Come Up For Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work With Nick Sonnenberg - I Love Marketing Episode #449

The underlying premise which leads into the framework that I suggest is the mindset shift. If you want to be a high a highly efficient team, the team needs to optimize not for transfer of information, but you need to set up processes and systems to optimize for retrieval of information. And it's a subtle but very distinct mindset shift and it completely changes the strategy of how you operate as a team.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com Nick Sonnenberg is an Entrepreneur Inc. Columnist and guest lecturer at Columbia University. He's the founder and CEO of Leverage, a leading operational efficiency consultancy, helps companies implement the CPR business efficiency framework outlined and come up for air of Nick's unique perspective on the value of time, efficiency and automation, which stems in part from the eight years he spent working as a high frequency trader on Wall Street. The CPR framework consistently results in greater outputs, less stress, happier employees, and the potential to gain an extra full day per week in 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 and across all industries from high growth startups to the Fortune 10. And there may be a little bit of background noise in the back. We'll do our best to minimize that because we are on a, we are in a zoom now with twice as many people that were on three minutes ago and it's going to keep growing. So Nick, what did I not say about you that would be relevant to this? And then let's get into you teaching people how to save an extra day a week, how to be more effective, how to be happier. And from reading what I've read so far, just knowing you, I know all of this is not a promise or marketing hype. It's, it's absolutely doable.

I just want to say one thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. And Joe, thank your network and just how much you connect people and what you did this afternoon with Damon John plugging the book. I really appreciate it. That was awesome.

Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, look, I mean you've been in Genius Network for a while. This company started in Genius Network. It's a testament to people being resourceful and just looking at problems that exist in the world and creating it. And I think what you are focusing on right now is one of the biggest complaints. Gripes, requests, issues, dangers that entrepreneurs face right now, where we live in this world where there's so much access to data and information and so many different forms of communication and you know, a pandemic that's going on, you know, three years ago starting and just a lot of overwhelm and a lot of pain and a lot of fear and people trying. You know, most of the people that are here today are either running or the founders of an entrepreneurial company, or they are a team member that works within an entrepreneurial company. And what I've been sharing with my founders and with my friends is that if you live in a world that requires you to produce results, then this will be really valuable for them to hear today. So I've got a few questions and topics that I'm going to ask you to speak to. I know Dean does also. And then with the time that we have available, we'll do a little bit of Q and A for anyone here that if we can get to some of that. So can you actually just explain the broken sink analogy that you talk about?

Yeah. So look, I think that at a high level with everything, you have to balance short term and long term initiatives, right. And you know, one thing that's really difficult with operational efficiency in general is a lot of it are long term gains that you get on the back end of something. And so you have to balance. Do you want to put your effort into that? Which, you know, if you fix this thing and it's going to take you X hours to fix this thing, well then for the rest of your life maybe you're saving 10 minutes a week. So but like over a five, 10 year period or even a one year period, that starts to become meaningful. But in the short term, you know, if you can sell something in an hour and make some money, that's always a distraction and something that you have to balance. And so the sink analogy is imagine you have this sink that's overflowing with water. You know, most of us are just mopping faster because the quickest way to clean up the floor is you just keep mopping faster and then you can move on to something else. The longer term solution, which takes a little bit more time on the front end, is you find where the hole is in the sink and you properly patch the hole so then you no longer ever have to mop again. And so that's the analogy that you're talking about. And depending, look, depending on the scenario, if you're strapped for cash and you can't make payroll, like you got to focus on, you know, you maybe have to mop that floor because you don't have the luxury of investing time on longer term things. But the mistake that I think a lot of us make is when you're just 100% focused on short term, you'll just never stop mopping that floor. And so just being cognizant that you have to start thinking about some ratio of short and long term efforts and be willing to give up some short term wins because you're investing in long term platform foundational stuff that's going to pay dividends in the long term. That's the concept of mopping the floor in the sink.

Yeah. So. Well, let me say this too. I've done a lot of work with you, and at the last Genius Network meeting that we did a couple weeks ago, and we got another one coming up next week that you're actually going to be at. Ned Hallowell, Dr. Edward Hollowell, the top ADHD psychiatrist in the world, who's been a good friend of mine for over 20 years. Why? Of course, because I'm freaking addicted. And so is Dean and so are probably my friends that I'm even looking at here that are on. They are too. And it's one of the traits not everyone, but there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are distractible and they're the ones that probably try to have eyes for opportunity bigger than their ability to digest or logistically handle or to manage. And so there's a lot of visionaries, there's a lot of starters and then people that are finishers. And so after the two day Genius Network meeting, we filmed me, you and Ned with you taking me through how to get to Inbox Zero. And you know, it's one of these things where that whole concept never truly was a reality until you then help my assistant Eunice, who is at that meeting. She has been my assistant now going on 28 years, and she's been at inbox zero since the day you got her there. And she's maintained it. Right. And so I still have a little bit of work to do, but it was so funny where you take people that are really bright, really capable, and you've worked with some very sharp people and you help them get their shit together right in this particular area. And one thing I wanted to say about Nick is like, when I learned marketing, I never learned it because I thought I'd teach it to anybody. I was a convert of my own system. I had to figure this out in my own carpet cleaning business, trying to figure out how to successfully sell Something nobody wants to buy. And I learned marketing and I taught it to people. And I built the largest training organization in the world in the 90s for the cleaning and restoration industry. And one of the things that puts you really in tune with a methodology is if you actually have to figure out a solution for yourself. And so one of the things that you, with your book, you originally had started writing this book how many years ago?

I started this book four years ago.

Yeah, talk to speak to that. Because I think it's important contextually for people to know this before we get into it as to why the hell should they listen to you.

So I mean I wrote this book, I started this book four years ago. The timing turns out, couldn't be more perfect. A pandemic and like a whole like economic recession has come, you know, in that four year period too. So I think now with the shift to, you know, remote work and people having budgets tightening and hiring freezes and real like there's such an emphasis right now on efficiency, I got lucky with the timing. But I started writing this book four years ago when I was drowning in work and I was in pain. And you know, Joe, as you mentioned before, I started, I started Leverage basically launching it at Genius Network's 2015 annual event back when it was a. A freelancer marketplace.

I remember.

And yeah, Dean, by the way, I cite you in the book. I don't know if you've gone to that part. Yeah. But there's a lot of good thinking that I've gotten from you that goes into the book. But the book started four years ago and at that point that was on the back end of a very bad business partner breakup that Joe was kind of in the mix of and saw some complete craziness. But one day with my ex business partner, you know, he decides to leave and we go through an extremely tough time. Not going to go into kind of all the details, but in literally a three at the point that he left, he was the face of the company and I was the behind the scenes person. I'm the one that I liked the systems and the back end stuff. He knew the clients and the people. And so when he left and I didn't get two weeks notice or two days notice, I got like two minutes notice. And in a three month period we lose 40% of clients. We had 150 team members. Most of them didn't know who I was. Before I know it, I'm cashing out my 401k. My dad's making a loan to the company to make payroll, bank accounts are getting frozen and I have to make a decision whether I bankrupt the company or try to renavigate this. And so I didn't want, you know, we owed about three quarters of a million dollars worth of credits to various clients. I didn't think it was ethical to just pick up and leave with that. And I did see a path to cleaning it up. And so that's the genesis of this book. Through these late nights and seven days a week, 16 hours a day, I started trying to figure out where we were missing things. We got a lot of things right. We scaled very quickly, but we got ahead of our skis and we were missing a lot of this foundational stuff. And so I really took a step back and I just started analyzing where am I drowning? I'm completely drowning in work. How do I fix this pain? And I started just bucketing it. There's pain in how I communicate. There's way too many messages. It's a cluster. Then there was this pain with. I couldn't answer basic questions in one click. I couldn't know what's the status of this project, what's the status of this client client, what's past due that I asked someone to do. I felt like all of these things should be one or two clicks away and they weren't. And then lastly, I knew that documenting our internal knowledge was important. And honestly, had I not have already done that when my ex business partner left, we, we definitely wouldn't have survived it. And so over time I started solidifying this framework. People started reaching out, asking me to consult them, you know, and so through referral and Joe put, you know, Joe connected Tony Robbins to us. I started working with Tony through Joe. I also met Poo Pourri. I met a lot of different companies, different stages. I met seven figure financial advisors, Fortune 10 tech companies and everyone had the same issues. And so that kind of sparked this. Aha. That the real opportunity here where we're seeing a massive impact and a huge gap in the market is there's all these new tools and ways of working that no one's been just taught how to properly use any of these tools, like Slack vs email vs asana vs like all these different tools. No one knows not just how to use them, but when to use them. And we were seeing these massive results of saving up to a business day a week with a lot of these clients per employee. And so it was just insane, the results. And so I started working on this book. At first I was just going to self publish it. I was working with Tucker's company. I guess he's no longer their scribe. And then I started writing it because I wanted to help people. Ultimately, I want to be known for saving millions of hours of people's time and give employees and teams the opportunity to work on the best work of their life. And when they're just wasting time going on the scavenger hunt looking for a document that was just disorganized, that's not the best use of their time. So I want to be able to remove all of these obstacles so people can be free to work on things that really tap into their unique ability or give them joy and unlock the ability to do the best work of their life. And so I thought a book, I thought that it was. The content was well structured enough that it deserved a book. And ultimately there really isn't any books on team or organizational efficiency. I mean, you got David Allen and Getting Things Done and Tim Ferriss and those are personal productivity books. But I just thought the world needed and is ready for given kind of where we're at in the world that they're ready for a productivity book, but for teams and for organizations.

Yeah, Let me say this too. And then, Dean, if you have anything that you would like to ask, I'll hand it over to you. I think the context of the mindset is not to delay getting to strategies and techniques and stuff. It's more what I have actually read. I feel a bit, a bit ashamed of myself and shaming myself is probably not the best way to go about making change. But sometimes it works. I mean, you can shame people and guilt them into stuff. But when I was reading your book, I really realized with my own team how ineffective and inefficient I'm being in some particular areas. Like my buddy jdev who's with us here. He posted just a couple minutes ago. Hi everyone. I've tried to get to Inbox zero many times. It usually leads to frustration. I end up signing up with a new email address. So looking forward to new strategies. And then my friend Momo, she's. She works with artists. She's actually running one of the first art events we're doing in our ghost town, Cleeder, Arizona here in March. She wrote. Do you have any thoughts on Discord and Slack? Well, he has all kinds of thoughts, thoughts on all these sort of platforms and he actually knows the founders of most of these companies. I just left Trainal, you know, which is where Daymond John was today speaking. And you know, I Brought your book to show Damon, John and Chris, who's the founder of Trainer, is like, I'm in his book. You know, this is great. So, I mean, you know, the founders of most of these platforms. But what I've learned, though, is it's not about the just the one technique. It's how it's integrated together. It's how you think about it. And so I guess I would say two things there, and then let's get into any specific strategies for people individually and for their teams. I want to ask you a couple things, and I want to turn it over to Dean, and we can do this in whatever order you want. I just want to mention that I'd like you to explain the scavenger hunt analogy. Right. And I'd also like you to explain cpr, because with those frameworks, I think all of the things you say will make more sense. And then anything that you really like here, I will say, get. Get his book. His book lays out so much of this stuff and so much more. And so we can either have you cover that now or go to Dean Jackson, whatever you prefer. Yeah, let's do that.

I just checked. I'm at inbox 294,956.

I mean, that sounds like an hour fix. Dean. Eunice was about the same. And Eunice, just by going through the book, I think she got down from like 100,000 to 40,000 just kind of by reading the chapter on inbox zero. And then we sat down and showed her a few other tricks. And an hour later, delete anything like that.

I go all the way back. I find it actually, you know, I like to have access to.

Yeah, all of it.

Well, let me. Let me say this, Dean. The reason I never did it is I like a certain fear I'm not going to get to it. I didn't know how to do it. So I hear the concept Inbox zero. And I've even had Nick in the past sort of, kind of try to help me get to it. And I now. It's now coming together, like, oh, I didn't do this, this, and this. So it's like the. The chain is only as strong as the weakest link. And there are just certain things I didn't know how to think about. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Dan Sullivan has that line. The problem is. The problem is not the problem. The problem is you don't know how to think about the problem. So I. I didn't quite know how to think about this problem. And frankly, everything that Nick's going to talk about is problems as it relates to overwhelm and productivity and teams and communication and utilizing resources and all these apps and all that sort of stuff. And frankly, if there were no problems, no one would be here today listening to any of this. Right? So the fact is, humans not only have these problems, they suffer from them greatly and they waste time, they cause a lot of heartache, and they can be the difference between a successful or an unsuccessful company. So go into the scavenger hunt, Nick, and then let's get into how the framework that you have.

Yeah, so the scavenger hunt is just, you know, when you can't find what you're looking for, and it's that no one enjoys, you know, searching for something that you're hoping you should be able to find in two seconds. And then it's like, was that in an email to Joe or was that in a Dropbox folder? Or was. Was that in a Slack channel? Was that in social media hyphen, marketing channel or marketing hyphen social media? And you just spend all this wasted time searching for something that's disorganized and lost, that if they were a little bit more organized, you should be able to find it in a couple of clicks, you know, and, you know, I think that the underlying premise of the entire book and the big mindset shift, because a lot of this is mindset shift, but when you're overwhelmed and you're underwater, you know, I titled the book Come up for Air because the number one thing people tell me is that they're drowning in work. It's the number one thing. Everyone's drowning in work. I mean, right now, I'll be honest, I'm drowning in work. I've got a book launch and I'm running a company. It's, you know, it's. It's. There's a lot to manage with, with all your priorities. And so everyone's drowning in work. You. And what happens when you're drowning in work is you try to cut corners. You play this game of hot potato where it's just like whatever's quickest for you in the moment because you're already at full capacity and you're working 14 hours and seven days a week. And so it's just like, here, just take it. And it could be that you text someone or that you email someone, or you randomly put it wherever. And what you do is you do what's easiest for yourself in the moment to transfer and get that off of your plate, because that's all you're focused on is like, you're being kind of a bit selfish, so to speak, but it's a little bit out of protection for yourself. But you selfishly just move it off your plate as quickly as possible because you need to move on to the next thing because you're overwhelmed. What ends up happening, though, when everyone thinks like that, right. And everyone is just doing whatever's quickest for them in the moment, that's what creates a scavenger hunt. Because then there's no framework and no logic in terms of where you need to look for any piece of information because it's all random. It's whatever someone felt like in the moment because they were stressed out and they're just trying to optimize for themselves to transfer stuff. And so the underlying premise which leads into the framework that I suggest is the mindset shift. If you want to. If you want to be a high. A highly efficient team, the team needs to optimize not for transfer of information, but you need to set up processes and systems to optimize for retrieval of information. And it's a subtle but very distinct mindset shift, and it completely changes the strategy of how you operate as a team. And when you start optimizing for retrieval, kind of in math, you have this concept of local and global optimizations. You're turning the equation around from being a local optimization to now you're doing a global optimization. And when you optimize for retrieval, it does mean that you might need to take pause and spend an extra 10 seconds that is longer than just. Nothing's faster than text. So I'm not going to try to win the argument with anyone. You know what's faster? Well, it's faster for me just to text it. Yeah. Like, there's no argument there. But when the argument really is, what's the fastest way to retrieve whatever it is, Whether it's retrieving an update on the status of this project, retrieving the document that lives somewhere, whatever it is, retrieving. What did I. What did I say last to Nick? You know, that's what you really need to optimize for, because that's the invisible time suck that's happening in all these companies. It's a scavenger hunt that's caused. Because you're not optimizing for retrieval, you're optimizing for transfer. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, totally. Well, in. In the way that you've explained that too, is that in the past, when you first got into productivity and however you want to look at being efficient is that if I can get it quickly, if I can transfer it quickly, that's one thing. And there's a bit of celebration and fetishizing that in the world. But ultimately, the ability to, you know, having. Having speed doesn't causes a lot of people to leave a lot of potholes and to drive off cliffs and things like that. So the retrieval distinction is huge for me. And that's one of the areas where I've been messing up with my. I'll use the path of least resistance or quickest thing, thinking that I'm being. I'm being smart, when in reality I'm just creating future difficulty for myself and my team. So. So one of the things, Nick, I want to say too, is that I don't expect anyone here. We're going to plant a seed today. Like, I know some of the things I need to put in place and that are going to help some people here. The. The book is not just buy this dude's book if you're not really willing to read it and work on stuff. Some things will take a setup period to get it down. But I'm. I'm gonna utilize your book because today I was reading, I sent a message to my team saying everyone on the team needs to read this, and we're going to go through this and it's going to be a new 2023 foundational thing that, that we take on. And it's gonna. Some of the stuff's gonna take months in order to change certain habits and stuff, but there's many things that you can do immediately that make the biggest difference. Let me just say, I know you're. You're about to say, so I just want to read this one thing from Eunice, my assistant. She posted. I went from 198,000 emails to 56,000 on my own. And then Nick helped me get to inbox zero. I used to have so much angst with email, and now it's so much more manageable. I find myself excited to check email and to get inbox zero. Get to inbox zero in minutes. Nick is a lifesaver, and his book will show you how. So anyway, I just want to read that.

Well, maybe we'll swap that quote out for Tony's. Eunice.

There you go.

That's a good one. Yeah. No, it's not just time savings. It's also anxiety. I mean, another thing, too, is you guys. Is it Dean? You talk about Rembrandts in the Addict. Was that. Was that your concept?

John.

John Ratliff.

John Ratliff. But I mean also it's not just about time saving and anxiety. There's literally money and opportunities being missed right now in your inbox because you know you don't have a good system. And we're talking a lot about Inbox zero. Usually in our experience that alone can save three to five hours a week per employee in a company. And the great thing with starting with fixing your email is everyone uses email. Everyone uses Gmail or Outlook. Not everyone uses some of these other tools that I talk about like Slack or Asana or some of these other tools, but everyone uses email and it doesn't require other people to be on the same page at first versus some of these other collaboration tools. Why those take a little bit longer to implement is you only get value out of them if everyone's using them properly together. So email though is a single user kind of tool in the sense that if you use it right, you get the full benefit regardless if your team has yet to adopt Inbox Zero. So that's usually a good logical start. And also one thing to mention is my book is really talking about the theory of how to think about efficiency. It's not a manual on this is how to use this tool. I try to really stay tool agnostic throughout the book. And I don't say this is the best tool on the market. Right. Like I want this book to be in 10 years just as useful as it is today. And so it's really about how to think about running a high performing team. Yeah.

You know the other thing too, Nick, that I just realized is how running meetings, in doing meetings and people that use entrepreneurial operating systems. And believe me, I'm, I know almost everybody that runs one. You know, Gino Wickman's a friend of mine, Verne Harnish is a friend of mine, you know, Lee Benson. So there's all these different systems and there's always different team meetings and there is so much time that I, man, if I, if I had a nickel for every wasted hour of meeting that I've had over the last 30 plus years of business. I mean, I'll be 55 years old in February, right. So I've been running my own company since I was 22 years old. So I've been at this for a long ass time and I've ran, you know, I've ran many, many events, many groups and I'm bringing this into Genius Network. I'm bringing this into our ELF coaching that we are doing and not Just the marketing strategies and the what's in it for them, Methodologies, developing relationships, but just even how to navigating it. So explain the CPR framework. Let's start with that. Yeah.

So what I found. So CPR stands for communicate, plan and resource. Those are the three buckets that I found. Every business you could be right now a five person financial advisor firm, you could be 100 person insurance firm, you could be a thousand person poop spray company. You need to communicate with people internally, with your team externally, with clients and vendors and partners.

Let me stop you because you mentioned poop spray and for people that don't know. So Poo Pourri, who you mentioned, you know our friend Susie Batist, she's the founder of Poo Pourri. And I don't even know what that company's worth now because three, four years ago when I interviewed Susie, she was worth $240 million selling freaking poop spray. So it wasn't just meant to be a joke. There's actually a company, you know, her company.

Actually let me actually plug. You can't see this. I'm just looking at the back cover. On the back cover I've got three, four, five, six. I just realized I have seven endorsements on the back cover and five of them I know in some way, shape or form because of you and Genius Network. Out of the seven, I just realized that and Susie Batiste from Poo Pourri is one of them.

Well, thank you.

So thank you for that.

Yeah.

So what I. I've worked with a multitude of different industries, different team sizes. Everyone needs to communicate internally and externally, right? Everyone needs to plan. You've got tasks, you have projects. No matter what you are, you have work that needs to get done. And an analogy I use in the book is if you were to go camping in the forest with your team, you would need walkie talkies to communicate with each other. And you need. But you also need a map to navigate out of the forest, right? And there are different tools for different purposes. And common mistake that we see is you're using the same tool to do both, right? So a lot of what's happening in text and email are actually things that belong inside of a project management or a task management tool. So anytime you want to be able to hold someone accountable, you know, like, hey Joe, I need your testimonial by Friday, right? Like ideally, if we're on the same team, that wouldn't be done in a communication tool because I need to hold him accountable. I need that needs to Be a task assigned to a person with a due date, right? So communication, when you break it down, it should be like, hey, everyone, welcome, you know, Joe to the team, or hey, you know, does anyone know? Blah, blah, blah. But so much of what's happening in communication tools is actually a misuse of a communication tool, and it's actually a task or a project that belongs in a different tool. Different tools are built for different purposes, right? And we're using text and email like a Swiss army knife, and we're using it for internal communication, external communication, project management, task management. Sometimes people are using it to document processes and they're using it like a Swiss army knife. But. And the argument most people make is, well, you know, it's easier for me to manage everything in just one tool that's more efficient. And what they're missing is all these tools have specific functionality that are built for purpose to make your life easier on something that's foundational. And another example, if you're going to go in that forest that we were just talking about and you wanted to chop down a tree, you could do it with a Swiss army knife, but it's going to be faster with a chainsaw. And so sometimes with a lot of these problems that we're trying to solve, you're using a Swiss army knife instead of the chainsaw. That's just going to be way better for you. So you got communication tools, you got planning tools, and then you've got your resources. That's all your digital knowledge. Everyone on this call right now has intellectual property. You have standard operating procedures, you have processes, how you onboard a new employee, how you do payroll, your core values, your vision, your mission, your org chart, all of these things is company knowledge that needs to be easily accessible. And just like you want to be able to in one click answer some of those basic questions we talked about before, you also want to be able to, in one click be able to know what you know, be able to find any kind of critical piece of company information. And when you do that, that's both a time saver because now people can self serve and answer their own question versus getting notifications and messages and pings and dings of, you know, it's kind of back to the mopping the floor example. If someone asks you a question twice, right. If you, if you continue answering it, that might be quicker for you in the moment, right. To just re. Yes, we do. I love marketing calls every, you know, every month on this day of the month. Right. And that's really quick to answer. But if every month you're getting that question over and over and over again over a 5, 10 year period, think about the wasted time that you're spending answering the same question. It's like you're just never ending mopping the floor. The patching the pipe would be you stick that answer in a queue, in an faq, in a knowledge base that people can go and find it. And that might take you a couple of minutes to do versus a couple seconds right now to answer it. But now you never have to answer that question for the rest of time again. Right. And so it's back, it's always back to that mopping the floor example. You know, you gotta, you just have to balance it. But you have the time savings when people can go and find their own answer and you've got the risk mitigation. You don't want to be vulnerable. You know, I had a business partner leave. Like I shared earlier, we've all had critical team members or partners leave unexpectedly. And we all know what the pain of that is like. And the more you can document how things work, the less risk you have if some event happens and they're no longer there. You know, we, we all understand the concept of insurance and we buy, you know, all various types of insurance. Well, you could think of documenting knowledge as like this special insurance policy that you can't go and get from an underwriter somewhere. But like imagine if you could have insurance policy that your CFO against your CFO leaving and it crippling your company or co founder insurance or you know, head of sales insurance, you know, by, by documenting and digitizing all of their knowledge. It's like the equivalent of buying an insurance policy at an, and getting an underwriting on it.

Yeah. You know what the cumulative effect of neglect in a lot of ways is? If you've eaten very poorly for many years, you're going to have the consequences of that. And if you've done certain other behaviors such as exercise or sleep, if you, if you're sleep deprived for a day or two, you can sustain yourself. Some people can do it for weeks, some people can do it for months. If you do it your whole life, you can frigging die early. You're going to lose decades. Right. So there's many, there's many cumulative effects. And I think all of this in the cpr. You know, my marketing brain can think of all the analogies of like real cpr. When you don't have your communication, your planning and your resources together, you're going to have to resuscitate yourself and you're going to be put in a situation. So the time to start dealing with some of this, you know, the biggest angst and the biggest frustrations and the things that piss us off the most and cause us the most angst, if we, the things we're ashamed of, the things that we, you know, avoid and neglect, those are the, the monsters sleeping under the bed. And the, the sooner we come to grips with that and address those in an intelligent, thoughtful way, not only will the pain subside and lessen, in a lot of ways you can transform it into joy. So I'm approaching this call today and I, I sort of have an advantage here because, you know, having to. I would have not taken the time to have put. I've literally been reading your book all day and yes, and you sent me. I think I was the only person that has the audio version of your book, which you just got me a couple of days ago. You had to get permission.

I haven't even listened to it.

And it's really. You're a good reader. I mean, I recorded my book. What's in it for them? No one that's ever recorded their own audiobook does not realize it is so.

Much more such a pain. Such.

Yeah, and I'm not talking like digging ditches and you're doing painful like, again, like difficult work is relative to stuff, but it's really a hard thing to do. And your, your book is really what. You're a great reader. It's a really well done thing. So I.

Are you sick of my voice yet?

No, no, no. It's actually, it's quite, it's quite helpful. I separate what I really think about you as a person from the value of the. But yeah, so, so what I, what I'd like. Let me, let me ask you this question here because. And then come back to the cpr because I think it's important especially for people here that have more than themselves working in the company. You know, who not how is a book that you reference in your book, and that's Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan and that. That's another book that happened in Genius Network. Dean Jackson is the one that originally came up with the, the, the line who, not how. And then Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy wrote a book about the concept and it's. If you, you know, why learn how to, you know how to do something when you can write, find the right who. And in a lot of ways people can use that as a way of, of copying out and saying, well, I'm not going to do any of this. I just need to find the right who and if. And it's kind of like if you try to delegate the marketing but you don't understand it, you're gonna, you can be put into a bad situation. I mean, I can't tell you how many people, I don't want anything to do with all this marketing stuff. And then their marketing sucks and they try to hire a marketing person, but they have no idea if the marketing person is good. So here's, here's my question for you. What are the downfalls to hiring more people into an inefficient system? And then in parentheses, complexity scales exponentially with team size and hiring more people as a knee jerk solution to many business problems. Would you rather bring more people into a broken system and fix it later or fix the system first and bring more people into an efficient system? So going back to the question with what I said, that's the one thing in your book is like, well, we can just hire people, but if you have a bunch of broken systems and things that aren't working and you just pile in more people into it, you're just going to have a lot of inefficient people running around. So how would you respond to that?

I think there's three ways to increase your capacity. The first way that most people go about it is you hire more people. And it's usually the most expensive and should be the last resort, but it's most people's first resort. If you think about all the expenses of hiring someone, you pay for recruiting, onboarding, training, you pay a salary odds that they stay around in 12 months is what, 50%. And even if it all works out, every person you add to your team adds exponential complexity. It actually follows I talk about in the book Robert Metcalfe's law and it has to do with networking. And you know, the more cell phones you add to a network, there's exponential more ways that people can communicate, right? The value of one cell phone, zero. Because you can't communicate with, with someone. As you start adding cell phones, there's exponent, it becomes this graph and this massive web. So when there's, what is it, five people on a team, there's 10 ways that information can transfer. And when you double to 10 people, there's 45 ways. But that's not just transfer. That's more opportunities for information to get lost, right? For friction to happen, for things to fall through the cracks, so on and so forth. And I think that I'm speaking for everyone here, but have you ever been out of bandwidth and thought, oh, I just need to hire that one person and all my problems are going to get solved. And then you hire that person and like, your problems didn't get solved, and now it's like you got all this crap that you got to manage them, and there's now just more ways that there's more group text messages, more slack messages, more. All this stuff. And sometimes it's like, man, this person I was hoping was going to take 20 hours off my plate, and maybe it took two. And so that happens because every person you add, there's this extra layer of management and complexity, and you only want to add as a last resort, not a first resort. I'm not saying that there's never a purpose to hire. I'm just saying that people do it too early normally, and it's usually the most expensive way of doing it. The second way you can increase capacity is you just tell people to work harder and just tell your team to work 100 hours a week. In my research, it turns out people don't like number two as a strategy. The teams tend to push back at that one. And so then you have strategy number three, which is, how do you remove the scavenger hunt? How do you make people more efficient? How do you remove all the crap of just pure waste of them just wasting time searching for stuff that's disorganized and free up an extra business day a week? And now you don't need to hire anyone. And it's like, let's try to relate this to marketing. Say you don't have a good Dean, I know you talk about, like, a compelling offer is 10 times more valuable than a. Than a compelling argument. Like, say you don't. Say you don't have a good offer, and, you know, maybe you don't have good copywriting. You know, like, sure, you could probably bump up revenue by doing Facebook ads, but you're probably gonna burn a lot of money. And, like, you probably want to first get the offer right and get the copyright before and kind of get that foundation of kind of your marketing done before you go and try to pour gasoline on it and try to really scale it. And so it's the same with your, you know, efficiency. Like, you. You always want your base to be, you know, you always want to be thinking about how strong is your base before you start pouring gasoline on it, I think, and that. That's regardless of whatever base we're talking about. Whether it's an operations base, a marketing base, a sales base, whatever. Because if you start trying to pour gasoline on something and it's not ready for it, like you're gonna blow up. How's that analogy? I've been working on my analogies. I'm trying to get better at marketing. There you go.

Well, you know, so let, let me, let me ask you about. There's some comments about doubts of. Let's find one here. How do you deal with people with employees who won't reference the systems or processes you've already created? Then Jake wrote, systems are greater than superstars. So there's fear, there's apprehension. Anyone that's never hired somebody, the first hire is usually a very difficult sort of situation because you know, you're having to turn over your company in roles and responsibilities and you're literally handing over behavior that you were doing to someone else to do that behavior. Because an employee is a behavior rental agreement. You're renting someone's behavior, and I'm a rental behavior agreement. When people are joining Genius Network, they're renting my behavior when they're coming to my company, or they're renting the behavior of my team. So in order to quote, unquote, get people to behave the way you want them to versus the way that's going to be most serving to the organization, the goals of the, the company. I mean, someone here has a nonprofit, they talked about, you know, making sure they hire the right executive director. So when it comes to, you know, hiring a team member, like if you, what can you speak to? Because you've had, you know, I mean, when you, when you were in your dire straits with this, with leverage, you know, Starting back in 2015, you had 150 team members and, and it instantly became a shit show. I mean, that's a lot to navigate. So what have you, what have you learned layered on the come up for air, the CPR methodology now that you could share with everyone here, that would help them embrace, you know, where they're at and in the best of ways and get their team most aligned. And frankly, you know, how do you get rid of people that are not the right fit people? I mean, I, you know, so love to have you speak to those topics.

Yeah. I mean, it was a complete clown rodeo circus. Right. And like it's not that 150 people isn't manageable, but like when you're in year like one of a business and you don't have an org chart, like, you know, it was just premature and so I think that you have to make sure that you're celebrating the right success criteria. And I think that there's too much emphasis on vanity metrics like how big is your email list? Or how big is your revenue? Because you could hack a lot of those numbers and it doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing business the right way. So, like things like revenue per team member, for example, or profitable or profit or lifetime value relative to cost of acquiring a customer. You know, I think it's really. I think that you have to get really clear on what you're trying to optimize for. And I got sucked into the. You know, everyone was super impressed with leverage. We hit seven figures the first year, 150 team members. People thought we were freaking geniuses. And under the hood it was just like a complete cluster. I mean, we were doing some stuff really smart, but we got ahead of our skis and prematurely scaled. And ultimately, I think premature scaling can blow up a company just as much as a lot of other things. So you got to make sure that you get that foundation. And I learned that the hard way. And the more people you manage, it is literally exponentially harder. Right now we're a fraction of that size doing way more revenue, way easier. And so I really think hiring is a last resort and making sure that you're getting the most out of your team. Joe mentioned who, not how. I view all of these different technologies we're talking about as who's. They're just technical who's right. And they help me to avoid hiring a lot of people because by using tools like Zapier for automation or some of these other tools, it would require dozens of more full time people in order for me to accomplish all the tasks and requirements that we need. And it helps me to avoid like literally probably dozens of headcount. Like we're probably outputting the equivalent of a team that's 10 times the size of what we are because of how we use these tools.

That's a good comment. We're outputting a team of 10 times the size we are because of utilizing these tools. So what is. You make a great case because I think throughout the book you have to give people the financial ramifications of a poor system or neglecting to fix something or just, you know, going off the cuff. So let's talk about meetings, because the, the interesting data over the last three years, the percentage of people's time because of zoom and the amount of zoom fatigue that people have gotten because the increase of Meetings did not go down, it actually increased. Now I think one part of it is just human connection. I mean, if, if you're not interacting with people in the workplace and all of a sudden the only way you're seeing people is over a zoom meeting because of the pandemic and everything, then that's one aspect. What it did do is it scaled massive inefficiencies and ineffectiveness. So what's the cost of ineffective meetings? And speak to that and who should actually be part of a meeting? If you could give some tips, you have a whole framework on how to do a better meeting. And Cameron Herald, who wrote Meetings Suck and you referenced his book, you know, he's, he's been a genius network member for seven years. Like when I read the way that you described how to do meetings, it just really reinforced to me even today, a guy who spent God knows how much time in my life in meetings, how some of the stupid that I'm doing that I'm no longer going to do. And so, but there's a cost to it. So I'd love to have you speak to that because I think this really helps people understand.

The cost is $37 billion a year in the U.S. here I'll cite the article. So there are $37 billion worth of productivity waste in meetings, according to some articles. Different places cite different. But it's like anywhere from 25 to 75 billion I've seen in different studies. Meetings are one of the quickest wins that you can do and it doesn't require. You could be allergic to technologies. And cleaning up how you do meetings is a quick win that saves a ton of money. It's costing you probably millions and millions of dollars a year and you don't really need to add any technologies. So first of all, you have to really start looking at a meeting differently, right. First you have to start with what's your time worth, right? And if you don't know it, the easiest way to do it is take your salary and divide by 2000, 2000 hours a year roughly of work hours, right? So if you're $100,000 a year person, that's $50 an hour, the average, right? And then you could adjust accordingly. If you make $200,000 a year, maybe it's $100. So you just got to get some rough baseline and think about that, not just for yourself, but for your team. So if you go into an hour long meeting and you've got three people that make $100 an hour, that's a $300 meeting, right? And so you should be looking at every meeting like, what's the dollar value associated with this? Like, if you start seeing 10 person meetings, the first reaction for me is like, this is costing thousands of dollars, right? Like literally it's a thousand. Like you're investing thousands of dollars into that meeting. How do you make sure that you get a return on that investment?

Right?

So first you have to look at the meetings from the right lens and calculate the investment that you're making, right? Then once you do that, there's a handful of ways to reduce the cost. One, you reduce the number of people. Two, you reduce the frequency. So you start auditing. Does this meeting really need to be daily? Could it be weekly? Does it need to be weekly? Could it be monthly, etc. Three, does the meeting even need to be a meeting? Could you solve this asynchronously? Could you send a, like a video message or a, or a slack message or something?

Hold on a minute for Nick. Asynchronous. I can never pronounce that word, but this is an important distinction because I've been doing it. This is how me and you communicate most of the time.

Yeah, yeah. So asynchronous. So basically, right now we're synchronous, right? We are live on a call, I blocked my calendar. We're going back and forth in real time, right? So that's synchronous. But there's a lot of stuff that you can solve asynchronously, right? Where I have a question for Joe. He can answer it in three days if he wants. We can communicate asynchronously with that stuff. So what you. The other part to this too is we talked about your hourly rate and we've been talking all this time about saving time, but it's also about optimizing time, because not all time is worth the same. So if your time on average is worth a hundred dollars an hour, 9am on a Monday, when you've just had a relaxing weekend and you worked out, you've had your coffee and your brain's at full horsepower, the 9 to 10am time slot on your calendar on a Monday might be 10 or 100 times more valuable of a time slot than 7pm on a Friday after you're exhausted and you've had a hundred zoom calls for the week, and you're in the back of an Uber without your laptop and you're just sitting there doing nothing, staring out the window. Like your time at 9am on a Monday might be worth 500 an hour. And it might be worth $5 an hour on that time slot on a Friday. Making sense? So you start having to also think, how do you optimize time? So think about in the, in your meetings. If you've got an hour long meeting on a Monday from 9 to 10, and say 15 minutes of it is just someone reporting on something, sharing screen and reporting on a deck for 15 minutes that didn't need to be live, that could have been pre recorded with a tool like loom that I see people chatting about or other tools. And that could have been sent the previous week for people to watch on their own time. And now the back of the Uber ride on the Friday you can watch that video report out, make good use of that time. And now you've freed up 15 minutes at one of the most valuable time slots on your whole calendar. So imagine your calendar is not just equal each time slot. It's like a heat map where you can project kind of your energy level and the horsepower of your brain and each time slot actually has a different hourly rate tied to it. And you should be trying to optimize around kind of this heat map of a calendar. Does that make sense?

So you have a chapter on efficient meetings. Like literally, you know. And you have these graphics here. One is the four ways to reduce the cost of meetings. Eliminate it entirely. Reduce the number of people. Reduce the duration, reduce its frequency. If it's a reoccurring meeting, you spoke to that. And then you have this great graph here. Okay. And this, this graph basically says some of the things you spoke to. Does this really need to be a meeting? No. Cancel it. Yes. Does it really need to be this long? No. Shorten it if yes. Do all the people need to be in the meeting? No. Remove all unnecessary attendees? Yes. Is there any paperwork that can be done to distribute in an event? If it's no. Schedule it. If it's yes. Assign pre work in advance. I mean you literally take.

Yeah.

Here on, here on a. Here on this, this zoom that we're doing right now in this conversation we're having. I know you're going through the flyover of the whole book and everything, but the, everything is laid out step by step. And what I realized is I was taking so many of these little things in piecemeal that I was never really doing them. And then I was missing. Now I'm doing some of this. I mean I run a multi million dollar company. I mean I have a lot of success. The, the, the, the. In business, the, the the thing though is, my God, the amount of frustration and angst that can be eliminated though with all of this is, is, is a massive game changer. And that's why. So I'm, I'm going to, you know, the, the truth is like one of the reasons that I wanted to actually do this also this conversation with Nick is because I'm using this as a way to even force myself to speed up the rate of which I execute upon and implement what I can in the time frame and also enroll my whole team into the process. And so everyone here, we're just, I'm just wanting to enroll them into this thinking so that they, you know, get your book and start getting the benefits from this.

Well, look Joe, one thing I'll say right is give yourself a bit of grace too. I know you went 63% of my book in a two day period is, is a lot like this book isn't a, I mean curious your thoughts, but it's not one of these books where it's one concept with like, you know, that could have been five pages and then you've just got like all these stories around the same concept. I mean it's a pretty dense book with a lot of actionable, tangible tactics and strategies. I think the best way to read the book and the most value you're going to get is read one part at a time and then try to implement. Because with anything there's hundreds of strategies and tactics in there, but you only get value out of any of it if you actually roll it out properly. And so whichever one is the one that you want to start with, do it properly and get the value and then move on to the next thing. A big mistake I find people making is they try to do too many things and they're trying to fix too many things at once. If every day you just solved one problem right after a year your business will look completely different.

Yeah, I had a big realization guys, when I was realized that our anxiety and ambition both move at a faster velocity in our imagination than reality. And one of the blessings of any of this stuff is that all the things that actually happen are limited by the speed of reality, which happens to be currently 60 minutes per hour. And so you can only, even if you look at this pile of things that you have to do that makes you anxious that you look at it and you say this is going to take hours and hours. The reality is that you can't do anything more than what the. The reality time of reality is 60 minutes per hour and that is really helpful in realizing that when you slow things down and get into that granular level of time, you realize how little of what is causing all this anxiety is actually required to be actioned right now. And that gives you at this kind of. I think it fits with what you're saying, Nick, is this idea of coming up for air that you feel that whenever you get. I did this with. You know, whenever you get anxious, I would always sit and. And I use this as an on ramp to focus. Time too. Is my watch. I've got a Rolex that has a sweeping secondhand. And I find it just very peaceful to sit and just breathe and watch that second hand for one minute in silence. And you'd be amazed at how much centering that gives you in the midst of this anxiety or all this stuff that you're overwhelmed by something. And what from that then getting calibrated. It's almost like you can't come up too quickly with. In your scuba tank or you get the bends or whatever. It's almost like that same thing. It's coming. Getting yourself calibrated.

That's a good one. I'm gonna steal that. I'm gonna steal that one, Dean.

No problem. There you go. What. What do you think are the most important things you can share in the time we have and then we can take.

So I'll just leave with a few other kind of final thoughts and then go to Q A. But, you know, David Allen, who I know you also know. Well, you know, he has this. This phrase, which is, your brain is for having ideas, not holding ideas. And especially if you're on this call and you have ADD and you have a ton of ideas and you're very creative. Right. I know for myself that it's very stressful. It's hard to be present on conversations when you've just had 12 new ideas pop into your head that are totally random ideas. And you're in the middle of a conversation or you're driving somewhere and you don't want to lose these because they're potentially very valuable ideas. And so this CPR framework gives you a framework to know where you can dump and kind of cleanse your brain and trust that it's going to be able to be retrieved and it's not going to get lost somewhere. And then you can go about and free up your brain space to go back to whatever you need to use it for. You know, something I mentioned in the book is this concept of retrieval versus transfer. We do this already in our personal lives. If you think about how you do your laundry, you don't just take things out of the dryer and stick it into one drawer, although that would be the fastest way to be done with laundry and transfer your clothes. You spend the extra minute or seconds to separate your socks in one drawer and your underwear in another drawer. And you invest that time to separate it. Not because it's the fastest way to be done with your laundry, but tomorrow when you need to put together an outfit, it's easier to retrieve what you're looking for. And so treat your business like how you're treating your laundry and optimize for retrieval. And then lastly, this stuff is only going to work if you have alignment from your team and it comes from the top down. So implementing a tool and not rolling it out right will probably hurt your efficiency and hurt your business. Like you really have to either decide are we going to do this right or not? And otherwise it's a complete waste of time and it needs to come from the top down. Like this stuff won't work if it's a do as I say, not as I do. It's almost like speaking a language, this stuff, right? And if, imagine you were, you know, you speak English and you hire someone that only speaks Spanish and another person that only speaks Japanese or French. Like it's going to be hard to work efficiently together and get work done. And so this stuff is like speaking a new language. All of these new technologies and ways of working is a completely new language. And you know, if you want to be a high performing team, everyone needs to speak this language. And this is really my way of saying you should buy a book for your whole team. But no, no, if they do someone posted.

Who was it? Was it, Let me see. Posted? What, what are the, what are the bonuses if peop. Oh, Randy wrote. What are the bonuses or does it differ based on the number of books ordered?

So if you go to come up for air.com, there's a button for teams. We've got different packages that are special offers there. If you're a genius network member, we're gonna have an extra special one. But another offer that we're doing is if you want to buy 100 books or more, I'll do a private ask me anything for your company. So those are the kind of the special ones. Then there's free resources. You don't even have to buy the book. As you'll see in the book, it's already a 320 page book. And so we couldn't make it any longer. So throughout the whole book we cite. If you want additional bonus material, go to the website. So you could go to the website, right? You could go to Come up for Air. And I think in the next week you can enter your email and you'll get all the bonus material and free resources whether you buy the book or not.

You should not have your sales prevention department telling people that you should. You don't even need to buy my book. I mean, that's like one.

Well, I mean, I mean, if you, if you listen to all this and like, you don't think that you're gonna get $30 worth of value out of the book, then, you know.

Yeah, actually, I totally hear you. I totally hear you. In the last two months, going on three months now, the amount of innovation in AI has been unbelievable. And there I even have a newsletter I'll ask someone on my team to just post in the chat. If someone wants to see my ConnectionInsider AI, which is the website for my. I have a connection Insider newsletter that combines things related to connection, marketing, business addiction, things like that. And it's pretty cool. There's a lot of things that I have, a lot of stuff I've accumulated three decades worth of. I'm a hoarder, but I'm a hoarder of books, knowledge notes, both physical and digital. I mean, I know we have a lot of digital hoarders that are listening to this right now. I mean, email could be one version of it, right? In helping people with this symptom of holding on to stuff or trying to retrieve stuff, what are your thoughts on AI? How will this impact team productivity? How does it fit into your CPR methodology, communication, planning and resources? What are your thoughts on it?

I think AI is going to change a lot with how people work. I think that we're still even in the early days of what these things can do, but I think that it doesn't really. I think that AI is going to play a role. For example, we talk about knowledge base in my book in the resource part. Imagine that you could just type to a bot asking the bot a question and then the bot can reply to you by looking up in your knowledge base and using some machine learning to start answering questions. And you could start asking bots questions rather than a human. Right? I'm already seeing bots having employee IDs in HRIS systems. So I think that tools like ChatGPT are going to be integrated into tools like Asana. So you might have a task like write this blog and you could basically just within the task, have ChatGPT do it for you. But I do think that there's limitations and I do think there's a lot of hype on this stuff and people I think that there's definitely merit to the hype, but I think that there's probably limitations too that people have to be aware of with this stuff. But I do think that we're starting to look at it a lot for a lot of our content and using it more for rough draft or title ideas and things like that that are super helpful, super helpful tricks to use tools like Chat GPT. But I think we're just in the infancy of this stuff and it's going to completely change a lot about how we work.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's my thoughts. I think it's going to change everything about how people work, how they interact, and I think it's going to be good and bad. That's why in December 10th I sent out an email about the negative sides of AI and I'm getting ready to send out one on the positive sides of AI. And what it will do is it will definitely facilitate so many things in creative ways that you can have a machine do for you that a human could not do as well. AI is not going to take an inefficient dysfunctional system or person and fix it. As a matter of fact, it's going to exasperate it. So yeah, so there's a lot said with that. Jason Campbell and Dave Streen are both on with us. Dave has been running the I Love Marketing meetups locally in Arizona for the longest time and he's been running ELF Coaching, which is our coaching group. And Jason Campbell, who runs Zen Wellness, he's my partner in the ghost town of Cleader, Arizona is on with us and he's going to be heading up the ELF coaching program also. And for those of you that want some personal help with with marketing and being part of a program for that, then why don't you give it a quick plug, Jason?

So yeah, we're doing all types of good stuff with ELF coaching.

We're doing and I think the short version is right now.

I'm happy to put a booking link if you would like a consult, like a 30 minute consult on your business and how to make it more ELF and to see if ELF coaching is going to make sense for for you to be a little bit more easy, lucrative and fun.

Cool. Yeah. So that's Jason Campbell. And so thank you and thank you Dave. So, Nick, any famous last words? Anything you want to mention before we wrap it up?

No, I would say a couple things. One, celebrate the small wins. Like I said before, try to just fix one thing at a time. Like there's, there's, I can guarantee you in all of our businesses there's thousands of things you could fix. So don't take it on yourself to be overwhelmed and think you got to do a million things at once. Celebrate small wins. Even if it's a one second win, that's a huge win. Because if you do that thing 60 times a day, that's a minute a day, five minutes a week, 20 minutes a month. You know, by the end of the year, that's four hours a year. And that's just for you, you know, and then you got your whole team. So if you're a team of five, that's a 20 hour a year gain. So sometimes small wins add up to a lot also. Just thanks for the opportunity. Thanks for having me on the show, Joe. And for those of you listening that are ingenious network and we'll be at the meeting next week, looking forward to hanging out and talking more about this stuff in person.

Yeah, it's going to be good and we're going to keep the conversation going. And like I said, this is something I'm really excited, excited about this year. I'm really happy we were able to do this as a. We're going to put this out as an I love marketing podcast, the audio version and we'll also put it on YouTube. So if you want to share it with your teams or anyone that you know, I'm sure a lot of you have, you know, business associates that would really benefit from hearing this, then share with them. You can subscribe to I love marketing. And you can also, you know, pre order Nick's book right now, wherever books are sold. So on behalf of myself, Dean, anything else you want to share?

That's great.

Awesome.

I think. Get the book. I don't know if you know, he's got a book that's coming out, so go and get that. Get it out of the way.

Yeah, exactly. And so thank you all and I appreciate it and we will let you know about the remember, I love marketing zoom. We've got some really cool ones that are going to be coming up next month and the month after and we'll let you know. See, see everyone next time. Happy rest of the evening or morning, wherever part of the world you're in right now and talk to you guys next time. Thank you. Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today@ilove marketing.com subscribe if you'd like access to the show, notes or resources to help you take action on what was discussed, please visit ilovemarketing.com 449.