us a little bit about what you're working on.

Well, there's a lot of books on productivity. There's less books on how an organization can be productive as a whole. And when you get started working at a company, you get an employee manual which tells you like vacation days and health insurance, but it doesn't tell you what are the tools that you guys are going to use at that company and when and how are you going to use them to maximize the team and the organization's performance. And so over the last seven years of running leverage and we've always been remote and we've always been a highly efficient company. We started realizing some patterns of how we operated that was really working. And then as we started consulting for companies of various sizes, from a million dollar vet hospital up to one of the Fortune 5 companies, everyone kind of had the same issue. So our framework that we've developed is called CPR and that stands for communicate, plan and resource. We found that any company, in order to be operationally efficient, you have to know when to communicate and how to communicate. You need to know the difference between communication tools and planning tools. So the example we use is imagine you were going to go camping in the forest with your team. You would need walkie talkies to communicate with each other, but you'd also need a map to navigate out of the forest. And so tools like Slack or email, those are communication tools. Those are like your walkie talkies, different from your map, which is a tool like Asana or Monday. And then you have your resources which are your SOPs, your processes and. And so regardless of your size or your company, those are three distinct buckets that require its own set of tools. And people need to be aligned on when and how to use those tools. Most companies are just using kind of text and email and maybe some Google Docs to kind of solve all those problems. And that's just not enough. You know, there's specific tools built for some of these problems. You don't want to have a million tools in a company, but you need to have everything, at least the right tools for each of those buckets. So that's my long winded explanation here of the book is basically the employee manual that you never got. And it goes through kind of that framework and it's meant to serve teams and organizations, to create the alignment and give them the insight and the strategy so that they're not just stuck in the minutia on a scavenger hunt and they can actually be high performing and work on the things that matter most.

I love it. Yeah, it's funny when you mentioned the employee manual, you never got. That's how I envisioned free time as well. Yes, it's written to the owner, but I actually wanted them to just give it to team members. Like here, this is how we work. And it's so true. Like talk about at a meta level, the inefficiencies in the system of all these small businesses and no cohesive onboarding or team cohesion training or systems thinking training because you have all the small businesses who just haven't developed that yet. And So I love that you're writing this to kind of serve that need. Yeah, I feel like onboarding, that's another nut I haven't cracked yet. Mostly because I haven't put my mind to it. But how quickly, you know, there's speed of retrievability, but there's also how quickly someone can get ramped up into the culture and systems mindset.

That's why it's important to document so much of your knowledge.

Oh, yeah. And that. See, it's all there. But I find when people join my business, they're almost overwhelmed by that because they've never seen it. So like, oh, there's so much everywhere. So it's interesting, them wrapping their minds around the process, the documentation, the software. There's a lot of different moving pieces.

Well, you know, you were talking before about like, unique interview style. You could put them reading that as part of the interview process and then you quiz them on it before they get hired so that you one, like, you're sure that they have read it before they get started. And, you know, you could even consider paying them whatever you want for, you know, that stage of the interview. So it's not that you're just trying to get them to do work unpaid. But yeah, anything that's absolutely critical, like this book that's coming out, come up for air, that's going to be part of the interview process. Like, if they want to even get to the point where they're talking to someone, there's going to be a question like, what were your key takeaways from the book?

Yes, I was thinking the same thing with free time. Now you gotta read it and talk to me about what's the thing that comes easiest to you within it, what do you struggle with.

But if someone hasn't spent the time to read your book, do you really want to hire them?

No. Well, that's what I'm saying now. It is going to be part of the process. And I never had that kind of vetting. I used to just casually try to assess if they resonated with my work or not because I always wanted somebody who was excited to be here and be learning this stuff and be working on these types of projects and clients and everything, but I didn't have a formalized process around it. So now it will be just a baseline to even get in the door for these conversations.

Last question. If you could give business owners permission to drop something or do something differently, what would it be?

Drop the office and you can work remotely. If you use all these systems and tools properly.

Absolutely, yes. I love it. I don't know that any of my listeners, I'd be so curious how many actually do have an office. I don't think many of us do. Do you have an office that you still pay for with your team?

No.

Way to go. Did you ever?

I've tried just like it was just for myself actually. I was at Soho Works, which I know you did your book launch at. So I've tried these over time but I travel so much and I don't know, I've just always found maybe I'll try it again at some point when I'm traveling a bit less. But maybe for a total of six months out of seven years I've had office space.

Yeah, I hear you. Amazing. Well Nick, thank you so, so much. I know you're deep in a final sprint of putting the finishing touches on the book editorial wise. So congrats.

Thank you very much.

Can't wait to read it. And yeah, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me and thank you for listening everybody.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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