How To Be Productive, Happy & Healthy Everyday | Nick Sonnenberg

Most people also think that what you do and who you do it with is the most important. But I really think that how you do things is actually even more important than those two things. The world's changing so rapidly. We're going through economic crises, you know, shifts to remote work. There's all this stuff with AI and blockchain, like things are moving really quickly. And I think the most important skill set that any team has is, is the ability to shift on a dime and be agile. And so how you work together, having seamless baton passes, you know, the world could flip upside down tomorrow. My team works so well together with various systems and tools, I could tell the team, hey, we're a lemonade company now. Let's go and figure out lemonade. And we would be up and running way quicker than anyone because of our ability to work efficiently together as a team.

I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. Mainly because.

What you teach and come up for air is, it's not only practical, but it's also just as profound. I was, I shared with you briefly in a previous meeting that you know, in scaling an eight figure company from nothing, the last thing I thought about was, was processes, improvements and, and communication styles and, and all the elements of basically just so much freaking frustration. Like how did you actually find yourself in this circumstance to kind of be like a master at this, this, this the sector.

I think, I think oftentimes you become a master due to having to endure tremendous amounts of suffering and just never wanting to suffer anymore. Yeah, you know, my, the way that I kind of came up with my framework for operational efficiency and what ultimately led, led me down this path of building a training and consulting company. Writing a book? Well, one, I was a high frequency trader, you know, many, many years ago. And I in that space, high frequency trading, basically I would describe, develop algorithms and code computers to trade stocks automatically based off of math. And in that space it's fully automated. Literally we're looking at microset, like how do we save a microsecond? You know, because you know, we're trading billions and billions of dollars. So if you can save a microsecond, capture an extra fraction of a penny, it all adds up to big numbers. Yeah. To bit to, to pretty good numbers. So it was in that space like I really started building this muscle of process of celebrating small wins, micro improvements. Because often, sometimes it's hard to just find one thing in your company that's going to save you 20 hours a week. But it might be there Might be hundreds of opportunities to save a minute, you know, or five minutes. Right. And so sometimes, sometimes you, you kind of aren't looking for those because there's always something that's a higher priority, but it all stacks up. So I built the muscle then, then when I got into startups.

My initial company, or the initial version of Leverage, was we were a freelancer marketplace. And the backstory is I was having dinner one night with one of my close friends at the time and I was working on something. I was already out of finance, I had an app, he was known in the productivity space. And this virtual assistant company announced that they were going under. And we, I've always been passionate about productivity. I've always felt time is our most valuable asset. You know, you can go bankrupt and make back your money, but you know, if you waste an hour that's lost, you're never getting it back. And so I've always been passionate about that. And so at the end of dinner, we were brainstorming.

This new idea for a freelancer marketplace. And I, I said, look, I could build a very easy, simple, MVP minimum viable product in a day. Can you get five clients in a day? Sure. Yes. Great. That's launch on Tuesday, this was a Sunday. And so fast forward a month. We're on stage at a conference called Genius Network. You know Joe Polish.

Yeah, yeah.

And Tony Robbins was the day two speaker, we were the day three speaker. And at the end of the talk, everyone signed. Like 95% of people in the audience signed up. And so within a month, we kind of launch ourselves into this company. You fast forward a year, you know, and you teach this stuff, you know, it's, it's not easy to, to find where do you get your clients and yeah, how do you deliver stuff? So in a month and within a year of launching this, we bootstrapped it to seven figures and 150 people on the team.

Wow.

Not, not easy thing to do. And it sounds impressive when we say that, but we made so many mistakes. Like when you scale that quickly, things just break. And so some of the, some of the issues, and you'll appreciate this is no one knew who I was. He was the head of people, I was head of non people with 150 team members and 500 clients. Although we were growing 20% a month, we were losing 15% a month, so it was net 5%. So good marketing was masking some foundational issues.

Yeah.

And then also little details like we were losing almost half a million a year and we had Three quarters a million.

And so there's that.

So there's that too. So I mean, it's, you know, you can, you can shape a story however you want. You know, we grew to seven figures in the first year, so. But still, that was impressive and not easy to do. But one day we were having coffee and he taps me on the shoulder and he just says he's out. Not in two weeks or two days, he's out in two minutes. And like I said, we were losing all this money and people didn't know who I was. So I'm sitting there holding my coffee and I go white and I'm like, holy crap, we're going to go bankrupt potentially. And I had to make a decision. Do I, you know, do I buy him out of the business or we just bankrupt and move on? Ultimately, for various reasons, I decided to stick it through because one, it wasn't ethical to screw people out of three quarters a million of credits that we owed. But two, I saw a path to cleaning things up and I started really identifying kind of where are the log jams in this business?

Where are we wasting time? It was hard to fix anything when you're drowning in work, which I was.

Mm.

It's hard to fix stuff because you're always putting out fires and you don't have time to kind of go and build that foundation so that there's going to be less fire. So you're always stuck in this chicken egg, hey, there's a fire. I guess I got to go and put out the fire. But that's taking away time from actually fixing stuff so there's less fire. So there's always this dance that we have as entrepreneurs. And I started identifying kind of the buckets where these fires were happening. So one, one fire was communication. It was just impossible to get any focus time. It was just non. With 150 people on the team and 500 clients, the volume of messages and pings and dings and was that a slack message, a text, an email? It was just ridiculous. I couldn't get anything done. So I knew I had to solve communication. The next thing was I didn't have a grip on what my team was doing. So that's what I call a plan. I couldn't just click a button and know what's the status of this project, what's the status of this client, this work, who's working on what, what's past. So I knew that those were critical things that I needed to be able to answer. And then lastly, we were Already quite good at this. But I knew that we had to document our knowledge. I had a co founder leaving, team members were leaving left and right. So I knew that we needed to document kind of all of our processes and SOP. So I started looking at C, communication, planning, resources, CPR.

But it was tough man. Like within the three months of him leaving, we lost 40% of revenue. And before I know it, I'm cashing out my 401. My dad's taking a second mortgage on his house to make payroll. You know, try. It's hard enough, some people complain about moving into the basement. Try driving your parents to the bank to sign, you know, loan documents. So it was tough. But what I found was when I focusing on cpr, things started turning around really quickly. And then other people started reaching out. Word kind of got out. Wasn't trying to be a consultant, but people started reaching out, asking me to help them. And so I got to work with Tony Robbins who you know, endorsed my book on the if you see the front cover, poo Pourri, the poop spray company, cryptocurrency companies, financial advisors. So people started reaching out. And so I started, I started seeing the impact outside of my business. And this CP&R was helpful for a world famous speaker, a cryptocurrency, a poop spray. So I started saying to myself, huh, this stuff is actually pretty impactful.

Maybe this is really the business I ought to be in. Like when you think about how work has changed, you've got the remote factor now, but also there's all these new tools like Slack, Asana, so on and so forth. It's not just text and email and there's just been no training. Every single business, regardless of size or industry, had zero training and they were wasting over a business day a week. And so I started realizing that that's actually a more interesting blue ocean, impactful, meaningful opportunity. And so I pivoted the company away from being a freelancer marketplace towards what it is today, which is an operational efficiency training and consulting company. And I decided to write a book because my mission is to save millions and millions of hours of wasted time. And I think the best way I can service that, that mission is get this content and book in as many hands as possible. So that's my super long winded answer.

I love it. No, I mean, I think it's because I love the title of the book, Come up for air. I've had a similar circumstance. I went in 2017, I went through a scenario with my executive team and bezel a bunch of money and I didn't have SOPs and processes. A lot of stuff that I had trusted them to develop, they had developed and then basically took it with them and.

Yeah, and then all the money that you invested in paying them and all that stuff and energy, it leaves. The moment that they leave the door. Right?

Exactly, exactly. One of the interesting thing is, you know, in, in our unstoppable curriculum that we have, I always tell the business owners there are really five core drivers. There's the development process, your sales process, your fulfillment process, your finance process, and then your raving fan retention process. You know, you get all those mastered, you get all those laid out. A lot of really good things is going to happen to your business. And then it dawned on me as I'm reading through the book, I was like, in each one of those categories is the undergirding of exactly what you teach. Like if you're going to have a, even, even going as far back to the beginning as casting your vision or setting up your core values or, or the mission or the thing that you're, you're, you're actually about creating a process around us as entrepreneurs to make sure we're constantly growing and maturing. Obviously how you're intaking sales, how you're serving those clients, how you're, how you're tracking all the financial metrics, how you're actually tracking customer satisfaction. That was one of the things that I love most about the book is how the importance that you put on serving the clients with excellence. Specifically, I'm curious to know, and this is, this is just more of a selfish question. Anytime that I go and do what I refer to as the taking inventory process, which is me taking inventory on myself, my business, everything I'm at, I have to get away.

Did you have to get away to kind of really get a lot of clarity on kind of like how you're going to begin to put this thing back together.

Well, I kind of view my company leverage as like a guinea pig laboratory where I'll come up with an idea and before it ever sees the light of day and any piece of content or a client sees it, we've stress tested it internally and gotten feedback. And you know, it's, it's impossible to have something where everyone loves it. There's no tool out there. Like you're always going to find someone that hates the way something's happening. But I use my company as a laboratory to experiment with things. But yeah, oftentimes I'll need to get inspiration from different sources. Oftentimes that inspiration just comes out of pain, if I'm being honest.

So you and I are brothers from another mother then?

Yeah, like oftentimes. And I'm an engineer by background, so I'll. I'll see something that bothers me and then my mind starts going, how do I never have to do this again? And then I'll just start. So my inspiration isn't necessarily that I go off, you know, to a cabin and just think for a bit. It might be through books. It might be just lowering my acceptance of tolerating stuff I don't like. You know, I've trained myself that if something happens, if I do something more than once that I don't like, my brain immediately goes to problem solving mode. How do I never have to do this again? It doesn't mean that I can get it off my plate immediately, but I start thinking, is there a tool we could use? Is there a way to automate this? Is there a way I can delegate this? So on and so forth. But, you know, I, I read quite a lot. I pay attention to kind of our performance internally, get feedback from team.

And that's kind of where I, where I get my inspiration from.

Yeah. Well, one of the things I also love about the book is the importance on communication, communicating.

It's like the oxygen, bro.

Yeah. I, in starting my first company in 98, basically with no background whatsoever in business, whatever. Just sheer grit. Right. One of the things I didn't realize is not everybody thinks like I think. Not everybody cares about the things I care about. When you're the owner and you have.

Equity stake, you know.

Yeah.

Exact level of care too, you know.

Yeah. I also realized that team, your team and your team, if you build it correctly, has strengths in areas you have struggles and vice versa.

And you might hate doing something and someone else loves doing it. It lights them up.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's the crazy part.

And it's like, how the hell do you like that?

Cool.

Don't do it.

Yeah. I'm very much more of a visionary than an integrator by, by a long shot. But one of the things that I came in, in contact with was I thought as an entrepreneur, I was communicating well to my team. Yeah. And because I didn't provide a safe place or a way to have a, A proper dissemination of communication going back and forth, the team was not telling me, hey, we need more information from you or can you give us more clarity on this? Like it. The communication cycle, I think more than anything else, can stifle a business's growth more than anything else almost as much as, you know, improper cash flow.

Well, a, a couple things to unpack there. You know, depending on the s, depending on. I think a big mistake that I see businesses make is they put zero emphasis on operational efficiency and they're just 100 focused on growth and marketing and new clients. And you know, if you're a six figure business and you're struggling to make payroll, like, yeah, documenting processes in the short term probably isn't the priority if it's like you're about to go under, like, you know, dial for dollars or do what you got to do. But it's a mistake for any business I think at any stage to go 100 growth, 0% on operational efficiency. There's some happy medium that's optimal depending on kind of how much buffer you have.

How much buffer you have and how mature you are. But you know, it might be 90, 10, might be 80, 20, might be 50, 50 depending on kind of what you can afford. But it's important the sooner that you start paying attention to this stuff because time is all you got. And with more time you can get to eight. You know, if instead of working a 50 hour week, if you were able to work a 500 hour week, you know, you'd get to eight figures. You know, even if you're not the most clever entrepreneur, you'll probably get to eight figures pretty quickly if you just had more, more time. And so it's one of the most important things as an entrepreneur to try to free up. And, and so that's one thing I loved what you said before about kind of the, you have your finance process, your sales process, et cetera. Yeah, people, people really need to be thinking about, you know, how do you optimize each of those, each of those critical functions. Yeah.

Because at the end of the day that's, that's really all you got is your time, your energy and your resources and you have to maximize them. And most, most people also think that what you do and who you do it with is the most important. But I really think that how you do things is actually even more important than those two things. The world's changing so rapidly. We're going through economic crises, you know, shifts to remote work. There's all this stuff with AI and blockchain, like things are moving really quickly. And I think the most important skill set that any team has is the ability to shift on a dime and be agile. And so how you work together, having seamless baton Passes, you know, the world could flip upside down tomorrow. My team, it's my team works so well together with various systems and tools. I could tell the team, hey, we're selling, we're a lemonade company now. Let's go and figure out lemonade. And we would be up and running way quicker than anyone because of our ability to work efficiently together as a team. Does that make sense?

Oh, absolutely. In fact, I was just thinking and all like, so it's funny when you start talking to fellow entrepreneur that's actually been through some stuff and built some stuff and that kind of thing, you have no choice but to kind of remember some of the early days or even some of the not so early days. Like a couple years ago during all the supply chain issues. Because one of my businesses in the construction sector and one of the things that comes to top of mind is I discovered that without having a process, I could not properly articulate what the role or responsibility was for the team member. Yeah. Which means I then couldn't like properly align the team member to be in the right seat in the right bus at the right time. Nor could I properly set the expectation for metrics on how I was going to measure their performance and all. It seems like all human nature wants to be in this process of continual improvement. Everybody wants to win. Right. So for me, when I started putting a higher emphasis on process improvement and optimization, it was a 90 day hockey dip and then like a five year hockey stick.

Yeah.

You know what I'm saying? Like it's a catapult to me.

It, it totally is. And it's an investment. Right. So you have to be willing to sacrifice some short term because again, if, if, if, if you have two choices right now and it's to, you know, write some better copy for this week's newsletter or call 10 more clients versus documenting a process.

There's no comparison. Like the dialing 10 clients will probably short term yield more revenue. Right. But if you're constantly, always doing that and you're not investing, just like you can invest in the stock market or an investment, you can invest the time can be an investment, you can waste time or you can invest time. So documenting those things is a time investment that should have a return on investment over some period. So it's just a total mistake if you're constantly just chasing the short term and you don't have some allocation to that long term stuff because in order to really 10x your business or go from six to eight figures at, at some point you need to Be able to step away and have other people do things. An example that I like to use with this stuff is like, imagine if you had a sink that was broken and overflowing with water and it takes you say, a minute to mop the floor and then you're done. Well, if every day you gotta mop the floor and it just takes you a minute, you know, after, after 60 days that you've just spent an hour mopping, if patching the pipe took an hour, like short term, it's kind of like that dip that we're talking about after day 60. Now you're in the positive, though, because now you're not mopping after day 60, not wasting that minute anymore. So after a certain period of time, you break even and then you're positive on your return on. Return on time. And I think. I don't think enough people kind of pay attention to that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I also think too, at least going again. I'm going back early days. Right. For me, I didn't know where to start. Like, I didn't. I had never been taught process improvement. I'd never been taught the questions to ask, where to look, who to talk to, where to get advice from. Yep. And all that kind of stuff, which is one of the reasons I think your, your book is a top 10 book if you're going to build a business.

Thank you.

Because it has all of that. It has all the questions, all the pro. It. It is a process to create your infrastructure, basically. And one of the things I love about it specifically, or one of the things I, I take away from it is as an entrepreneur, you're typically a firefighter. Right. So you're, you're constantly going and doing and going. Doing. I always tell my team, stop aiming at the top of the fire. You. You put out a fire by aiming at the base. So get to the common denominator and then ask why five or six times to figure out why you got there. How do we get here? How do we get here? You know, until we start kind of building that direction back up. I will also say that even there's.

A lot of wisdom in what you just said, like coming back to Japanese principles like Kaizen and like the. Do you ever read the book the Toyota Way?

I haven't read the book the Toyota Way, but I'm very familiar with the Kaizen approach.

Yeah, yeah. Every. The stuff that you're talking about just reminds me of kind of a lot of the fundamentals of like Japanese manufacturing principles.

Well, I mean, if you're going to build it. If you're going to build a scalable organization, you have to. You have to have a compounding effect within the organization. Your team has to compound. Your resources have to compound. But one of the things that I know I did wrong is I drastically undervalued hiring an organization or a team of people that actually this is what they specialize in to come in and help me build it out. So much so that I probably wasted over the course of three years of just lost lost profit. Not revenue, but profit and sleep. Because I think another thing that happens as a byproduct of this is if you're constantly putting out fire, you're living in stress zone. But when I did that, I lost probably three to $4 million over the course of a few years just because of stupid stupidity, for lack of a better word. It cost me a tenth of that to bring in a firm to help me actually optimize everything. Right. I think that goes back to that. I think. Was it Simon Sinek says play the long game?

Yep.

Right. If you're gonna drive the bus, play the long game? Yep. Yeah.

My friend Dory Clark wrote a book called it Play the Long Game with a lot of O's in the. For. For long. Yeah, totally.

I.

Everything he said, I completely agree with. And you know, it's always like a. I'm. You're always bouncing between being a firefighter and like a juggler in the circus. And it's like today I'm firefighting and I'm juggling.

Yeah. Well, I tell my team all the time too. It's like if you go into the. If you go into the fight, so to speak, expecting to put a sacrifice in for 90, 120 days or six months to then come out the other side and have a higher, much higher quality of life than before you went into the fight to begin with. It's a big deal. I'll also say that something else. There's so much in the book that our audience has to check out. I mean, this is. Guys, this is an incredible. One of the things that I. That I made, I wasted a lot of money on was actually getting software, processes, systems and various softwares and then not setting it up properly. And therefore it never really served me.

Why I wrote a book. Did fell into that mistake too. You could have the right tool, but if you don't know how to use it and when to use it, in a lot of cases it could just hurt your business, not help your business. So it's critical if you are, you need to have all the tools in cpnr. But if you're not gonna. If you're not committed to rolling it outright, you might as well not do it because it's gonna be another place for information to get lost, friction to happen, et cetera. But if you are committed, and this is why I wrote a whole book and a business around this, if you are committed.

To being operationally efficient, you know, and I'm guessing a lot, you know, a lot of the things to get from six to eight figures, um, I'm guessing in terms of your content is going to be goal setting. Like whether it's okrs or other things. Like if you're committed, you're setting okrs or whatever gold framework you practice to, and you've got goals around process improvement, operational efficiency. It can be transformative, this stuff. But it, it starts with not just how to use these tools, but when to use them and when not to. And that's. There's a big emphasis with the way that we teach and train this stuff. Not just, again, about how to. Which there are nuances that make our intellectual property really special, but a lot of it is really aligning your team. First and foremost, what's the purpose of Slack? Like, when should you use that versus Gmail or when should use both of those versus Asana? Or what about text? Like, where do all these things fit in to the. They're all different pieces to a puzzle and the most important thing is that everyone is speaking the same language and everyone is aligned around. Okay. When this type of thing happens, like we go into Slack.

Yeah, right.

You want to take it a bit deeper. Like we. And we go into this channel and we've got channel naming conventions and there's some streamlined standards. Standards around when it should be private or public. And we've leveraged workflows and automation, all these nuances. But first, like, what's the trigger to even open Slack up in the first place? Or Microsoft Teams or Outlook. And that's the purpose of my book and a big part of the trainings. Because if you don't even know where to look to begin with, you're already. You're. You've already lost.

Yeah. No, for sure. Well, I also think that another. Again, there's. Again, guys, there's so much in this book. One of the other core things that I love is to focus on priorities. Yeah. Like one, trying to figure out what is the main priority that's going to get you the most lift. And then two, focus on it. With such a, with such an intensity that you actually get leverage out of it.

Not everything. Look, there's short term and long term investments in assets. There's short term and long term.

Investments with time. And just like you have return on investment, I believe in return on time, like rot, just like roi. So there's various things where the rot is extremely high in your business. So documenting optimizing and automating processes is critical. But that might be a long term rot. There might be something though right now where you could save an hour a week and you can maybe get that hour a week back with just an hour up front of investment. So that's pretty high. You know, after the first, what investment in, in the financial markets, can you make an investment, get all your money back after a week and then every week after get a paycheck for that initial investment back. So you know, start with that and start looking at time as an asset just like, you know, stock or anything else. And so what we found is teaching people how to use email properly, as silly as that sounds, is by far the hard, on average the highest rot inside of a business. Because a lot of these tools that I talk about in the book, like Asana, Slack, Microsoft Teams, they all have high rots too. But you have to align. The team has to be aligned on when and how to use those tools because they're collaborative. It's like what's the value of a cell phone if you're the only person in the world that owns a cell phone?

Yeah, zero.

You've got no one to call. So as you start adding more cell phones to the network, there's more people to call it because the network's more valuable. So with these collaboration tools, you have to align people on, you know how to use them for, for you to get value. But with email, it's a single user activity. You, you could be the only person in your team that's using email efficiently. And even if no one else in your company is, you still get an extra one to three hours a week back, depending on volume. So you know, when we, when, when we're advising people, we usually 9 out of 10 times say like just start with email. That's a quick win. It'll give you back a couple hours a week, give you that breathing room so you're not drowning and then reinvest that newfound time into the next, the next thing, whether that's Slack teams, Asana, documenting, optimizing process. But usually, usually people are drowning in work. It's why I called my book come up for air and it's important that you find a quick win to give a little bit of breathing room. It's hard, especially when you're six figures your early stage, you're figuring out your business model, kind of have this feeling like you're in a tight box with no room to move. So you got to create a little bit of breathing room there so that you've got some, you've got some ability to make choices and invest it a little bit into long term foundational things.

Yeah, well, that's another reason I want the audience to go pick it up is because that the book itself can give them a roadmap. And even if it's kind of like trajectory, right. Even if they only change two or three things right here, it's, you know, it's going to hockey stick in their favor. Right. So it's like implement what you can and then keep coming back to the resource to implement the next thing and keep coming back to the resource, the next thing. I was actually going to bring my next question and one of the things I've realized and gosh, I've been an entrepreneur for almost 30 years now, 25 years with the flagship company.

Damn, you look good for having endured so much pain and suffering for that long.

It's zoom, right? You know, makes, makes the wrinkles go away.

But one of the things that I, that I've seen is that I actually went over this with my team last week. Matter of fact, in one of our operational leadership meetings is when I started the business, we used to turn in our purchase orders on notebook paper and then it turned to an Excel sheet that we'd fill out, we'd print it out and then we'd send over. And then that turned into a robust accounting system, and then that turned into an elevated robust accounting system, and so on and so forth.

On average, how long do you think like you, let's say you get, let's say you take what you've done, you implement all of it. How long, how much Runway do you think you can get before you have to optimize it all over again?

I think a lot of the stuff that I, that we do also is principles based, which I think you can appreciate because, you know, from what you were describing before, about like five whys and stuff. A lot of these are foundational principles that you're bringing up. And so it, once you understand the principles and people understand how and when to use these various tools, even if your processes change, even if one of these tools goes out, out of business. As long as people understand the principles of what are how to communicate, how to plan where your resources go and they understand that new language. Yeah, you constantly have to be reevaluating, you know, these tool. We're constantly updating our intellectual property because there's new features, there's new ways of using them to solve problems. But once you have that baseline foundation, you're, you're kind of, you've got like 80% locked in and then you know, you got 20% that you just, you know, have to be on the lookout. Okay, this changed or our business has changed, our process has changed, but you definitely, you definitely should be kind of constantly challenging status quo in your business.

Yeah.

Something that I learned as a high frequency trader. They used to force us to do a two week block leave every year so they would lock us out of our trading books. Couldn't go on, email, couldn't come into the building. You, it's to make sure that you're not hiding trades. So I would have to document on paper and pen how my algorithm worked, how my book traded and then a backup person would, would go and trade my books. And every year for eight years when I came back from, from vacation, there was always an improvement to how my book traded.

Nice.

That's because fresh eyes spark innovation. It's hard to see the label when you're inside the jar. And you know, I think that one thing that I don't see enough teams doing is challenging the status quo. I hate when I ask someone, either on my team or in a client's team, you know what, so why are you doing it this way? It's like, oh well, because it's always done. For the last 10 years we've been doing that. It's like, but you know, your business has changed 27 times in the last 10 years. Like, yeah, you know, and so I think that you, you know, if you are committed to operational efficiency, you have goals around being operationally efficient. You know, every quarter pick a key process and commit to analyzing it. Maybe you do a role rotation, have someone document it and then go and hand that documentation, even if it's not in a fancy tool, give it to a colleague and say, hey, I've written the steps down, go and try to do this, go and try to do payroll or go and try to onboard the next person following my steps and when they will get stuck because people suck at documenting process in general and but see where they get stuck. So then you can go and use that data to go and Update and make it a little bit more clear.

Yeah, for sure. Well, before we get too much further in the show, where can everybody get. Find out more about the book and what you guys are doing.

Yeah, no, thank you. So you can go to come up for air.com, find out everything about where to get the book, and then also a bunch of free resources that, uh, we created a bunch of bonus content. You know, the book is as you've described. It's, it's dense. It's not one of these fluffy business books where it's like, yeah, one concept that could have been three pages, but we made it 300 pages with a hundred examples. It's, it's, it's a dense book. Harper Collins was my publisher. They didn't want it more than 320 pages. And I'm an efficiency nerd. So you can imagine that for most people, this is like a 14.

You're optimizing every chapter.

So what we did was throughout the book, it's like, if you want to go deeper and see the playbook here or a calculator or whatever we've created, go to come up4air.com so we created a whole bunch of supplemental bonus content with the book. So come up for Air.com is where you could find everything about that. And if you want to go deeper and get help with training, we've got various programs to help with email. We've got a membership to help train not just individuals, but entire teams on the best practices that we've created. And that's@getleverage.com.

Dude. Love it. Love it. You know, I want to go back to a really important concept. It revolutionized my business. Early, early days. Well, I'd say early days, middays. I'm probably 15 years in business at this point. And it's a principle that I think you, you refer to as conditional logic. I refer to it as the if that or if this, then that principle.

Yeah.

Like, so if this happens, then this happens. How important is going through your business with a fine tooth comb to really kind of figure out where all the branches are?

Well, that's a long. That's a longer conversation. I think not all processes are created equal. Right. Like, payroll is a critical process for your business, and then there might be something around. I don't know how you, I don't know how you edit.

Best practice of how you edit your articles for your blog. Right. Like, that's not going to bankrupt your business. If that, if you, if that doesn't get, you know, Revamped with a fine tune comb. But payroll is critical or your sales process is critical. So I think what you need to also realize is you probably have hundreds, if not thousands of processes. Not all are worth the same. So you need to kind of think through, okay, it's. Realistically you're not going to, you're not going to be able to get to all of them anytime soon. So how do you prioritize and being clear on what's the most important and just really going deep on those to start is the most important.

And then give it a try, document it and hand it over to someone and see, watch them do it. Try not try to close, shut your mouth and just watch and see. See where they get stuck?

Yeah, no, I've actually heard that. Take your SOPs and hand it to a 10 year old and see if they can figure it out. And if they can figure it out, you're onto something a hundred percent.

You know, the first day of grad school I did a financial engineering master's at Berkeley. And the first day the person that ran the program said, you know, you're going to be learning rocket science here. But our goal is for you to be able to explain all of this to a 5 year old and then we know that you've demonstrated mastery. So with everything that we do and teach, I try to do it from the lens of like, how do you know, could a five year old understand this stuff or are we explaining it that clearly?

Yeah, yeah, dude, I love it, man. I'm so enjoyed this conversation. This is like the, this is like my jam. Like I'm all about like, you know, making businesses better. And you know, it's funny, as you go through all of this as an entrepreneur, especially after you bumped your head enough times, I mean, I literally have a mark on my head from the weekend.

When you, when you bump your head enough times, right, and you figure out a solution and you figure out the solution can work for a lot of other people. It's almost like you have no choice but to serve the audience and serve those people with that information to prevent them from bumping their head as much. A hundred percent.

And like operational efficiency is just an underrepresented aspect.

Right now in terms of content and training inside of businesses, right? Marketing, sales, that's the sexy stuff. How do you know? How do I show you how to do a funnel and you know, get an extra 3% open rate or close rate or whatever. This stuff has kind of just been neglected for whatever reason. It's you know, revenue is sexy and top line and subscribers is sexy, but saving time is also sexy and like if you don't have the time, it's.

Gonna, you want to go on vacation sometime soon, this is what it's going to take.

Yeah, like not having burnout, having better culture, not having stressed out team. So.

You know, I just felt like the world needed some more content around how to have a high performing team.

Dude, I love the fact that you did it, honestly, because as you just mentioned that you can have the sexy revenue and stuff like that, but if you're pissing off customers left and right, you're not going to have a business.

Exactly right.

And this is the work that helps you not only keep. Re. Keep customers, but retain and compound customers. Yeah.

And your team.

Yeah, exactly. And it's going to help, it's going to help the business be cohesive. I went for 20 years going around like crazy fire.

It was not a life that I enjoyed. Yes, I had nice things, but I couldn't even enjoy the nice things because I was so busy putting out all the fires.

Yeah, you owned a job basically.

Yeah, I've been. Which wasn't very fun. So I'm recommending that you don't do that. Yeah, you pick up the book and build your map. So.

Yeah, dude, one of the things that A little final thing, I use a resource called Whimsical. I think there's another resource called Miro or Miro that allows you to kind of go through the exercises of trying to process map. Do you feel like it's worthwhile an exercise even before jumping into understanding the entire model as a, as a way to start to develop strategic thinking as a resource?

Like when you're mapping out a process, you're saying, yeah, yeah. So actually.

This is a, this is an area that over the summer I'm going to invest more into building up more training on. Right now, you know, we've got trainings in email and Slack and a whole bunch of things, but the process of optimizing process is, is, is something that I'm really interested in. And so my process for optimizing process and again we're building out as we speak a lot of content in this area. First, I think you need to be clear on kind of the why behind it. Why is this process important? What's the business impact and who owns the process? Sounds basic, but a lot of people skip this step and then if something breaks down, it's not even clear like who to talk to. You know, you have five People touching touching something. So who's the ultimately, who's ultimately accountable for this process? Why is this important? What, what needs to happen for us to say that we're successful with this process? So getting clear up there and then kind of step two is, is a flow diagram. And you mentioned before if else statements. So if you're a developer that's comes from software code and oftentimes people that aren't process oriented people think that every condition is important. Well you know, if the person lives in Alabama and they're 53 and they're this and then we need to have a list and every time you have an if else statement it it to me it's just should be signaling complexity.

Yeah.

Now you can't get around it. But the more if else statements that you have in your business, you know, if it's Monday and it's this and it's this but else if it's this, it's too hard to remember and hard to manage. So you have to just be cognizant of that. And so every FL statement comes with a cost that you have to be aware of. And so oftentimes starting off with that flow diagram because every FL statement is a splinter in that whimsical or mirror tree root system. So you know, does it look like a tree or does it look like a forest what you're building?

You know, if, if for me it's always a forest.

But you know, if your thing starts splintering out, you know, like with a hundred if statements and you've just built like basically a forest a forest out of it, that should be a red flag. Like hey, if it's even hard for me to follow this, you know down every single condition. Like maybe, maybe we're over engineering and we need to simplify this thing.

Yeah.

And, and so a lot of people don't think think in terms of that but when you put, when you present a flow diagram it could become pretty obvious. Is this too complicated? Where do we need to simplify? And once you kind of get sign off on the flow diagram then we start putting process into our process management tool. Dude.

Love it.

Which for us.

Thank you enough for coming back on brother. We're gonna have to have to keep you have you keep coming on because to make sure that we can keep.

To support you with your events. I love what you're up to too, dude.

Much love. Much love. Well dude, that's going to do it for the today's show. But I really appreciate you. Everybody go check out the book, everybody. The links will be in the show notes and all that good stuff. Follow Nick. You're going to love it, dude. Thank you again for coming on.

Thanks for having me on the show.

All right, take care.

I hope you liked that video.

And if you did, make sure you check out this next video right here.

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