The Trick To Getting Exponential Leverage In Your Organization Feat. Nick Sonnenberg

And so when we do these 10 minute talks, and some of you are new, I know we try to make it so that you're getting at least $250,000 of value. And what I'm going to try to do is do better than that. I'm going to try to give you $250,000 per year of value out of this talk. And so I just want to break down the math for a second. So we recently did this with a client and they were a 10 person team and immediately they started saving about 5 hours a week. So if we want to translate this into dollars on average blended with the CEO's rate, it was about $100 an hour per person of cost. So when you just do the math, that's $250,000 not one time, but per year. So if you weren't excited before, I hope that I got your attention.

As a Genius Network member, you have a lot on your plate. You do a lot of different things to grow your business, to gain customers and clients, to and of course you run your business now. Some of these things you love to do, others you don't. Some activities are using, as Dan Sullivan, a strategic coach says, your unique abilities. Other activities don't. Joe Polish has asked you to put some of these things on your Not to do list tool. But what if there was a way that you could reduce the things that you don't like to do or don't do well, while also increasing the activities you excel at and love to do? Now if that sounds like a great idea, what if you expanded it to include everyone on your team? Imagine if each member of your team could focus only on what they're best at and what they love doing. This could be a game changing concept that could easily be worth over a quarter of a million dollars for you. This is a concept that Nick Sonnenberg has been focusing on for the last six months. Nick is a longtime Genius Network member who is often called an efficiency expert by some of his many clients like Lee Richter, our facilitator host today, Jim and Mimi Du, Dan Sullivan, Cherie Ong, Tim Westbrook as well as Andre Norman. They know him as the founder of Leverage. Nick has used his unique ability to help others such as Tony Robbins, Joe Polish, Jay Abraham and organizations like Poo Pourri, to name just a few. He is also a writer for Inc.com and the author of his soon to be released book Come up for how youw Team Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work. Nick is again the founder and also the CEO of Leverage, a growth agency that helps businesses optimize their top and bottom line revenue. So next title for you today is Dynamic Role Optimization. Would you please help me in welcoming Nick Sonnenberg.

Welcome, Darwin. Thanks.

Good luck.

All right, all right. Thank you very much, Tim, for the kind introduction. As Tim mentioned, you probably have been exc exposed to the not to do list concept when you come to these meetings. And you probably have heard of Dan Sullivan's unique ability concept. What I have found is the real trick to getting exponential leverage is you apply those concepts not just to yourself, but to your entire team. And better yet, you have it documented in a transparent system so the entire organization can see it. So this concept of dynamic role optimization has a bunch of really key benefits. So first, it will improve your culture. High performers don't like working on crap. So all of a sudden, if you give them the ability to work on higher level stuff that they like to do, it's going to improve your culture. Second, it's going to de risk your business because you have all responsibilities documented. So it's no longer the day where someone leaves and you have no idea actually what they were doing. It's going to help to drive hiring decisions. One key thing that I have personally felt as a challenge is we need a lot of hires. But what's the first domino that you need to knock over that's gonna knock off the most pain? So this is gonna help you with that. Also it's gonna decrease the need for outside hiring because now there's gonna be this transparent place where internal people can raise their hand, say, hey, I noticed Cameron, you don't like doing that. I would actually love to do that. And lastly, it's going to just free up, free up a ton of time. So the things that as a business owner, you want to know is what are the things that you need to get off your plate? But also, even more importantly potentially is what are the things that your team needs to get off of their plate and what are the gaps in your business? And like I said before, who should be your next hire? Okay, now, as Tim mentioned, I am an efficiency geek and I obsess about saving a second here, 10 seconds there. And after six years of tinkering with all these systems and tools, we kind of hit this stopping point where it's like, all right, we're not really getting that much more efficient. We're saving a few seconds here and there. This concept that I'm going to be sharing with you is the first quantum leak that we've had in about five years. So really excited to share with you. But as a business owner, we all get stuck doing things because we've always been doing it right. You fall into this trap, why am I doing this? Well, I've always done this. And what I found for myself is it's virtually impossible to get rid of stuff that you don't like doing if you're not conscious of it and you don't systematically try to take pause at the end of the day. Write down all the stuff that you didn't like doing and it gets documented in a place, preferably it gets documented in some collaborative place so other people can see it and try to help get it off your plate. But if you don't take pause, take a few seconds to really be aware of what's the things that you didn't like doing, it's gonna be really hard to ever get it off your plate. So about six months ago, I kind of hit this wall and I was like, all right, we've got the systems down. Why am I working so hard? So I started doing this practice and what I found was I saved about five hours a week.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get.

A copy there just by being more aware. But then I had this light bulb moment and I was like, well, if this works so well for me, imagine if my entire team practiced the same practice and they started documenting every day all the stuff that they didn't like doing. After about six months of this, now the average is about seven and a half hours per person on my team, not just me. So it's completely transformed the way that we operate. And so when we do these 10 minute talks, and some of you are new, I know we try to make it so that you're getting at least $250,000 of value. And what I'm going to try to do is do better than that. I'm going to try to give you $250,000 per year of value out of this talk. And so I just want to break down the math for a second. So we recently did this with a client and they were a 10 person team and immediately they started saving about 5 hours a week. So if we want to translate this into dollars on average, blended with the CEO's rate, it was about $100 an hour per person of cost. So when you just do the math, that's $250,000, not one time, but per year. So if you weren't excited before, I hope that I got your attention. So before we start, we have to align on some definitions. So the first concept before we get into this, I call it DRO Dynamic Role Optimization, is you have to understand the concept of a work level. This was something that we rolled out just this year. And it's something that even if you don't do dro, it's probably something that you want to consider in some way, shape or form. So basically every hire has a work level associated with them. And Eunice, you're all going to get a PDF of more details of this because we really invested a ton of resources in building this out. But just to give you the concept, a work level one person, they're just going to. Here you go. I did exactly what you said. They're not going to be thinking too strategically. And if you're hiring someone in the US it's roughly someone less than three years of experience and 35 to 70 thousand dollars. So work level one for us at Leverage is the introductory work level. I'm going to skip two through four, but just highlight what a work level five would look like. So a work level five, which would be everyone basically in this room, someone that's going to be more strategic. Hey, I noticed this gap in the market and there's this massive opportunity and I'm going to go and build a team team around it. And we're going to go and do this, this and this. And so it's much higher level thinking. And this is going to be someone way more experienced, way more expensive. Next definition is delta. And this is quite simple. Basically you're all a five. So start with a five and it's basically it's five or whatever the work level is of the person you're talking about minus the work level of their work. So, for example, if you're a five and you're doing, say, scheduling, which is a work level one activity, we would call that a delta of four. Make sense? Right? So if you hired a work level three person and they're doing work level two work, that's a delta of one. So the name of the game is you want to reduce the delta. Okay. And then lastly, what is a role? Work is changed. So the director of marketing, I Like to think of a role as all these Lego blocks. Now, in the past, you might think all the Lego blocks are one color and that's your role. But in reality, as the world changes and we have to be more agile and organizations are starting to flatten a little bit, actually it's not just 100% marketing. The director of marketing might do some sales, which is yellow. They might do some finance, which is green. And so it's important that we deconstruct the role into micro responsibilities and capture that, because things are going to change. And when we hire people, you have a fluffy job description that never gets updated. Even though the market has totally changed in the last couple years, the job description of someone that you hired before the pandemic is probably very different than what their job is right now. And so in a job description, which I'm not, you need a job description. But it's going to be something like this. You're going to lead these strategic initiatives. You're going to be in charge of implementing the game plan and making key decisions with data and setting goals and budgets. Right? That's true, but it's not on a granular basis actually telling you in the day to day, week to week, what this person does. If they left tomorrow, you're not going to really know what they do based off of reading that. So this is a glimpse of what it might look like if you were to document it and break it down into micro responsibilities. So the director of marketing actually has 41 micro responsibilities. Right. And you're not going to put on a job description that you're in charge of blogs and ink articles and YouTube and Forbes and webinars. You know, that's way too granular, but you still want that captured somewhere because it might be that someone else is in charge of webinars, but the director of marketing is still the director of marketing. So if we were to just double click into one of those rows, this is the metadata that we capture on what a responsibility is. So let's just say you're in charge of creating the podcast strategy. We put a description of what that means, the department that that responsibility belongs to the role who's in charge of that responsibility, who that person is, who's accountable. So who's the direct report of that person? What's the role of that direct report? So I'm the CEO, but I'm also the VP of growth. It's one of the roles that we need to hire. Creating podcast. We've assigned that responsibility to work level three. Not too painful. And the delta zero, because the director marketing is also work level three. So three minus three is zero. Make sense? Okay, so what's the first thing that you should get off your plate? It's one of the key things that we have to think about. Could be payroll chasing, invoices, scheduling meetings. There's a whole bunch of this. That question becomes really easy to answer. So this is my personal to transfer list. There's 31 things to transfer. You could see on the right all of my Deltas. So clearly I want to start with the highest delta activities. And you could see there's a pattern there on what role is my next role that I need to hire. Right. If I hire a controller, it's going to solve a lot of my pain. That wasn't easy for me to answer before laying it out like this. Okay, so then you might want to know what are your gaps? And so I could create another filter and I could show that there's. I could see very clearly there's 49 responsibilities that have no owner. Right now you could see current person doing it is blank. So that in one click I can answer that question now. So all of this takes time. It's not easy. But in closing, what I would challenge you to do as a first step here is take your not to do list, assign work levels to each of those activities on your not to do list, and try to get rid of those ones and twos, which means the highest delta activities. And feel free to email me the results because I'd love to, love to see how you guys do. And we're going into Q4 right now. Now, so imagine if you were to do this activity in Q4, how well you'd be set up in 2022. Thank you.

Now, Nick, you know that you did a marvelous job. The last five days we've been together at our houseboat on Lake Powell. I know how amazing you are, but I'm going to open by beating you up first. You look wonderful right now. And if you're watching virtually, there were 76 people on a virtual presentation that have no idea who you are or what you look like because you open with slides. The suggestion is talk to your audience for 30 to 45 seconds before you share your screen to develop that connection. The best way you connect virtually with an audience is through your eyes. Lee, how many people are in the.

Room live approximately 42.

42. So we have 42 lives, 76. The majority of people are virtual. You gave us a crystal clear setup of exactly what you were going to talk about seven specific benefits. The other thing that you did so well was you defined the terms, and this was so important. You told us exactly what the work level was, the delta was, and what role. Defining the word role was so powerful. And then you shared your story about six months of what you've been discovering on this idea. You had four and a half minutes to set it up. You went 11 minutes and seven seconds. So you were a little overtime. We'll give you credit on that. One minute because you gave us such great content. But the single most important thing on a positive note that you did is you didn't end with the call to action. You gave us the call to action, called the plan of action. Then you stopped the sharing of the screen. You looked right at us virtually and said, imagine if you did this. Congratulations.

Well, I have a great speaking coach. Thank you very much, Joel. Okay.

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Go ahead. You're over here.

Do it now. Come on. Thank you.

Watch them.