Nick Sonnenberg: How to Improve Operational Efficiency in Your Startup

Hey everyone, how's it going? My name is Ayhan, I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Thank you so much for joining in, joining us today. I know I'm based in Dubai, UAE, so it's nighttime here, so good evening. If you're in the US, it's, I think we should be starting right now about 10 AM Pacific, so good morning. And obviously if you're in Europe, then good evening. Today we have a pretty interesting presentation planned out for you today. We got Mr. Nick Sonnenberg from, he's the CEO and founder of Leverage. He's written an awesome book called "Come Up with Air." He's gonna give a keynote today on everything operational efficiency. I think Akshay, do you wanna bring up Nick to the stage? And while we're bringing Nick up, let me go over this housekeeping. So first off, you know, you see the chat there, please let us know on the sidebar, Sorry, let us know in the chat located on the sidebar where you're calling in from today. Drop in your location. It's always fun to see. So I see Toronto, Canada. I see Sofia, Bulgaria, Boulder, Colorado, Helsinki, Estonia, Stratford.

Awesome.

We have a lot of international places. Chicago. That's super, super cool. The way today's session is going to run is Nick's going to give about a 20-30 minute presentation. After that, we'll float over into Q&A, please use the Q&A button. The Q&A button will allow you to submit questions. We'll rank them, we'll bring it up on stage, and then Nick and I will briefly discuss it. We'll try to end 10 minutes before the hour so everyone has room for questions— sorry, everyone has room for networking. For those who logged in a little bit early, you saw there was a bunch of these virtual tables. You can join those virtual tables, talk with each other, to discuss what you learned about today, but also just network with each other and see what everyone else is working on. That being said, we have Nick here. Hey Nick, how's it going? Do you wanna unmute yourself and say hello?

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, awesome. Well folks, I'm going to kind of, Nicole, if you wanna share your screen, that'll be, then you can maybe kick off your presentation. I'm going to hide myself now. We have about 80 people that's live right now. We'll see people start to trickle in. I think we had close to 350 people register, so we should see closer to the 150 mark. So, but yeah, Nick, whenever, whenever— oh, actually, let me use, run the poll so we all know. This would be good to know. Everybody can do a quick poll, like how would you rate your current operations infrastructure for your company or startup? Is it bad? Does it need improvement? Or are you a guru and you've set up everything? Okay, interesting. So Nick, can you see these results?

I don't see any results. Where are the results?

Uh, it's on the stage, so the same where both of us, uh, both our faces are.

I just see the poll, I don't see the results, but what What does the result say?

Oh, so right now, well, it's in real time. So about 75% of the people say that their operations is okay but needs improvement. 20% says it's bad. And then 2%, which is one individual, says they've already set up everything. So you're dealing with one maverick and everyone else is here to learn from you.

All right, sounds good. Awesome. Kick it off?

Yeah, whenever you're ready, I'm going to close this poll and hide it from the stage. Yeah, if you want to screen share, we can kick things off.

Yeah, before screen sharing, let me just do a quick intro of myself, and then I've got a bunch of slides prepared for everyone. But it's nice to meet you, um, my name is Nick, and what I wanted to share today is the kind of the key concept of my new book that just came out. Come up for air. So if you, if you are a founder and you're just starting your company, it's really critical to start it off with the right operational foundation. My very, very quick story is I'm also a founder and I started Leverage about almost 8 years ago and we grew very quickly. We grew to 7 figures in the first year, 150 people on the team. Bootstrapped, which sounds impressive, right?

Hey, Nick, sorry, I'm just going to cut you off. Some people are having difficulty hearing you, so I think it's just low.

Is it low? Let me switch my microphone.

Yeah. All right, let me come back on stage. Okay, awesome. You see me? So let's give Nick a couple of minutes to readjust.

Is that better?

Yeah, it's good for me. Audience, can you give us a thumbs up? Okay, awesome. We're seeing some thumbs ups in the audience.

Uh, fancy microphone, fancy microphone has issues with the gain right now.

Okay, I'm gonna remove myself. Nick, over to you.

All right, thanks for interrupting me. All right, let's start over. I'm Nick Sonnenberg. I wrote a book called Come Up for Air, and it's supposed to be the employee manual that you kind of never got. It's really a guidebook in terms of how you should set up your company and operate to be as efficient as possible. And my very quick background is I'm also a founder entrepreneur. I started my company Leverage about almost 8 years ago and we grew really quickly. We bootstrapped it to about 7 figures in the first year, 150 people on the team, which to a lot of people sounds impressive, but we made a lot of mistakes and under the hood our foundation was a mess. We actually almost went bankrupt from it. What, you know, we were losing about $750,000. We had about $500,000 a year of losses, $750,000 in debt. And out of the 150 people, maybe 5 people knew who I was. One day I'm grabbing coffee with my co-founder and he taps me on the shoulder and he says he's leaving. Not in 2 weeks or 2 days. He's leaving in 2 minutes. And I go white and I'm thinking to myself, holy crap, we might go bankrupt here. Cause everyone knew him. We had set it up so that he was the face of the company. I was the behind the scenes person. And so when he left, not only did I kind of get stuck with this company that was generating significant revenue, but had all of these underlying issues. And within a few months, all hell broke loose. We lost 40% of revenue. Clients leaving left and right, team members leaving left and right. Before I know it, I'm cashing out my 401(k). For those of you not in the US, that's a retirement account. My dad's taking a second loan on his house to loan money for payroll. And so I say this because I know what it's like to grow quickly. I know what it's like to grow too quickly and not have that foundation to support it. And ultimately, I decided to stick it out because I could see a path to turning things around. I could see that we were drowning in work and losing a ton of time and energy and money with how we communicated with each other. There's just messages all over the place. I could see that I couldn't just click a button and know who's working on what and what the status of work is. So I knew I needed to fix that. And then lastly, I knew that we needed to have in one or two clicks be able to find anything about the company, all the SOPs, the processes. And so I started cleaning these buckets up and very quickly I started seeing the company rapidly turn around. Simultaneously, companies started reaching out to me asking me to consult for them. So at the very beginning, we were a freelancer marketplace doing tasks and projects. For entrepreneurs. But on the side, people started asking me to consult for them. So I got to work with Tony Robbins or Poo-Pourri the poop spray or cryptocurrencies or financial advisors. And what I noticed, which was very interesting, is all the same things that were helping to make leverage be more efficient were just as impactful for a poop spray company or a world leader in coaching. And so we decided to eventually pivot the company to what it is today, which is Leverage. My company is an operational efficiency training and consulting company. And I decided to write the book because I want to make a bigger impact. I want— I don't want anyone to have to drown in work the way that I did. And so everything in the book is what we train and teach teams in terms of how to be more efficient. And it's all— it's not theoretical. Like, we've worked with thousands of teams Through leverage. So all the content of this book and today's presentation is based off of empirical evidence of the thousands of teams that we've worked with. And we feel like we've really cracked the code to have a high-performing team that operates extremely efficiently, efficiently. And it's not rocket science. A lot of this is common sense that you just never probably heard in this way. So without further ado, let me share my screen. And we'll have plenty of time for Q&A after. But I want to share with you the central concept of the book. You should still go out and get the book because we're not going to cover the whole book in 20 minutes, but I'm going to just share the kind of the main concept of the book. But before we begin, I also want to conduct a quick survey. And if you wouldn't mind just scanning that with your phone and typing in, in one or two words, where do you feel like you're drowning in work the most. So take out your phone, scan it. Is there any issues with this? Okay, one person typing. Okay, I don't know what that means. Doing things that don't scale, organize the people, marketing is wasting time, admin work, syncing with my team, bench prioritizing tasks, catching up on processes, meetings. A lot of admin work stuff. For the admin stuff, what we get into in the last part with documenting processes is critical to getting rid of admin work. All right, seems like admin is trying to become the winner here, which makes sense if you're an early-stage founder and you don't yet have significant revenue, profit. You're limited with how many people you can hire. But one of the first hires might— that might make sense for you is a virtual assistant, and you delegate all the kind of low-level work that doesn't give you joy or tap into your unique ability. So what would an hour a week be worth to you? Well, if your time is worth, you know, let's just call it 50 $50 an hour, right? A 10-person team is worth $25,000 a year. Now, if you're a team of half of that, 5, that's $12,500. In general though, we see that it's quite easy to save 10 hours a week when you follow the system I'm gonna be sharing with you. So again, even if you're a 1-person team, You take that top row, you look at the 10 hours. Even if it's just you, it's worth $25,000 a year to save 10 hours a week. So let me just share with you some strategies to do that. But it's not just about the time savings and the dollar amount. It's how can work be easier, less stressful. Oftentimes we hire people without realizing all the expenses incurred with hiring. And it's not just the expense of recruiting and salary and training, but every person you add to your team, especially if you're early stage, it adds exponential complexity. So even a 5-person team, if you kind of follow the, the lines, there's 10 ways that information can transfer. If you go to a 10-person team, you could see that web of complexity goes to 45. So it's really important that as you're early stage and you're, you're kind of setting this foundation, you hire slow, you fire fast, and you also are aware that every person that you add is going to add exponential complexity to your organization. So you really want to make sure that you're hiring people on a solid foundation. And it's not just the money side, it's also how can less stress, more fun. You know, I know personally, I went years without being able to take a vacation where I wasn't constantly on my phone or just in my head worrying about stuff. You know, so it's, it's really important to be able to take breaks sometimes, both your employees and yourself. And it's hard to do that if everything's a ticking time bomb, if there's always all these issues, if people don't know what to do properly. And so having that foundation is really critical. Okay, now the number one kind of principle, let's call it, in my book, if I had to summarize my book, you want to set up systems and processes inside of your company that optimize for retrieval of information versus transfer of information. Let me explain. When you're busy and you're drowning in work and you don't have a free second in the day and you're working 14, 16 hours a day, it's human nature to try to cut a corner and just pass it off to someone, right? What's the harm in a quick text or a quick email or whatever's easier for you in the moment because you don't have a free second and you just wanna make your life a bit easier. The thing is, as you scale and you have a bunch of people playing this you know, solo game where everyone's just doing what's best for them, a text, an email, whatever they have a personal preference for, what ends up happening is you create this scavenger hunt and information is just all over the place. You know, did Nick email me? Was that a text, an email? Was that in a Slack message? Was it a direct message or a channel? Or maybe it was in a sauna. And so Congratulations if you save 3 seconds right now giving it to me in, in a text message, but in a month from now when I need to find that thing, you've just made my life 100 or 1,000 times worse. And when everyone's playing this game, you're making it hard for anyone to find any piece of information in the future. So the name of the game is you want to set up systems and processes to optimize for retrieval versus transfer, which means People need to take pause and put things where they belong and take the extra few seconds or steps or clicks today in that, in the moment, but align your team that everyone's gonna do this, and what goes around comes around, and that's how everyone's gonna save exponential amounts of time. There's a survey that Asana puts out every year, and it turns out over half of people's time is spent on work about work. So this is inefficiently dealing with emails, going on a scavenger hunt, looking for a document that's not easy to find, going back and forth, trying to schedule a meeting or an inefficient meeting, you know, and on average, we see that very quickly when we work with people, there's over a business day a week per person in a company that you can easily give back. So imagine if you could wave a magic wand and you could get done the same amount of work in 5 days, but now in 4. Or maybe everyone's working 5 days, but they're outputting the equivalent of a 6-day. So imagine like what that would do for your business, especially if it's an early-stage business. We already kind of think like this in our personal life. When you do your laundry, the fastest way to be done with your laundry would be you take it out of the dryer and you throw it in a drawer. Right? That's the fastest, and then you're done with laundry. Great. But for the most part, what we do is we take it out of the dryer and we spend an extra minute and we separate our socks in one drawer, our underwear in another drawer. And we do that not because it's the fastest way to be done with our laundry. We do that because tomorrow when you need to put an outfit together, it's far faster to do that. And it's the same thing in business. We've got a whole bunch of drawers. We've got drawers for internal communication, a drawer for projects and work, a drawer for our SOPs. We've got these drawers and it's just important that everyone's looking at the same chest of drawers on your team and everyone knows what drawer to go into to find what they're looking for. Okay, and it turns out there's 3 primary drawers that you need in your team. You need to communicate with people, both internally and externally. You need to plan, you've got tasks and projects, work needs to get done. And then you've got your resources, you've got your SOPs, your processes, your intellectual property. So these are the three drawers. So the framework, we call it CPR, which goes along with my book, Come Up for Air, CPR. And so let's dive into this framework. Think of, a lot of people misunderstand the difference between when to use a communications tool versus a planning tool versus a resource tool. So let's just take, for example, you take your team on a team retreat and you go camping in the forest. Let's think about what you need. Well, you probably want walkie-talkies to communicate with each other. You probably want a map to navigate out of the forest, and you probably want some type of manual for what to do if a bear attacks or how to build the tent. And it's the same thing inside of business. You need to talk, You need a plan, you need to like track where you're going, and then you also have to have a reference manual. Okay? And over the last decade, everything has changed. It's not just the pandemic and working remote or in person, but the tools have changed, right? It's no longer just email and text. And it doesn't matter if you're a small team or a big team, it doesn't matter your industry. The framework, that CPR framework is gonna make work easier for you and your team. If you don't start adopting modern tech tools like Slack and Asana and Microsoft Teams and Notion and Coda, you can get by, but it would be the equivalent of trying to operate your team right now with a typewriter and your competitors have a Mac with an M2 chip. You know, you're gonna be at a huge disadvantage. So you wanna be thinking about utilizing all these amazing tools available to you that can fundamentally transform how you operate. Now I'd like you to quickly just pull out your phone and we could just highlight a few examples here. But if you needed to onboard a new team member and you couldn't remember a step in the process, scan the QR code and let's see, how would you go about solving that? Okay. All right, so it seems like we've got a kind of a tie between communication tools and a wiki, and then, you know, about 20%, you know, would go call or Outlook. You know, calling, Outlook, and Teams— if we add this up, you got 26%. Basically two-thirds of the group right now would solve this via some form of a communications tool. And 1/3-ish would use a wiki. So in a perfect world, you want to use a wiki, right? You don't— you want one, people could find the answer faster than waiting, you know, for my boss to be free, which might take 6 hours, versus being able to answer it themselves. Not to mention, if there's a wiki, um, you're not wasting other people's time to ask the question. And you can guarantee having a streamlined response. You know, the wiki should be the official answers to certain common questions. So most people are missing wikis, or if they have one, it's not well structured, but you definitely wanna be thinking about an internal wiki, and the sooner you do this, the better. Okay, let's do another one. If you wanted to know the status of a client project, where would you look? All right, great. Well, it seems like there's a lot more alignment here, but yes, uh, status of projects should be in some type of project management, work management tool like Asana or Monday or ClickUp. Okay, great. Now, a common piece of pushback that we get at Leverage when we're, you know, talking to a client and trying to explain the benefit of, you know, adding Asana, for example, to their tech stack when they only use Outlook to manage projects. A big piece of pushback is, oh, another tool, isn't that less efficient? I'm so good at using Outlook or piece of paper and pen, whatever. And yes, you don't want to get completely out of control and have too many tools to manage. However, Tools are built for specific purposes. And just like you could go back to that forest and chop down that tree with a Swiss Army knife, it's gonna be way faster if you have a chainsaw to do it or an axe. So although a chainsaw or an axe is another tool, it's built for purpose. And it's the same thing in business. Like I'm not proposing you need hundreds of tools, but for things as common as communication, work management, documenting knowledge, you don't wanna start skimping out and trying to have a Swiss Army knife to solve such a fundamental piece of your collaboration problem. Okay? So within communication, we, I break it down into personal. So you've got text, WhatsApp, you've got internal like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and then you've got external communication, Outlook and Gmail, the two most common. It's important that you know how to use these tools properly. So like one, for example, one of the most popular things we do is we teach people how to get to inbox zero in email, saves people 3 or 5 hours a week, or teaching people how to properly use Teams and Slack, naming conventions of channels, private versus public, third-party integrations with Zapier and automation. Even though, even without knowing how to use all the features properly, just knowing when to use these tools already is significantly impactful for you because you know at least Okay, external communication. Nick isn't in my team, he's a consultant. Let me look in email for what he said. Versus right now, if sometimes you text your team, sometimes you email, sometimes you do a Slack message, you have to look in 3 tools. So do yourself and your team a favor, just look in one tool. And then as a step 2, you know, utilize all the features of the tool. Okay, for planning, these are some of the most common ones on the market today: Asana, ClickUp, Monday. And for resources, you've got, you know, a whole bunch. You've got Coda, Process Street, Notion, Guru. So there's a lot and you have to know again when and how to use it. This is so critical to you now because there's literally money sitting on the table not being utilized. You're just wasting money by not being as efficient as you can. And you're putting yourself and your team honestly through unnecessary stress. Work doesn't need to be as difficult as it is, and my framework should help to alleviate a lot of that pain. Okay, now my book that just came out, we're very proud of it. It hit Wall Street Journal bestseller. Um, it's a long book, it's 320 pages, but it's— there's no fluff. That's not like the same story repeated 100 times. Um, and I'm an efficiency geek, so HarperCollins told me, don't go beyond 320 pages, but you can imagine being an efficiency geek, it probably would have been 1,400 pages for a lot of authors. All that being said, throughout the book, there's parts where we're like, look, we don't have enough time in the book to explain this, but we've got a free quiz, a resource, a blueprint. And so we put all that up on this website, comeupforair.com. So here you could check out where to get the book, but also get a lot of the book resources. You just have to, I think, put your order number in. But there's like a whole bunch of really valuable tools. The team spent a lot of time putting that together. So I'd encourage you to go and take a look at comeupforair.com if you're interested in some of those more advanced materials. And I just want you to picture a day where your team is saying to you, Hey, at Company ABC, we're doing the best work of our life. I want you to picture a day where work is easier, less stressful, and everything is just getting done seamlessly. And I want you to picture a day where your business is growing like crazy, but you're not burning out and you're loving every minute of it. So it doesn't matter, like I said before, you could be a 10-person team, a 1-person team, 100, you could be a financial advisor, a tech company, this framework is going to work for you and for your team. And it's gonna kind of give you that feeling like you're driving on the open road and just all of a sudden everything's green. You have no speed bumps, nothing to stop you. You can just frictionlessly go fast. So go and visit that website. Once again, it's comeupforair.com, and let's make work easier together. And here's my personal personal information. And with that, I will open this up to any questions you might have.

Thanks, Nick. Super, super helpful. It's funny, as you were going through your framework, I was thinking about, like, some of the operations we do internally. So definitely resonated a lot. So folks, if you found Nick's presentation helpful, you can use the keyboard or the emojis. Yeah, you can see the claps, the love. Awesome. Let's kind of jump into Q&A. Folks, please use the Q&A tab. We'll kind of go through this. So we have Ion from Romania asking, you know, can you elaborate more on the resources section? What do you mean by resources, examples, and what do you mean by tools that can help us organize resources? So maybe going a little bit more wiki, but yeah.

What I call a resource, you could almost say knowledge. Um, uh, so like for me, like a company resource would be all of your SOPs, all of your processes, um, even like all of your files that you store on Google Drive or Dropbox. Like these are your assets, your resources, and you want to make it organized so it's easy to find any standard operating procedure, find any process, or find any PDF or document that has been worked on. But basically when you hire someone, and they're building assets for you— that an asset doesn't have to just be a stock or a bond. An asset could be a new hire onboarding process. If that's just living in people's heads, the moment that they leave, you lose that asset. So you want to retain all of your assets, and that's what I call resources.

Awesome, thanks. Uh, let's queue up Nikolai from Sofia, he's asking, what do you mean by the latest technologies and that you built for your process? I guess another way of thinking about this is how are you looking at optimizing processes as once you've built them? Because like it's part of like, part of it is data hygiene, process hygiene, and keeping just stuff in general up to date. So what are your thoughts on that?

On keeping stuff up to date? Well, being up to date with the latest technologies is a slightly different question than how do you get up to date with your SOPs and processes. Do you want me to answer both?

Yeah, go for it.

So staying up to date with technologies, that's kind of my job. I mean, you need to be thinking about Slack or Microsoft Teams. You need to be thinking about Asana, ClickUp, Monday, one of the key project management softwares. You don't need to every month be, you know, thinking about adding a new piece of tech 'cause stuff is changing, but at the very least you need to have something in CP&R. You know, and I geek out on this stuff, so I could tell you Fellow and Loom and CloudApp and a whole bunch of other tools. That I think like once you get that foundation in place, then start thinking about some of the kind of power booster tools. And I put out a lot of content on this, but, you know, make sure that you've kind of got the foundation of CPR working. For keeping your knowledge up to date, your SOPs and processes, you have to divide and conquer and have different people in your company own different SOPs and different processes. And you can always do a role rotation. So I used to be in finance. I used to be a high-frequency trader, in case you've ever heard of that. And basically, I was developing algorithms and coding computers to trade stocks at microsecond speeds. Um, every year I had to do a block leave. So every year they shut me out for 2 weeks. I didn't have access to my, my company phone, email. I couldn't even access the building. It was really a full lockout to make sure that you're not hiding anything. And so I would have to document how my algorithm and book traded and pass it off to someone every year for 8 years. Obviously I wasn't hiding trades, but every year for 8 years, there was always some improvement to how my book traded when I got back. It could be a minor improvement or a major improvement. So even though I'm the world expert at that, my algorithms and my books, my colleagues would be able to find things that I wasn't able to. And that's just because fresh eyes spark innovation. And when you're inside the label, it's hard to see the jar. It's hard to see the label when you're inside the jar. So doing forced role rotations where maybe once a quarter, hey, you do payroll for a week and I'll do client onboarding. It forces you to document your processes and stress test, is the documentation accurate and clear? All right.

Awesome. I like some of these questions that are coming in. I think you'll enjoy some of these as well. So let's talk about legacy tools. How do you get, I guess, how do you get people to actually use the tools once you start implementing them, you know, like different communication tools and let's call them wikis or whatever? Yeah, I'd be curious to get your thoughts on this.

Yeah, you have to have buy-in from kind of the leadership. and it has to be, this has to be something that the leadership adopts, believes in, adheres to. This doesn't work if it's do as I say, not as I do. I don't like Slack, but I want you to use Slack. That's not gonna work. This also needs to be part of your new hire training and onboarding. This needs to be part of like yearly mandatory training for the team because these tools change, people need refreshers. Just like you might need to invest in changing culture and things like that. This is, this is a skill, but this is such a critical skill. People are using these types of tools for 80-90% of their work week. Like, in what, in what world you wouldn't want to hire a surgeon that hasn't been trained on how to use all the tools for surgery? Yet email, Slack, Asana, these are tools required to do your job properly, yet most people don't invest in the training. So this needs to come from the top down and you should do one thing at a time.

I like that. I think one, definitely important on the training and then use the tool for better documentation. And two, have someone on the team to own the board. So depending if you're using Asana or Notion, so like on the marketing team at FYI, I'm kind of the owner of the board and I go ballistic to the team. I'm like, hey, if it's not in Notion, it doesn't count. I've not seen it. There's 15 different things going on. So have someone owning the board and making sure that they're the ones that are keeping up to date. And at least when you're doing the transition, I would say you need to have someone to really, not necessarily police it, but enforce it and really recommend it. I've done marketing operations implementations a few times and each time that's always been an issue is adoption. So having one person where it's like, this is your responsibility, you're kind of policing and enforcing, that makes a big difference. Again, doesn't work for everyone per department, but yeah. So we talked about this. Is it good with you? I like this question, is the cost-benefit analysis. How do you kind of go and like determine the cost versus like the benefit of like getting your ROI on using these tools, would you— I think you shared a calculation earlier, but for those who joined late, do you want to kind of like just go over that again?

Well, I mean, look, like these tools, plus or minus, you're talking $20 a month for any of those tools that you put in that question, right? So what's your time worth? Let's just imagine your time is worth $20 an hour. Then, you know, does using that tool save you more or less than an hour a month? If the answer is yes, I'm saving 10 hours a month, or, you know, in some cases maybe it's 50 hours a month, well, then you're getting a 50-to-1 return on investment under that scenario. So you have to, you have to estimate the impact of time savings by using the tool, what your time is worth, and then do a comparison. But If you're not getting more than $20 of value out of one of those tools, it's probably because you're just not using it right. Those tools, if you set them up right, which is what I've created an entire business around because most people don't do this right, but if you do do it right, you should be able on any of those tools easily save 25 hours a month, right? So unless your time is a dollar an hour, which I'm doubting anyone on this call, their time is worth a dollar an hour. I'm sure it's above that. You should be net positive on any of those.

Yeah, I think also a good indication from our side is we determine how often are we actually logging into this tool. If nobody's logging into it, that's a huge red flag, whether it's on a daily basis, weekly basis. And that will also give you a clear indication. If somebody's using the tool every day, and clearly there's utility to it. So I hope that answers your question as well. I like this question from Elizabeth. She's asking like, okay, let's say you're in a small company, you want to implement something, but you're not, you're not in that position. How do you kind of go and convince your leadership or other stakeholders like, guys, I really need to do this?

This is a self-serving answer, but I actually legitimately think it's not a bad answer. Give 'em a copy of my book. Instead of you having to lay out the compelling argument, you could say, look, I just read this book. I think that this is going to fundamentally change how I work and how we might be able to work. Just read the first hundred, read the first hundred pages. And if you like it, read more. But the book lays out all of the arguments that you kind of need to you need to give to your manager, or, you know, say, look, I'm drowning in work. We don't use email, right? We don't use this, we don't use this. I heard this talk where I've been playing around with this, this thing, and I think that this is gonna really fundamentally have me produce better work, better quality, more output with less stress. But yeah, I think everyone has a different culture and different specific situations. So I've just been recommending in general when the management of a company has been reading the book, it seems to work, work much better.

Awesome. Thanks. The way that I kind of got around to it is I would use the free tier of these tools or pay them for myself and just start using them. And then kind of like once it gets to like you can create nice dashboards and people are kind of using it or you're using it for yourself, you can go and show your leadership team or your management team, saying, "Hey, like, this is how I'm working. I'm like, look how efficient this is. You know, do you think John or Jane can utilize this in our team?" And then if so, a team subscription might cost like $40, $50, $60 a month. Can you approve this, right? So we're like, just go and do it. Like, I think that's another way of looking at it. But again, it changes if you are, your position. All right, let's do a couple more questions here, then kind of close out for networking. so we have a lot of early stage founders. So I guess like, what is your go-to for like productivity platform? That's a big word, but like, for people to have daily standups for across different business units. Oscar's asking from California.

There's an agenda tool that I use for standups called fellow.app. And if you write to them and tell them that you were referred by me, they might have a discount for you. I'm not sure, but I use Fellow a lot for the daily standups. I use tools like Loom, which is a recording tool which can record your face, your screen, or both. So I try to avoid a lot of live standups and live meetings and instead send videos to people, which I can do. On my own time. I don't need to coordinate a calendar and then they can watch it, you know, when they're going for a walk or when they're in the back of a car. So we do a lot of Loom and a lot of Fellow app.

That's cool. I've never heard of an asynchronous standup. That's very, very interesting. I might steal that one for our team. Cool. Let's do a couple more. So I don't know if Aeon's asked this, but he's asking, but do you have any tips for creating organized documentation like folder structure, naming conventions? Like what are your thoughts on that?

It's a longer, that's a longer one, but whatever's gonna make it faster for you to retrieve what you're looking to retrieve. So clearly at the extreme, you don't want one folder with 10,000 documents and you don't want 10,000 folders with one document, so you want something in between, and whatever's going to be the most intuitive way to find whatever you're looking for. I know that's not a— there's no answer. It's not like 17 is the right answer.

Yeah, got it. I think we talked about this earlier, but like it came up again, but like, how are you when you're in the middle of— so Nancy from Ottawa is asking like, hey, like Again, legacy system, how would you manage the actual transition? Um, and just to train, like, how would you—

so this is again a self— I apologize, I'm not trying to be a self-serving, uh, answer, but like, I legitimately think the best thing that you can do is one, uh, what you could do, a call with my— a free, uh, 30-minute consultation with Eddie on my team. If you go, I'll just type it in the chat, but he could talk you through some stuff to help quickly do that. It's getleveraged.com is the company. We, you wanna pick one thing at a time. So in a lot of cases, teaching your team how to get to inbox zero is usually the best start. So you don't have to overly stress, like we've got all this broken stuff, like Just start with email, that's probably the best thing. If you need help, my book has a bunch of content around how to use email. If you need further help, we offer training programs on the nuances of the, you know, how to snooze, how to, when should you set up a folder? How do you, when should you archive? When should you search? And just do one thing at a time. But there's companies like mine that offer training that can fast-track you. There's books like mine. There's stuff on the internet you might be able to find, but don't get overwhelmed by thinking you need to do 100 things. Like, start with, start with one. And, you know, you could do a call with Eddie if you select, you know, getleveraged.com there.

Perfect, thanks. Let's do one more. I just saw this. One which is here, let's see this one. So like this individual's— so Tope is asking like, do you know of like a workspace that integrates with a lot, a lot of different tools? And like, I guess the, the, this, the last part of the question is—

the answer is no, but that's, that's part of my 12-month roadmap is some— that's something that I'm planning on building.

Got it. Oh, you're planning to build your own product for this?

I'm planning to build something that integrates with all the tools to help people stick to best practice.

Okay, got it. Interesting. So, Tope, the answer is no, there's no short answer. I think you need to use different tools for different purposes and different utilities. All right, folks, let's wrap it up there so we have 15 minutes of networking. I'll stick around on the tables. Folks, if you've enjoyed this talk by Nick, show him some love using the emojis. Okay, we've got a few claps in there, a few hearts. Cool. Nick, any final words for our audience? Any words of wisdom you'd like to wrap up with? You have about 118 people still live with you, and then we'll shoot out the recording to everyone.

I'll leave you with this: operational efficiency. If you are an early-stage startup and you can barely make payroll and you don't have enough revenue or profit, you you know, obviously you gotta figure that out, but just always know everything that you say yes to, you're saying no to an infinite number of other things. And sometimes it's the way I look at this is like, if you have a broken pipe in your sink and water's overflowing, say it takes you, I don't know, a minute, a minute to mop the floor. Or it takes you an hour to patch the pipe. Well, if every day you're having to spend that minute to mop the floor, after 60 days, you know, you would have broken even on the investment of patching the pipe. Yet when you patch the pipe, now you never have to do it again versus after the 60-day mark, you're in the negative every day that you're continuing to mop. So it's the same thing with efficiency. It might not be that you need to allocate 50% of your money and resources to some of these things right now if you're very early stage, but you probably also don't want to be investing zero. So you want to, you know, depending on kind of where you're at and what you can afford, both in terms of money, but also in time, attention, energy, focus. You don't want— the longer you wait to do these things, you start getting kind of past that 60-day mark in that example, and you're gonna look back and you could have saved maybe thousands of hours long-term had you prioritized things that are more foundational. So just keep that in mind.

Perfect. I think that was a great way to end things out. Folks, thanks for joining us live. We're gonna end the session now. You'll see some virtual tables. Nick, I don't know if you'll have time, maybe if you, we have like about 15 minutes left till the hour, you can join. We have a table with your name on it so you can jump in if you—

I'll stay for a few minutes. I have to hop in 5, but it was nice meeting everyone and good luck.

Awesome. All right folks, actually do you wanna end the event here and then we'll see everyone on the tables. Thanks.