How Efficient Teams Leverage Systems and Tools
Guest Speaker Nick SonnenbergIn this episode of WiseTalk, CEO and Executive Leadership Coach Sue Bethanis hosts leading efficiency expert Nick Sonnenberg. Nick is an entrepreneur, Inc. columnist, guest lecturer at Columbia University, and the Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work.
He is the Founder and CEO of Leverage, a leading operational efficiency consultancy that helps companies implement his CPR® Business Efficiency Framework. This is the culmination of Nick’s unique perspective on the value of time, efficiency, and automation, which stems in part from the eight years he spent working as a high-frequency trader on Wall Street. The CPR (Communication, Planning, and Resources) Framework consistently results in greater output, less stress, happier employees, and the potential to gain an extra full day per week in productivity per person—just by using the right tools in the right way, at the right time. Nick and his team have worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries, from high-growth startups to the Fortune 10.
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INTERVIEW SUMMARY AND KEY TAKEAWAYS
Nick provides some amazing insights into how teams can increase productivity and shift their workload through more effective operational tools. His current protocol to rescue company productivity – CPR (Communication, Planning, & Resources) – was developed when trying to save his own company from bankruptcy. He discovered new ways to allocate time and resources which he now shares with others to create more efficient workplaces.
Some of the key take-aways from this talk:
- When looking for areas to focus on, the CPR protocol emphasizes streamlining communication, focusing on planning, and utilizing resources. To establish more efficient practices within a company it all comes down to these three categories and how you operate within them. (6:26)
Nick breaks down the difference between project management and process management and explains that once projects become reoccurring, it’s time to invest in a process or system to make it run smoothly and effectively each time. Not only for repeatability, but also to save time in the long run. (14:00) - Whether the company size is 2 or 200, there is always a way to increase productivity within a team. By creating SOP and systems early on and ensuring everyone uses those same practices, everyone will be on the same page and work dynamically. (19:19)
- Nick provides a plethora of resources and tips for both individuals and teams. Whether it’s optimizing your inbox or creating SOPs for the whole department, there are many options that will save time in everyone’s work week. Some of the programs he mentioned include Asana, Process Tree, Slack, Monday, Trello, and specific tricks to optimize programs we already use such as Outlook or Gmail include inbox zero. His book and website offer many more resources, and taking the time to research optimization options will clearly save you and your team time down the road.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“I think a sign of maturity of a company is, as a company matures, the ratio of work should shift more heavily towards process relative to the project.” (14:00)
“Individual productivity is necessary but not sufficient for a team to be productive. It requires collaboration, coordination, and sometimes individuals have to suck it up and sacrifice their own productivity for the greater good of the team.” (19:19)
“Look time is time, you want to save as much time as possible. And it’s not just about saving time you want to optimize time.” (22:3)
“Everything that you do that you that doesn’t tap into your kind of unique zone of genius or give you joy, you should be documenting SOPs and processes for those things. If you do it more than once, the only way to get it off your plate is you have to document it so that when you do hire that person, you have something to make it really easy to hand off to them.” (22:33)
RESOURCES
Nick Sonnenberg:
Book:Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Sue Bethanis 0:00
Welcome, everyone to WiseTalk. This is Mariposa’s monthly podcast where provide perspective leadership, and today we’re excited to welcome Nick Sonnenberg from New York, Manhattan, particularly Greenwich Village. He’s an entrepreneur, columnist, guest lecturer at Columbia University, and the Wall Street Journal’s best selling author of Come Up For Air: How Teams can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work. He is the founder and CEO of Leverage, a leading operational efficiency consultancy that helps companies implement his CPR business efficiency framework. This is a culmination of Nick’s unique perspective on the value of time efficiency and automation, which stems in part from the years he spent working as a high frequency trader on Wall Street. I want to hear about that. The CPR framework consistently results in greater output, less stress, happier employees and the potential to gain an extra full day per week and productivity per person, just by using the right tools the right way at the right time. Nick and his team have worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries from high growth startups to the fortune 10. Welcome. Thanks for being here. And as I always do, we’ve done this for 15 years, and I always ask you to start with a personal story about why you decided to write the book. I read your bio, but I’d like to hear from you a more personal story about why this is important to you.
Nick Sonnenberg 1:19
Well, thank you for having me. Yeah, clearly, I wrote the book for a reason. And I called it Come Up for Air because I know just as well as anyone what it feels like to be drowning in work. My personal story is, when I got out of finance, I was a high frequency trader for about eight years, which if you aren’t familiar with what that is, I was developing algorithms and coding computers to trade stocks at microsecond speeds. Capturing fractions of a penny just purely based off of math knew nothing about the companies. I did that for eight years, I got into startups. And I launched my company Leverage, I had a co-founder at the time, and we grew very quickly. We really tapped into kind of where to get clients. And we did a lot of things quite in a clever way. But we grew to seven figures in the first year 150 people on the team bootstrapped just by leveraging, you know, technology and in smart ways, but also, you know, we got really good at knowing where to go to get clients. But I say all that, which it sounds impressive, but under the hood, we had a lot of ton of mistakes, you know, premature growth can only kill you. For example. It was just the two of us. So the org chart was he was the head of people and I was the head of non-people. And then there was 150 people underneath.
Sue Bethanis 2:44
Non people, love it.
Nick Sonnenberg 2:47
We were losing like half a million dollars a year in profit and had like three quarters of a million dollars in debt. And we were growing at 20% new clients a month, but it was 15% of them left. So we were net only growing at five. So we had good marketing, masking this broken product. And one day he tapped me on the shoulder and he tells me he’s leaving. Not two days, not two weeks, he’s leaving in two minutes. And so I’m sitting there having my coffee with him. And I go white, and I’m thinking like, holy crap, we’re gonna go bankrupt. Yeah, and I had to make a decision. Do I bankrupt the company? Or do I try to turn around and clean it up and it was really tough, like working like 18 hour long days, cashing out my 401k. We lost 40% of revenue in a three month period, my dad’s going into the bank taking out second mortgage on his house to loan money for payroll, you know, like pretty, pretty bad. Yeah, you think it’s like bad pretty much living in your parents basement, like try driving them to the bank for a second on their house. So I had to make this decision, do I stick it out? Or bankrupt it and I decided to stick it out because I saw a path to cleaning things up. And we had many problems. But from an efficiency and productivity standpoint, I didn’t have a free second, like messages. What was eating up my time was nonstop messages. I couldn’t get any work done. Couldn’t find, you know, where did I talk to this person about what? So communication was broken. You know, I had 150 people directly reporting to me. I couldn’t just click a button and know who’s working on what tasks and projects like I had no idea kind of like what people’s priorities or plan was for the week. And then lastly, we had already done a pretty good job at documenting our knowledge or what I call resources. If we didn’t do that, we probably would have gone bankrupt. And so anyway, I started really focusing on the CPR our communication planning and the resources and things started quickly turning around Sue. And what ended up happening randomly is people started reaching out to me asking me to consult them on their efficiency. So people like Tony Robbins reached out or PooPourri, or others, and the same stuff that helped me turn the company around and be more efficient. It worked for all of them too. And so I decided ultimately to pivot the company. And now Leverage is no longer a freelancer marketplace. We do operational efficiency training and consulting, right. And I decided to write a book, I wanted to help more people. And the best way to do that is, you know, spread the message through a book.
Sue Bethanis 4:05
Well, I love that story. And sort of reminds me of Slack, you know, they started out doing I don’t even remember what they were started out doing. But then they ended up developing this process, and then they ended up selling that and look at them now.
Nick Sonnenberg 5:32
They built Slack in order to be able to operate better internally. And then they realized that was the real business.
Sue Bethanis 5:52
So similar. So tell us about this. I love that it’s CPR as well. That’s a great acronym, of course.
Nick Sonnenberg 5:58
Especially with come up for air, right? come up for air, CPR, resuscitate your business, all on brand.
Sue Bethanis 6:04
It’s all coming together. Okay, so talk about CPR. So, let’s break down what you think of. Did you decide to come up with those three things? You were sort of operating in those that you just said, Okay, those are those are great to use so we’ll let’s continue them. I mean, how did you decide to use those three? I mean, they’re pretty generic, but I’m sure you have specifics around them?
Nick Sonnenberg 6:26
Well, I just noticed, like, those were the three buckets that you think about the needs of any company, any size, any industry, like you communicate with people in your company, internally, with your team, and you communicate externally with clients, you need to plan stuff, you have tasks and projects and work that needs to get done. And then you have knowledge, you have SOPs, and you have processes. And you know, within that knowledge bucket, you can also bucket in kind of like your assets like that you might put in Google Drive or Dropbox, you might put like a CRM, like your database, like all of that is kind of resources. So when you think about it, every company, it doesn’t matter what you do, you have to CPR in your business. So I just had this kind of light bulb, like, hey, it actually fits, your operations fits into these buckets. And then there’s different tools that help you be efficient in each of these buckets. And I just had this light bulb moment like, hey, like, it’s no longer the days that it’s just email anymore. Now you’ve got Slack, like you mentioned, and all these other tools. There’s no playbook out there to teach people best practices of how to think about these tools, how to use them, when to use them, and so that was the purpose of my book. I just saw this opportunity that work has fundamentally changed and it’s continuing to change at rapid speeds. And in the last 10 years, there’s all these new ways of working. And there’s books out there on individual productivity, nothing though around team productivity. And so that’s, that’s ultimately what I’m passionate about.
Sue Bethanis 7:58
Could you give us an example on each of these? I think that that probably would be kind of what you started out with your story. I like when people give examples, and I know that our listeners like that a lot too.
Nick Sonnenberg 8:07
Example of like communication and planning and resources?
Sue Bethanis 8:12
Yeah, like a tool.
Nick Sonnenberg 8:13
Yeah, for example, like external communication is what I would say, is the bucket for email. So Gmail, Outlook, things like that, that’s external communication. Email is just an external to do lists that other people can add to. Most people use email incorrectly. And they use it for internal communication with your team, they use it for external, they use it to delegate tasks. You know, different tools are built for different purposes, the purpose of email is external communication. And it’s optimized for that. And then you have tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams for internal communication. And it has specific functionality to make it more robust and more efficient for internal communication. You can create channels, you can have threads, you can have third party integrations. Now, it’s important, though, to understand what is communication versus work management, project management, because a lot of people are delegating tasks and work and communication tools, which is not, that’s not the main purpose of those tools. Right? You can’t just click a button and know you know, what’s everything I need to work on today, or what’s everything I delegated to John that’s past due, you know, communication tools are for communicating like Hey, everyone, welcome Nick to the team. Or, hey, pizza in the side room or notification that you just got a new sign up of something. Right? But if it’s something like hey, can you edit this podcast by Friday, you know, sure, you can hack a communications tool. You could do it in text, WhatsApp, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Gmail, but the best place to do it would be in your work management tool where all the work is where now you have a paper trail of who’s working on what you can click a button did it get done or not get done versus in a communications tool, you could be talking about a million different things. You can’t just click that button and know what’s going on. So you’ve got communication. Then you got these the work management tools like Asana, Clickup, Monday, right, Trello. There’s a whole bunch of them. We prefer Asana. We’re partners with Asana. But they’re all good. Another way of thinking about it in terms of story is, imagine if you were going to take your team camping in the forest together, you would need walkie talkies to communicate with each other. But you would also need a map to navigate out of the forest. And so it’s important within your team that you have a distinction, what’s the walkie talkies we use versus what’s the map. And then lastly, you have your resources. And so every company has static knowledge and dynamic knowledge, static knowledge would be what you would consider to be the use case of a wiki. So somebody like Coda, Notion, Confluence, Guru, those are all wikis, and those answer the questions who, what, when, where, and why. Who’s the CEO? Where’s the office? What’s the org chart? What’s the vision? Why are we here, core values, you know, and then you can link to Dropbox and Google Drive for the assets, you can have like a page for marketing, and link to the branding assets that live in your cloud storage. And then you have dynamic processes that answer the question how, how do you onboard a new team member? How do you produce a podcast? So that’s intellectual property, you’ve invested time, money, money, energy resources into developing best practice of how to do something, that should be captured, and is an asset for your company, if you ever sell, that increases the value of the company, if you ever hire someone, it makes it much easier to get them up to speed, if you ever fire someone or they leave, you aren’t losing everything in their head, the moment they leave the building. Right. So those are the different tools within each of those buckets. Oh, and then for dynamic, we use process tree process.ST is a process documentation tool.
Sue Bethanis 8:14
So there’s a lot of companies who don’t, especially small companies who just don’t do this, so how do they get how does a small company make these decisions, like who should be making these decisions mean a COO or Uber project manager or in terms of like, the distinction between, for example, the internal tools versus internal communication tools and external communication tools.
Nick Sonnenberg 12:23
So in a smaller company, you know, any COO or CEO, you know, if you’re typically say, you know, less than a billion, and then, you know, above a billion, you know, we sometimes start working with CHRO’S, you know, or even senior vice presidents of divisions, you know, when you start getting into the enterprise phase, right. So wherever you’re at, if you’re listening to this, the most important thing, though is it’s clear who makes a decision, and what you don’t want is there to be shadow IT problems where what I mean by that is, different departments or different teams, you know, have their own preference, one likes to use Monday.com and one likes to use Asana. And before you know it, you’re supporting every project management tool, and like, some teams use Microsoft Teams, and some use Slack, and some use Gmail and some use Outlook. You can’t, you’ll piss people off, but it’s the only way to operate. And you need to just pick, pick one and each like buckets. With an exception, like software developers, you’ll probably geras, the most common project management tool for that group, and they’re kind of isolated. So you could make some exceptions like that. But for the most part, as a general principle, you don’t want to have a million tools.
Sue Bethanis 13:47
Right? And how do you see the difference between project management? Like what I was just describing as some sort of Uber project manager who’s overseeing this stuff, versus process management? How do you see the difference between those?
Nick Sonnenberg 14:00
I think a sign of maturity of a company is, as a company matures, the ratio of work should shift more heavily towards process relative to the project. A process means you have invested money and energy and resources to figure out how to do something. And after you figured that out, it’s now a repeatable process. It’s like, when say, Uber launched in its first city, it was a project like it had no it was just guessing what to do and how to do it. And maybe after a few cities, and you figure out okay, this is kind of the order that we need to do things you do this first, this second, you need to hire this person can this license after enough of them. You’ve invested kind of even invested a lot of resources and figuring it out, trial and error. You know, at a certain point, it’s no longer a project. You have a checklist of things and it’s like this is what needs to happen. You’re no longer figuring out stuff from scratch. It’s like this is what needs to happen. So that’s my definition of the two like, it’s a framework. Yeah, if something’s like a one off, like, write my book, like writing my book was a project. If I were to run a book company and try to write books for people, I would develop a book writing process. So then after I’ve done the first few, I can hit like a checklist, run and follow the best practices that I’ve developed.
Sue Bethanis 15:32
Essentially, what you’ve done is you’ve turned your project management into a process.
Nick Sonnenberg 15:36
Well, I keep my projects in my project management tool. And if I do something more than once or twice, and it’s something that’s worth investing in, then I start shifting it out of the project management tool and into our process management tool.
Sue Bethanis 15:55
Right. And what are some process management tools?
Nick Sonnenberg 15:58
Like Process Street, for example, is the one that we use.
Sue Bethanis 16:00
Okay, gotcha. Wow. Okay. So lot’s to think about here. Talk about the pandemic and how the need for collaboration, I mean, there’s a lot of talk about it’s better for people to be in the office to collaborate. I’m not sure if I agree with that. I think it’s better to be in office to connect, I’m not sure if collaboration actually is better in the office. I’m curious what you think in terms of that, in terms of how it’s shifted for you and your team, your group? What do you notice you with your clients?
Nick Sonnenberg 16:32
I mean, we’ve always been remote. Okay, so the pandemic, like, I don’t have an office like, I think that there’s certain industries where being in person is more important than others. Like, if you’re a scientist in a laboratory, you probably need to be with people, right? I think that if you use tools in the right way, which regardless if you’re in person or remote, you should be doing because even if you’re in person, you still don’t want to, it’s still not good to go and tap someone on the shoulder and ask them for something that you could have just found yourself if things were a bit more organized. But I think that being in person, the main benefit is the culture element and getting to know people on a personal level. So I think it’s more for the culture building, which is important. But yeah, I don’t know, I think that the best setup is kind of I know, people talk about four day work weeks, hybrid work, etc. I think that one model that’s really interesting is having a remote, a remote company, but once a quarter for a week you get together, and then people can live wherever they want, and get all those benefits, which is a lot. But you still need to meet at some minimum cadence to keep that culture. And there are some things that in person is, it’s not that everyday you need to be on a whiteboard and doing like a brainstorming session, which you could do in a tool, like Mural anyway. But I think getting together at some cadence is important. But I think it’s almost proven at this point that you don’t need to be in an office in order to have a high performing team. Right.
Sue Bethanis 18:18
Except that, yes, I agree with you. And I think that especially in tech, I don’t think, you know, I don’t think that people generally want to go back. They’re picking not wanting to commute. I think the commute is really at issue here, over connection, because although I think that people want to connect, but they don’t want to commute, and they certainly don’t wanna do it every day. There’s a lot of CEOs, though, who are saying, hey, we need you to come back where that can be in big companies or small companies. But I agree with you. I don’t know if that makes any difference insofar as people will have to, like come to, here’s my productivity tools today. And you know, that’s going to be obviously online, no matter what you’re doing, what your clients are doing, you know, our company does coaching and certainly, part of what we do with people is help them with their individual productivity. Although most of the people we work with are pretty productive. They need to like sort of, you know, slack off, actually, because they’re like they’re just too intensely into pleasing people. How do you grapple with an individual’s need for productivity versus the team? Like, how do you do that with your team? How do you do with other teams?
Nick Sonnenberg 19:19
So individual productivity is necessary but not sufficient for a team to be productive. It requires collaboration, coordination, and sometimes individuals have to suck it up and sacrifice their own productivity for the greater good of the team. Take the 2004 US Olympic basketball team as a perfect example. You have a bunch of individually productive superstars or basketball players you have LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony. I think Tim Duncan, Larry Brown is the only coach in history to win a NCAA and NBA championship and they get blown out by Puerto Rico and game one and end up with the bronze medal. It was the biggest disappointment. How does that happen? Well, you know, they got together like two months before the Olympics to start training together. And they didn’t gel as a team, they were great individually, but they didn’t gel as a team versus a lot of these European teams, maybe you know, you match on a one to one basis, each person, the US is just way better. But they’ve been training together for years and years, and they know the plays, and they know how to work together. And so it’s part of the culture, you know, it has to be clear that you’re trying to optimize for team productivity team performance, you want the company to win, right. And obviously, you want each individual person to be as productive and impactful as possible. But, you know, sometimes, it might mean that, rather than you saving five seconds right now, take pause and put it in the right project in Asana for me, even though it might be five seconds, or 10 seconds faster, for you to text me, put it where it’s easy to find it for me somewhere later. Because what goes around comes around. And when everyone’s doing that, and everyone’s putting it in the right drawer for each person, the five seconds that you spend extra to put things for your colleagues in the right drawers, you’re going to be saving hours a week, because now things are exactly where they should be for you to find. It’s like when you do your laundry, look, individual productivity is necessary, but not sufficient. But also you should be optimizing for retrieval of information versus transfer. So just kind of sticking on this drawer. The fastest way to be done with your laundry would be you take it out of the dryer, and you just throw it in a drawer. But you know, what are you gonna save a minute, instead of that, you separate your socks in one drawer or your underwear in another drawer. And you do that, not because it’s the fastest way to be done. But tomorrow, when you need to put an outfit together, it’s much faster. So you need to be optimizing for the team protocol. You need to be optimizing for the team and you need to be optimizing for retrieval.
Sue Bethanis 22:07
Yeah, that’s really great. So I want to actually, the next question, has to do with like going very, very small, to very, very big. So the first question comes from Katherine, which is any special advice for solopreneurs? Who need to come up for air? So this is more about it is more about the individual. But then I want to talk about like organization. So let’s start with, let’s start with the solopreneurs.
Nick Sonnenberg 22:29
So you still need to learn how to use email properly and get to Inbox Zero, that’ll save you hours, look time is time, you want to save as much time as possible. And it’s not just about saving time you want to optimize time. We could talk a whole hour about optimizing time. But time isn’t linear, 9am on a Monday is way more valuable than 7pm on a Friday after a long week and 100 Zoom calls and you’re tired in the back of an Uber. So you want to be thinking about how much time can you save? But also, how do you time shift? How do you make better use of dead time, and free up time where your brains at higher horsepower and needed for, you know, higher level stuff, right? You can predict at the end of the day, after 10 Zoom calls, you’re gonna be more tired than the first call of the day, after you’ve had a fresh cup of coffee and you worked out. Same thing applies if you have a therapist, you don’t want to be the last appointment of the day, you want to get your therapist first. So when you’re a solopreneur, you still want to be using project management tools like Asana, even if you don’t have other people to delegate it to now, you still want to be able to prioritize your work. And maybe you could do things like create a fake user, or create a project called whatever say you want to hire an assistant next, you could create either an assistant project or you could create a fake user called assistant at company abc.com. And you can start delegating stuff now to that person that’s not urgent that way, when you do hire this person in three months, six months a year, they might have a couple months of work preloaded that you’ve been delegating to this invisible person the whole time. So you still want to be set up with these things. Everything that you do that you that doesn’t tap into your kind of unique zone of genius or give you joy, you should be documenting SOPs and processes for those things. If you do it more than once, the only way to get it off your plate is you have to document it so that when you do hire that person, you have something to make it really easy to hand off to them. And so that still means that you need wiki you need to document process. So all things still apply, you just don’t have a team to also use these with you but you still can establish best practice and that operational efficiency foundation from the very start even if you’re a team of one.
Sue Bethanis 24:58
Or not necessarily from the very start. But like, yeah, it’s midway, let me ask you a question, I’m going to stay with the solopreneur for a second, I have a company of 15. So there’s a lot of handing off. What I find, though is that I don’t do zero on the email, like my inbox has 10,000 emails in it. So I just don’t do what you’re saying. But let’s just what the problem is with it is that I can’t retrieve them. Do you know of, I’m still surprised that there’s not a better way to search email. That there’s not, it’s funny to me that there’s not a better way to find, like the search tools for, like, in our case to Microsoft, is it just can’t find stuff. So, is Gmail better is like, which, which? Where is it? Where are the search email tools that are good?
Nick Sonnenberg 25:50
I mean, I think we could talk through some specific examples of things that you haven’t been able to find. But I think, first making sure that you’re using email for when it should be used. So for example, if right now emails are coming in, that are around your podcast, rather than it being in a Microsoft team’s channel for a podcast, like that’s something they investigate and look into. Right, so. So like being really aware, like, what should even be an email, but you know, email, it’s easy to search by person, by date range, a lot of the things I’m guessing if we were to, if we were to work on your email together, I would want to kind of find some things that are hard to search for, and really know, are these things that really should even have been an email or should it have been inside of Asana? Was this a team member giving you a task? Or something related to a project? Right? You know, because oftentimes, if someone gives me something, I’ll give you a few. So following my reply, archive, differ, say an email, you know that you want it to come back to you the morning of the 24th. Like, today, we’re doing an interview for the podcast. You shouldn’t have to search for that email, let’s say I said something like, Hey, I need this, this and this for the podcast, that could have been deferred, you can snooze emails, and it comes back to the top of your email on the day that you snooze it. So you don’t need to search for it, you know, it’s going to come back. If I write an email, and I asked, you know, can you buy a special headphone for the podcast, you should go and create that task in Asana in your kind of mega to do list. And now, you know, you don’t need to find it in email anymore, because you’ve, you’ve pulled the action item out of it. And, you know, put it into your project. So yeah, it seems it’s a longer question. But I think that the search is probably equivalent in both and, you know, there’s probably some opportunities to improve how, how email can be helpful there.
Sue Bethanis 27:58
And in what’s your thought about all the junk that comes in? I mean, I am shocked by it. How much stuff.
Nick Sonnenberg 28:05
Have you enabled the Focused Inbox in Outlook. No, I would enable that, that filters out a lot of the junk, you could set up rules too anything that has the word unsubscribe or opt out, you could create an optional folder and set up a rule to move anything that contains that to an optional folder that you check once a day. And that’ll get rid of 90% of your, of your crap. There’s a lot of these tips and tricks where there’s like, say, like a dozen, and these aren’t, it’s not rocket science, like we’re not talking about like rocket science here. It’s really just the sum of 12 things that, you know, you’ve just never been taught, you never just stopped to think about that, you know, we’ve spent the time to define these best practices this and literally Inbox Zero within a couple hours, you can get those 10,000 down to zero. And not just that you can going forward, never get back to where you’re at. And just email alone, our email training program is our most popular it saves around three to five hours a week per person in a team. It’s not even just the time savings. It’s the reduction of stress, like it’s stressful to people open their email and see a thousand things. Not only that, it’s not just a stressor and a time waster, it also by not having a grip on it, I’ve seen so many cases where people are literally like burning money. Like I’ve seen so many where we’re going through it. And like the client says, Hey, hang on a second, I just need to deal with this. This is like a $50,000 email that I missed, you know, so there’s like literally money sitting in people’s inbox that yeah, they just missed because they’re flooded, they don’t have a grip on it, and they miss important stuff that sometimes can be substantial.
Sue Bethanis 28:55
Yeah, good point. So let’s zoom out now to something much bigger. So yeah, how would you work with a head of IT that’s trying to change, or head of finance, trying to change their practices? That’s a much bigger company for sure. To be more digitally savvy to be more, you know, less manual labor, essentially. You know, where would a company like that start?
Nick Sonnenberg 30:27
Well, I’m not trying to do like a sales pitch or anything, but like my honest answer would be, I mean, we would have a conversation to understand kind of what the tech stack is and is one that we could support. But we’ve developed kind of like a training support program just for this case, because people learn at different speeds, people have different starting points, people have different tools that they use, etc. And so, you know, our main business is, you know, offering kind of a yearly support package for teams where they could get all of our online training programs, as well as all of the group trainings and, and kind of monthly calls that all lead to and asynchronously be able to ask questions. That’s where I would start with people. For a modest, small yearly fee. Each employee could have the support, they need to know how to use these tools properly and save, you know, a business day a week or gained 20 to 40% poductivity.
Sue Bethanis 31:38
Right? Well, what I’ve really gained from this is this idea of retrieval. That seems so simple, but that’s the great way of looking at it. Yeah, and then this idea of email, external, whatever, internal, whatever you want to use internal. So this has been great. So I want to just make sure that there’s anything else you want to add for this audience.
Nick Sonnenberg 32:01
I would say that a helpful starting point with this stuff is start with my book. It’s a very packed book with a lot of there’s no fluff, there’s a lot of tips and tricks, and we walk you through the process. And if you need more help, you know, there’s the things that I’ve mentioned on this call. But if you go also to comeupforair.com, there’s a bunch of materials, there’s a bunch of bonus materials along with the book that are, we’ve spent so much time they’re really valuable resources. So I would encourage people just to go to that, that website, comeupforair.com
Sue Bethanis 32:35
As a starting point, and then also want to mention your business website, which is getleverage.com. And then you’re on LinkedIn as Nick Sonnenberg, and it’s S O, N, N, E, N, B, E, R, G, and then the book is Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work. Thank you so much, Nick, for being with us.
Nick Sonnenberg 32:54
No problem. I mean, if we want to blast people with more, you can go to theoptimizedpodcast.com. I just launched a podcast on where I do live consultations with people. And if you could go and apply if you want to be on and that’s really fun.
Sue Bethanis 33:08
I love it. That’s great. So again, thanks, everybody for being here. Thanks, Nick from New York. Thanks again, everybody. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, Nick. Thanks. Bye