VANNOY:
Our teams can leverage systems and tools to stop drowning and work. I am Mike Vannoy, vice President of Marketing at Asure. And this is a really cool topic. So many times on the, on the Weekly show, we talk about HR issues around compliance and productivity. This is all about productivity. So as we are squarely in the war for talent, you know, we talk all the time on the show about, you know, 20, 25 years ago, this War for Talent was an enterprise term that only big companies thought about and cared about. But clearly the labor shortage has hit Main Street and, and, and has hit small businesses. And so as we have these kind of mega trends of a labor shortage and always trying to do more with less technology changes I I, I think it’s a great time to stop and think, how do we just become simply more productive with the people we have?
If we’re gonna add people, how do we make them more productive? How do they plug into systems to help our businesses grow? And, and have a really cool guest to help me unpack this topic. Nick Sonenberg he’s an entrepreneur. He’s an ink columnist guest lecture at Columbia University. He’s the author of Come Up For Air, how Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning and Work. He’s the founder and c e o of leverage, a leading consultancy that supercharges operational efficiency by implementing Sandberg’s CPR r Business Efficiency Framework. This in 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. Nick has lectured on the topic of operational efficiency to audiences, including Entrepreneurs organization, Tony Robbins, plat Platinum Group, genius Network, c o Alliance, and more. Nick, welcome to the show.
SONNENBERG:
Thanks for having me, Mike.
VANNOY:
Okay, so, so let’s jump into it. The, I I grew up in this HR world, used to work for big companies, and I remember, you know, the, the McKenzie types talking about this pending war for talent and a labor shortage that was a decade away. And now if you’re a small business owner, I’m sure you experience, you, you walk into the restaurant and you’re like, oh, there’s, there’s a bunch of open tables. We’ll, we’ll be able to sit, sit down right away. You’re like, oh yeah, it’s a 30 minute wait. Because we don’t have staff to serve all, serve all of our customers, right? Small businesses and entrepreneurs are dying to serve more customers and to grow in the face of this labor shortage. You know take the conversation where you want. How do you see, what, what, what are what is the opportunity that small business owners need to understand about how they can become more effective in, in, in improve efficiency?
SONNENBERG:
Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show, Mike. I think that efficiency is just as relevant to a small business as it is to a, a large business. I don’t think that it’s dependent on size or industry. We’ve worked with a multitude of different size businesses, ranging from seven figures up to some of the Fortune 10. We’ve worked with financial advisors to poop sprays, to mega social media platforms and cryptocurrencies and everyone benefits in similar ways. And those ways that the benefits evolve is when you have a more efficient team. One, it impacts culture. People, high performers, whether you’re a small business owner, you know, running a restaurant or you’re, you know, a hundred million dollar distribution company, high performers or individuals like to do things that add value, they like to do things. And my, my passion is how do I figure out a way to remove roadblocks, remove the scavenger hunt so that people can do work that’s meaningful work that gives them joy or taps into their unique ability.
And now what I found is it doesn’t matter if it’s a small business owner that you’re trying to help their team free up time to work on things that give them joy or tap into their unique ability or add more value to that small business. Or you’re doing it for a company with a hundred thousand employees. It’s all the same people. It gives people a bigger purpose, a better experience working there, which will ultimately lead to higher retention, which is a huge issue right now. If you look at the average retention of a, of an employee at any, at any company it’s exponentially declining, right? And so there’s many reasons why, but I do think that one, one thing that is a part of the solution to that big problem is you make work more enjoyable. You give them, you give them more meaningful work that’s more intellectually stimulating.
You remove the scavenger hunt you improve culture. When you don’t have efficiency inside of the organization, trust deteriorates. What I see is trust comes in multiple forms. You could trust someone’s integrity, like are they gonna steal from you? But you can also trust, if I give this to Mike, is he gonna get it done? And when it doesn’t get done, and a lot of the cases it’s not cause you didn’t want to or you’re a bad person, it’s because you just didn’t have good systems to, to capture it. So, but I ultimately, that causes trust to erode, which impacts culture. So I think there’s a big culture aspect to this problem that we’re discussing. And then also it impacts the bottom line of the business. And the more profitable your team is, your, your company is, you know, the more, the more you can have vacation days and salary increases and other cool things that does yeah, improve the experience for an employee. So I, I think that this efficiency is just in general something every business of every size, shape, and form needs to be thinking about right now.
VANNOY:
Yeah. Nick, what, what do you mean by scavenger hunt?
SONNENBERG:
So, what I mean by the scavenger hunt is when you have to go and look for something and it’s not just one or two clicks away, and we’ve all been there, you know, if when you’re looking for a document and it’s just like, oh, where was that? Was that in an email or was that in a text message or was that in Slack? What channel was that in? Was that in a marketing hyphen social media or social media hyphen marketing? Or was that in Google Drive or Dropbox or Box or a SharePoint? When you don’t have kind of things in clean drawers, so to speak, meaning like it’s easy to go and find what you’re looking for, there’s so much waste. The core of my book is really this framework which kind of gives teams and organizations guidelines into, in terms of when and how to best think about all the different technologies available to have a high performing team and collaborate.
When you think about how work has changed over the last decade, of course there’s a big shift to remote, which is, which is available in part to these new tools that you can now use, right? Right. So it’s no longer there’s just text and email. You’ve got these new tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams and Asana and Guru and Notion and a whole bunch of them. And no one’s ever been taught when and how to best think about these tools. And if you don’t have alignment across your team, and they don’t even know the basics, like forget about all the fancy functionality and, you know, tips and tricks, but just even the basics, like what’s the purpose of this tool in a, what scenario should I even think to open Asana? Right? Right. If you don’t even have alignment on that, you know, nothing else really matters. And when you don’t have alignment on that, I might prefer to email you, but you might love Asana. And then, you know, Sean might love, you know, text or Slack. And when you have this misalignment, you, it causes that scavenger hunt and it takes longer to find information that’s helpful than it is to get the work done in the first place.
VANNOY:
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. You know, I work for big companies, work for small companies around my own companies you know, big companies see, see the, the modern tools as, you know, shadow it and they discourage them. But then so frequently either companies with flexibility or smaller companies that are, that are prone to use these tools, they see them as point solutions, I think. Right? And, and and don’t really tap into the real power of how these things kinda integrate together.
SONNENBERG:
Well, the shadow it problem’s a big problem. And the mistake that I see companies make is when, when you start allowing people that came from another company that loved Smartsheet, and another person on another team loved Monday and another one on this one loved air table, and before you know it, you’ve empowered, which sounds really powerful and great, and in some cases it is to allow people to make kind of decisions and, you know, empower them to make those decisions. But there are other types of things where you do want to centralize that decision because the, the co the, what ends up happening as a byproduct, if you don’t, is you literally might be a company right now supporting every single SaaS software in the collaboration tech space, right? Right. And inevitably, teams are more and more collaborating with each other. And so when, you know, the marketing team uses Monday and the, you know, the client success team uses as Asana and another team uses Smartsheets, everyone’s got a different system.
So you can’t just invest on the HR side of things in some great training material for the company cuz you’re supporting everything. And then teams can’t collaborate as easily as they can. And so I think that that’s a huge mistake when you start letting you know every team make their own decisions. I do think that on a company level, there needs to be some company decisions on what tools are supported and it’s gonna piss some people off. But they have to understand that the reason why you’re doing it is because the other going the other direction’s way worse.
VANNOY:
How do you strike a balance, Nick? So, I mean, I’ve seen mature companies you know, they’re all about simplification of their business. How do we get, how do we, how do we go from 300 vendors down to 75 vendors? And, and they do try to make these top-down decisions and there’s really good, there’s good cost and efficiency and simplifications reason for doing it. They’re also just, they’re stepping over dollars to pick up nickels when it comes to some, some of the, some fresh blood comes in the organization and knows how to use different tools to do things better. How, how do you guide, how do you guide businesses to think through this balance of central control versus experimentation with the new?
SONNENBERG:
Well, I think that, I think that one of the most important, what’s the word, qualities or superpowers a company can have is how agile they are. And we’re living in a world where things change so fast that how you collaborate and not just what you work on, but how you work as a team is more and more critical. Cause you know, interest rates could rise, the economy could go in a certain direction, inflation, all these things, you know, covid could happen, like business models, right? Right. Have been rattled over the last few years. And I think that people need to wake up and really take it seriously. It’s not just what you do, but how you do it. That’s extremely critical. And I think that a lot of the companies that are going to be surviving, not just surviving but hopefully thriving over five to 10 years, is going to really think through how they work, how are they incentivizing team members, how do they create alignment and transparency?
And I think that that’s going to be absolutely critical for, for companies to thrive. But you know, there’s so much that goes into solving this problem that’s not just like this one thing. I’m just, I’m just really hyper-focused on the collaboration aspect. How can I save as, as many millions of hours for teams across the world by teaching them a framework and how to think about best practices so that they can then go and reinvest their time in whatever is deemed to be the highest priority stuff. So the difference between efficiency and effectiveness, effectiveness is doing the right things. I don’t get into that. I mean, if someone wants my advi like my thoughts, I’m happy to share it. But really what I, the lane I’m trying to stay in is how do you do things right? So effectiveness again, is doing the right things.
Efficiency is doing things right. So whatever it is that is deemed to be the most critical thing or direction for your business, I want to help you get there, get, get there as fast as possible without as many roadblocks. And I think that teams and organizations need to be constantly challenging status quo in this, in this day and age. And if you’re doing any process or anything in your business today, exactly the same way you were doing it a year or two ago, there’s probably an opportunity to rethink it. And we’ve got, and I lay this out in the book, there’s different things that you can do to kind of start sprinkling and challenging status quo into your core values and into your, your culture. But I think it’s critical companies that are just, I’ve seen it cuz like we’ve done this with so many, you know, thousands of teams and companies, the, those that kind of sit back and just continue doing things the way that they’ve been doing it just because that’s how it’s always been done. Yeah. Versus those that challenge the quo are always looking for a better way. You know, there’s a clear difference in those that are going to thrive versus those that might not be around in the next few years,
VANNOY:
Nick. So we kind of the throw it around, you know, you know different tools, you know, whether you use Asana versus Monday versus click up, whether you use HubSpot versus Salesforce versus sugar. I mean there, there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s an endless sea of collaborative tools out there. So whether people are following along and know those tools are not, how, where do you start in, in, in, and let’s maybe exit the theoretical. I think you and I probably could talk like that all day. What ju maybe give, start with just a real life example. What was something that, you know, you saw a, a client you working with perhaps that you saw, yeah, okay, they’ve been doing that forever. They didn’t probably think they’re doing anything wrong, but what was the before and the after in, in a real life example?
SONNENBERG:
So I’ll answer that question. That’s a great question. Let me answer it if it’s all right in a bit of a long-winded way because I think it’s an extremely important question. And those listening right now, really I could, I could rattle off hundreds of tools right now, but, you know, where do you start and how do you think about answering that question is critical? Yeah. So I’ll start answering it this way. The most important thing with all this stuff is that you choose one thing to fix and you really get one thing fixed at a time. You’re not going to, it’s gonna benefit nobody in your organization. If you partially roll out, you know, you mentioned Asana and you mentioned, you know, Salesforce and, and all these different tools. If you just like half-ass partially roll out Asana and then there’s a new shiny object and you heard from, you know, this podcast or read in my book you know, another tool and now you start trying to roll out multiple things at the same time, oftentimes that can just hurt your business cuz you only get Ben benefit if this is rolled out properly and used properly.
So you have to be strategic with where you start. And so one of the things that we do at leverage my training and consulting company, one of the core offers is a roadmap where we sit down with people and we do a deep diagnostic on their operations, their systems, and then we give ’em a prioritized list of what to do first, second, third. Because different things, depending on where you’re at and what’s broken or where you have opportunities, different things might be the most strategic place to start. Usually we wanna start with things that are gonna give you the highest leverage, no pun intended. So meaning look, everyone’s busy, like everyone listening right now is at full capacity. That’s why I titled my book Come Up for, come Up for Air, everyone’s Drowning in Work. It’s the number one thing I hear. So when you deal with people that are drowning in work that are at full capacity, their, their, their plate’s full, telling ’em to learn a new tool or to roll out another tool is never going to be an easy conversation to have.
And so we always try to find what’s the highest leverage activity we could do, what can we clean up or fix right now that’s going to very quickly save three hours, five hours a week per employee, give ’em that space and that breathing room and now we’re playing with house chips and now we do the next thing. Yeah. So it’s important that you’re strategic with what you start with. Now in general, a very logical starting point that is high impact and quick to fix. And also one of the most popular things that we’re training people on right now is get training on how to use email properly and how to get to inbox zero. Now, email is a great start because not everyone is using a project management tool or Asana or you know, something for your wiki like Guru or Coda or Notion, every company, everyone listening right now you are using Outlook or Gmail, 99% cases, right?
Yeah. And it’s been around for decades and everyone uses it incorrectly, basically. I’ve met so many people that think they’ve got good systems with foldering and all these things. But back to kind of challenging status quo, there’s so many bad habits with email. When we work with people, email’s usually that very quick win, that’s a three to five hour a week time savings and within a month, I mean honestly it’s within couple weeks, but we give it a month just to guarantee that the inbox zero, that can fundamentally change your productivity and give you that breathing room to then go and reinvest in the next thing. And another benefit is it doesn’t require your colleagues to be following best practices. And that’s a very subtle but distinct benefit of starting with email. Now, depending on your business, email might not be the most logical start.
I’m just saying in general, to answer your question, email is usually a very logical one because tools like Asana or Slack, those are collaboration tools. It’s like what’s the value of a cell phone? If you’re the only person in the world with a cell phone, it’s worth nothing. You have no one to call. So if you know best practices of using Asana, but you’re the only one or only a fraction of your team is, and the rest, you know, are still texting and emailing you, you’re not gonna get that much benefit because now you’ve just got another tool to manage while your other colleagues are still, you know, not on board and they still have the old bad habits. Yeah, yeah. Versus email, even if no one else is adopting it. But we teach you the, we have a framework called r a d and I talk about in the book, rad reply, archive defer, and with a few settings and mindset shifts and teaching you about, you know, when to actually create a folder, how to search, how to snooze emails, tricks like this, it doesn’t even matter if the person next to you follows it, you on a personal individual level will save three to five hours a week.
And that’s a really, that’s a really quick win that we provide. And then, you know, normally after that, normally I like to solve communication first in general too. But my framework in the book is cpr, communicate, plan and resource. And in general, solving the communication problem, which is email for, and, you know, slack and Microsoft teams, that usually is a quick win that saves a lot of time. And then we move into the p part of the framework, which is the work management tools and planning. So that’s where Asana or Monday and those category of tools come in. But again, there’s always exception cases, but in general we usually see that following CPR in that order seems to work quite well.
VANNOY:
It makes sense to me. I I, I’m thinking out, thinking out loud here where is it that I see, and I’m just stealing title from your book where, where do I see people drowning at, at, at, at work? It’s in communications, it’s like keeping on top of projects, but it’s, it’s partially using Outlook, partially using Evernote, partially using teams, partially keeping track of it in a PowerPoint slide or a word docket. I mean, it’s, it’s all over the place. And because so many people get to choose their own tools, there’s no standardization and therefore people don’t get get, get outta process. If, if what you’re saying is true three to five hours, pick the middle four hours a week, it’s 10% of your life, work life, right? I mean, what would you, what would a 10% productivity improvement mean to a business? That’s, that’s, that’s gigantic, right?
SONNENBERG:
Well think about this, right? 10% productivity gain isn’t a, isn’t a straight pro 10%. Because when you look at the research and you look at the stats, you know, around 60% of people’s time is spent work about work, right? So let’s just Asureme, let’s just figure out the math really quick. So say it’s 25 hours a week is spent work about work and say 15 hours a week is remaining on a 40 hour work week. Which is time that you can spend on high level activity, right? Well, so you got 15 hours towards that high level activity, call it 16 for easy math, 16 hours towards high level activity. A 10% productivity gain on 40 hours is four hours, right? So four hours out of 16, you’ve just increased the amount of time you can spend on that high level, high impact, right?
Key projects, key initiatives by 25%. So a 10% productivity gain gives you 25% more capacity for those high level projects. It’s, it’s a really interesting way of thinking about it. When you factor in, actually 10% across the board is 10%, including all this admin stuff. But 10% relative to the time available for high impact work is actually a significant increase for what you can, what you can drive. You know, a lot of times when you’re drowning in work, I know I’ve been there before, I mean leverage early days. I had a business partner leave and we almost went bankrupt. You know, one day I, we were at a, a coffee shop working and he tapped me on the shoulder and gave me, you know, not two weeks or two days notice, but two minutes notice and, you know, I, I go white and I’m thinking to myself, holy crap, we’re gonna go bankrupt.
You know? And people didn’t know who I was. We had a broken business model. We were losing, you know, about half a million dollars a year, had almost a million dollars of debt, you know, and like the whole, the whole story, right? Cashing out 401ks, taking, my dad took a second mortgage on his house to loan us money for payroll. And it, I, I had to make a decision whether I wanna bankrupt the company or not. Ultimately I saw a path to cleaning it up. And it took a long time, but that’s the genesis of this framework. Cuz ultimately as I was cleaning it up, I started realizing there’s communication stuff to clean up, planning stuff, resource stuff to clean up. And people started reaching out, asking me to help them. And I started noticing this pattern. And that’s kind of the background story to, to the framework.
But oftentimes during that tough period, what I found is, you know, back then when it’s pure chaos, it, you know, it was like a hundred hour weeks, but like, you know, it could be like 70 hours just of keeping the lights on, blocking and tackling. Like, this is just stuff that I need to do. And it’s really like when you start getting beyond that where you’re actually starting it to be able to spend time to invest in foundation and long-term projects. So there’s, in every piece, in every job out there, there’s a certain amount of time, which I was just calling before, work about work, which doesn’t necessarily drive your business greatly forward. It’s just like, this stuff just needs to get done. Like this is like lights on and it’s really when you, it’s really a small percentage of the time once you get beyond that, which is, you know, we’re actually making meaningful progress.
And so like an an analogy I use is you know, imagine you have a sink that’s overflowing with water. Most people only have the time to be mopping faster and that’s their strategy. It’s like you’re constantly mopping the floor faster. Yeah. Because it’s hard to find the, the brain space and the time space to, to take the time to find the hole and properly patch that pipe. But usually the time spent for patching that pipe, you know, is kind of when you’re already in that overtime zone and you have to be able to find breathing room to allocate time to patching the pipe because ultimately you’re only going to win if you patch the pipe. You can only mop faster for so long.
VANNOY:
Let’s go through my head here, Nick. I’m wondering how much of, so it makes sense to start with communications just intuitively that seems to me where most people have the most waste and therefore the biggest opportunity. And I like your math exercise. It’s not just, it’s not just four hours of a 40 hour work week. You’re get 10% more effective. It’s what you do and how you reallocate that four hours. And I’m sticking on this, I wrote it down, 60% work about work. Is there further clarification? I, I just wonder about the business owner. You got 20 employees and, and is, I think most of us are guilty thinking, oh, my employees aren’t effective, I need to help them. But there’s probably, it’s a little bit like being on the airplane. The steward just, you know, says, Hey, put your mask on before you put the mask on your child. Cause you can’t save them if you can’t say if you’re already, if you’re dead, right? So how much of this starts with, it starts at the head. It it, it’s with the senior leader in freeing up their time before you have the oxygen, so to speak, to help everybody else.
SONNENBERG:
Yeah, it’s a good point. Well it’s not that the, the, the top person needs to have the freed up time, but they definitely need to be bought in. Cuz this stuff only works if you do have buy-in from senior management. It doesn’t work. And it, it’s not just with efficiency, it’s any, anything that requires change management. You know, it could be that you wanna do something, you wanna hire a third party consultancy on rolling out new core values or something like that. Any change that you wanna make to your business, it can’t just be do as I say, not as I do. And you start telling people that they need to, you know, learn asana, but I’m not gonna do it. And if you want to talk to me, you still have to email me. You know, that, that becomes difficult and I don’t think sets the right precedent. So
VANNOY:
If it doesn’t exist int exist, necessarily need to send to your forecast in Excel, right, <laugh>?
SONNENBERG:
Yeah, exactly. So I don’t think necessarily that it’s the senior management need to first free up their time before you free up the rest, but they need to be bought in and part of the championing of whatever this change management is because they really set the precedent. And if, if, if I, if you’re my boss and I see you’re not following it, like why should I follow it? So I think it, it’s really important to have alignment from the top.
VANNOY:
So what do you think the biggest challenges? Not think your experience, you know, where where do, where do people fall short? So I think people listening so far would think, okay, makes a lot of sense. We start with communications, there’s a lot of platforms out there tons of processes that could be automated and improved and hardened in our, in our firm. Where is it that, where is it that people make the mistakes unwittingly?
SONNENBERG:
Well, multiple mistakes. I would say. One, the shadow it problem where you, you start getting everyone, you don’t centralize who’s making the decisions on, on these things. So that’s one mistake we’re, and before you know it, you’ve got, you’ve got like every tool under the sun that as a company you’re managing. So not, not centralizing and aligning on, you know, what are, and I’m not talking about does your design team want to use Canva or something like that’s like a local tool specific for one department. I’m just talking about those foundational tools that fall into my CPR framework. You know, communicate, plan and resource. Anything that falls into that is central to the foundations of your operations. So anything that’s nuanced specific, you know, if, if your finance team wants to use pride.co for fp and a, that’s not going to affect the other teams.
So that’s, that’s fine, right? But something that is in CP and r should have some deeper conversation in a centralized decision, then the way that these tools are rolled out is completely haphazard. And then what ends up happening is if you don’t roll out a new tool properly, people will hate, they’re not gonna see the value. It can hurt the productivity of the team even though it’s the right tool now there’s another place to look. And so you’ve just slowed people down and now they think it’s the tool’s fault. So in a year, if you wanna hire a company like mine to come in and help you properly kind of roll these out, you’ve made it a hundred times harder because now you have to fight people for round two after they’ve had a bad experience and think it’s the tool’s fault. So you have to pick the right tools, you have to roll it out properly and you have to do it one at a time.
Too many people try to bite off more than they can chew and that slows them down a lot as well. And then lastly, it has to have that, what I was saying before, buy in from the top down. It, it makes it very difficult when you have leaders and managers that think that, you know, they could still just text you and, but everyone else needs to use these things. You get the value, you get the value out of this when everyone’s aligned. The underlying principle of my book, Mike, is you want a team and an organization with the mindset to optimize for speed of, of information, not transfer of information. And that’s really the name of the game that I found with all this stuff. And so when people are drowning in work and they need to come up for air, it’s a very natural thing to do, which is just get this off my plate as fast as possible. Usually that’s a text or an email. There’s nothing really faster. But by not taking pause and putting it in the right project in the right place in Asana, or putting it in the right place in your wiki or putting it in the right folder in your Google Drive, whatever, even though that’s an extra few clicks for you,
What you’ve just done by doing it is you’ve kept things much more organized. And so when your colleague needs to find that next week, or you need to find it next month, it makes it a million times faster to retrieve whatever you’re looking for. And so
VANNOY:
Can you give an example
SONNENBERG:
That again, I’ll just repeat it?
VANNOY:
Yeah, yeah. Can,
SONNENBERG:
Can you, so an example
VANNOY:
Could be example. Yeah,
SONNENBERG:
An example could be like, let’s say I want you to I don’t know we want to talk about writing a blog together to publish on medium, right?
VANNOY:
Yeah.
SONNENBERG:
So,
You know, I want you to write a blog by Friday. I could email you like, Hey Mike, could you write this by Friday? I could text you. Like, both of those are pretty quick. It’s extra clicks for me to open up Asana, go to a marketing project, create a task in that project, assign it to you, put a due date, write a description. All of that does take a little bit more effort upfront. So if the com, if if what we’re trying to argue over is what’s quicker, 10 out of 10 times text and email is gonna win, right? But
If you spend the extra few clicks, you put it where it belongs next week when we wanna talk about the status of the blog or if I wanna attach like a new document or give some ideas for the blog, rather than now me doing a new text or a new email like say the first time around I emailed you and now I text you. Now you’ve gotta stitch these two messages together to get a full picture of what’s going on. Yes, yes. Versus if I want to know what’s going on with that blog, I know exactly where to go. I know exactly where to update it. If I wanna see any update on it, I know exactly where to go. And, and retrieving information is a, is, you know, 10 or even a hundred times faster in the future. So, you know, upfront spending the extra few seconds, few clicks to put things where it belongs upfront is an investment that pays dividends on the backend. Does that make sense?
VANNOY:
Yeah, it it, it does. It does. And I feel like Interesting. Go ahead. Go ahead.
SONNENBERG:
Oh, go on.
VANNOY:
I was talking to a colleague the other day and, and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll put myself right in the mix here. I, I feel like the art of note taking and meetings has kinda died. I, like, I used to, you know, 25 years ago when I as a sales rep, I’d walk out of in a one hour meeting with five pages of notes. And now I walk out of a a a a a fi a one hour meeting and frequently I’ll have the date, the name of the meeting, the list of the attendees, and, and I got nothing. And maybe I’m using Word, maybe I’m using PowerPoint, maybe I’m using some other tool. But, but I don’t, I, it’s not just me. I, I’m watching other people go through this same thing. And I think we have, and I’m being super general saying we, but you know, you go from email, which always, always kind of sucked at, you know discerning threads cuz you could have one email about five topics and then it, it, it frac the conversation fractionalize and you can’t find anything.
And so people love Slack, they love teams cuz they’ve got threading, but we we’re still right back where you’re, you’re talking about, right? It’s like, okay, the, we, we might have a, a teams or a a a Slack thread topic on something, but this one document was an attachment versus this one sitting in a sono or click up versus SharePoint. And you got, and you’re still in version control hell and you spend all your time that you waste so much time trying to retrieve documents and, and find out, try to remember, okay, what was that meeting about? And then half the half the next staff meeting is recapping what happened. The last one. Yep. Never ran, but I’d like,
SONNENBERG:
Well I’m glad you brought it up because another starting point that’s a quick one that doesn’t involve any technology is how people run meetings. Meetings is probably one of the most, the biggest hidden costs inside companies and it’s quite quick to clean it up. But when you think about the cost of a meeting, right? Each per, when I see a meeting and I see there’s three people on my team, what’s going on in my head is, okay, this is an hour long meeting, this person makes X, this person makes y this person makes Z per hour. This is a $500 meeting right now, right? Yeah, yeah. When you start thinking about each meeting with a dollar value which most people don’t, don’t think about, but if, if you see a meeting with six people, like that’s almost guaranteed to be over a thousand dollars meeting, right? So
VANNOY:
Yeah.
SONNENBERG:
Are you getting the most outta that meeting? Is there proper pre-work? Are pe people documenting decisions, action items? Did the, did the meeting need to be as long as it was? Because if you could get the same done in 30 minutes versus an hour, but there was proper pre-work, you know, you’ve just saved a significant amount of time. Yeah. So, you know, I talk about this too in my book, like the, the four ways to reduce the cost of a meeting, right? Reducing the frequency, the length, the number of people or just canceling it. Yeah. And I think it’s one of the biggest hidden expenses and meeting in, in companies. I think that people are multitasking during meetings and also they’re so underwater and so drowning and work that just like, it’s quicker to send a text, you know, it’s, you know, how am I gonna get through all my emails?
So like most people are like getting through email and half paying attention and people aren’t note taking because that’s the way that they’re able to kind of do the meeting and not have to work 12 hours in a day. But what I found is there’s some best practices, and again, we have like a whole chapter on this in the book, but another thing people don’t think about is it’s not, this stuff isn’t just about saving time, it’s about optimizing time. If you think about every time slot on a calendar, they’re not all worth the same. So let’s just say for example, you make a hundred thousand dollars a year, divide that by 2000 hours roughly of work hours in a year, that’s $50 an hour. Well when you look at your calendar and you see 9:00 AM on a Monday, 10:00 AM on a Monday, 11:00 AM et cetera, not all time slots are worth $50 an hour to you, right?
It’s, it’s more like a heat map, like maybe 9:00 AM on a Monday after you’ve had a refreshing weekend and you woke up and you whatever you do in the morning, you work out, you journal, you meditate, whatever you had your cup of coffee, your brain maybe at 9:00 AM on a Monday is at a full horsepower. Like maybe what you can accomplish in that one hour time slot is the equivalent of five hours, you know on a Friday when your brain’s a bit dead from the week. Yeah. So it’s not just about saving time, it’s also aligning on optimizing time, predicting the horsepower of your brain and your energy levels at different times. And you know, so maybe that is worth $500 an hour to you and maybe seven o’clock on a Friday is worth $10 an hour to you. And so if you can free up 30 minutes of a call at 9:00 AM on a Monday instead of an hour meeting, maybe if you can reduce it to 30 minutes. But what you’ve done is anything that was a report out where people wanted to share screen and show you the Salesforce sales numbers. If you have them record a video like using tools like Loom and send it to you and you can watch it in the back of an Uber when you’re doing nothing, you could rewind it, you could watch it at one and a half X speed and you’re able to free up those really, really, really valuable time slots. That’s a huge productivity gain that most people aren’t taking advantage of.
VANNOY:
And we can go further down this rabbit hole if you want, but it just, it gets me thinking about I like your heat map metaphor. When you, when you’re an executive whether a small or large company and, and forget, forget executive for anybody cuz everybody, everyone’s drowning as you say. I do agree with that. Most people feel that. It’s a lot about energy management, right? You know, so yep. Some of the folks on my team are, are sdr, sales development reps. In, in my conversations with them, it’s like, okay, you can’t make 200 dials all day long and just keep grinding at the same energy. I would much rather see you, right? You know, look yourself in the mirror, give yourself that pep talk, slap yourself cross face, take that sniff of ammonia like the old weightlifters and the seventies. I mean, get yourself amped and then grind for an hour and you it’s unbelievable what you with super focused high energy work for one or two hours can do and then take a break, walk around the block, get a cup of coffee, meet with somebody, do some of the low brain, low energy work, like maybe attend a meeting, right? But you manage your time and you’re managing your energy in the process.
SONNENBERG:
Totally right? And that’s why shifting a lot of things from synchronous to asynchronous where you could wa you could go for a walk around the park and watch a video or listening to an audio recording and kind of kill two birds with one stone, right? Oh, I’ve been sitting in this room for a long time. I need to go and get some sun. Well, if I can go and listen to a five minute recording that you gave me about something that you wanna brainstorm, well I, you know, I, I can listen to you while I’m walking around the park on my own time. And now when we do talk live and I’m eating up your precious live time, we’ve already skipped the first five minutes and we’re just going straight to the good stuff. And so totally, it’s, it’s not just saving time, it’s, it’s optimizing time and you know, really thinking through how do you best utilize it.
VANNOY:
Nick, I’m looking at the clock. May maybe maybe just one topic here to to, to wrap on it. And it’s, it’s something that you started with the, this, this notion of culture. So I think we talked a lot about, you know, we’re rattle off a lot of, a lot of tools and we’re not, we’re not, no, no, nobody here is getting commissioned from a or a click up or Monday or sugar or HubSpot or Salesforce. There’s just obviously a million collaborative collaboration tools out there. You know, the famous Peter Drucker line culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? What, what is it about improving these processes that specifically help drive culture?
SONNENBERG:
Oh, it’s a good question. Well, just also full disclosure, we do have partnerships with a handful of these tools, but I do always say it’s not about the tool. It’s knowing when and how to use it. So if some, if you’re listening right now and you’re using Monday or click up, you know, we’re partners with Asana, but that’s totally fine. Like, I’m not saying tomorrow like you’re not gonna be successful. The most important thing though is people need to know I what’s the purpose of click up or Monday and when, when should you use it and use it, right? There’s just, most of these tools are within five to 10% of, of a feature parody and it’s a bit of a different ui. That’s all. In terms of culture eat strategy, I think this is kind of similar to what I was saying earlier, which was about, it’s not just like what you do, but how you do it.
I think that being agile and how you collaborate, and that ties to me into the culture of the team, you know, is more important than what you do, which is kind of related to what he’s calling strategy, right? Because things could change, et cetera. But if you have a good culture and that culture is such that people are focused on what’s best for the company and not just individual based, you know, and something I talk about too is how individual productivity is necessary but not sufficient for a team to be productive. It requires collaboration, coordination. Sometimes people need to sacrifice their own productivity for the greater good of the team. And so having that be part of your culture where people are able to make better decisions, where a better decision is a higher quality and faster decision. And again, high performance and the culture of having teams work on things that give them joy or tap into their unique ability.
I think at that point the strategy can shift, you know, external forces in the economy can happen, but if you’ve got that nailed, no matter what happens, you’re gonna be fi you’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna be able to pivot. Like I joke all the time today, leverage does operational efficiency consulting and training. If next week we wanted to sell lemonade, like we would be able to crush it selling lemonade just because we’re all speaking the same language. It’s like a well oiled machine. So yeah, we would’ve to go and figure out how do you package, distribute all that stuff and do some of the general marketing, but we would be so much further ahead than any random person wanting to launch a new company because of our culture, because of how we work and how we communicate and collaborate with each other. So I, I definitely think it’s all important.
You, I’m not trying to say anything bad about strategy, you definitely need that too. But imagine if you can, you know, move in the right direction and move in that right direction even faster. And it’s not just about that, it’s also part of the culture needs to be thinking about your risks and avoid moving backwards. And so I would say you need strategy to move in the right direction and you need efficiency both to move faster in that direction, but also part of the benefits of efficiency is reducing risk or risk could be in multiple forms. A big risk is a person leaving and they leave with all this knowledge in their head. If you can avoid the setbacks, that’s also a really interesting strategy of moving faster forward. Cuz a lot of people are moving fast at a good speed and it’s just that inevitable hiccup, like for me, a business partner leaving that, you know, stuff happens and if you can avoid the impact, the downside impact of those, you know, blindsided moments, you know, that’s huge too. So that’s, I hope that answers your question, but yeah, you, you need to have it does both of it.
VANNOY:
Yeah. And, and I’m listening to you, I’m thinking it, I almost like this idea of the efficiency gained isn’t just to do more, it’s to move faster, right? You know, there’s an old sa saying in sales if you’re gonna lose lose early, right? And so an efficient sales process has a good qualification process that you don’t waste a bunch of time chasing ghosts per, per se, right? Same thing with a business strategy. Hey, we experimented with something. If we are super efficient at it, we might learn that that was a terrible strategy, a heck of a lot fa faster and not waste a bunch of time. Or if we have a a, a new strategy that if we’re super efficient, we’re gonna, we’re gonna learn that was the right thing to do sooner and we can double down and give more resources and it’s like an acceleration curve, right?
SONNENBERG:
Yep. Totally.
VANNOY:
Okay. loved our conversation and I know we’re, we’re, we’re about at time here, Nick. I would highly encourage everybody to check out Nick’s book, same name as our webinar today, how teams can leverage systems and tools to stop drowning and work. I think February 7th is the launch date. I know that I’ll be I’m already on the waiting list to download on Audible. I’m I, I I thank you. I listened to my books and I listened to your previous one I idea to execution. I would recommend that to folks as well. I know it’s about a previous business model, but just full with super, super tactical practical ways to automate processes and stuff.
SONNENBERG:
So I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll end it with this. So my, my current book come Up for Error. I’ve spent on and off four years on it you know, tons of time. I don’t even know, like probably somewhere between 1,002 thousand hours. I mean, I really put Blood, sweat and tears into this book and, you know, we we’re with a traditional publisher, Harper Collins on my first book. It was self-published and I, it did reasonably well for the amount of time I spent, I spent 25 hours on that book and I, people seem to, the process of writing that book is an interesting story. So each chapter is a month of, you know, the, how I first started leverage. And so when I would go on a walk, I would brain dump into an app called Dropbox with a B with a V what I worked on that day that would automatically get sent to a Dropbox folder and tag a copywriter who would listen to it, summarize it, and put it into Evernote.
And so after about nine months I had this massive Evernote file. We hired a third party book writing firm called Scribe, who I gave that Evernote to, interviewed me for, you know, about 15 or so hours. Got me a rough draft, I stuck it in Google Doc in suggestion mode. I announced on a, on my podcast who would like to be a beta reader. I crowdsourced in suggestion mode 12 beta readers that raised their hand. And then after I got all 12 to give suggestions, I then read the book and did the final edits. And so you could literally, I say that not to brag, I say it that everything is a process and right, you should challenge back to what we talked about earlier. You should cha challenge the status quo just because you think a book needs to be written in a certain way.
It doesn’t necessarily need to, just because you’ve done onboarding and offboarding and hiring in a certain way, it doesn’t mean that that’s optimal. So I’d always be looking for a better way. Celebrate the small wins. And I’ll leave you with this example too. We talked about retrieval versus transfer. This, these core concepts that we’ve just spent the last hour talking about, a lot of them you’re already doing in your personal life. When you do your laundry, the fastest way to be finished is you take everything out of the dryer and you throw it into one drawer. But you don’t do that. You separate, you spend the extra time and you separate your socks in a drawer, your underwear in another drawer, your shirt’s in another drawer. And you do that not because it’s the fastest way to transfer your laundry from the dryer to your chest of drawers, but you do that because tomorrow when you need to put an outfit together, it’s faster to retrieve the clothing that you’re looking for. And so you’re already thinking about retrieval versus transfer and personal life in some of these very basic examples. I’m just encouraging people and what my book is all about is how do you extend that mindset to all the different aspects of collaboration and team productivity.
VANNOY:
I love, I love that example Dick. It’s a real pleasure meeting you and I’m sure our audience has got a lot of value of today’s conversation and encourage them to check out the book. We’ll put a link in the, in the show notes,
SONNENBERG:
Okay? Yeah. And, and also we have a lot of free bonus material and resources on come up for air.com. That right. You should check out as well, cuz I mean the book, the book is packed with information, but we have a ton of additional stuff there too that you should go and check out for free.
VANNOY:
All right. Appreciate it Nick. Everyone else appreciate you joining us today. Until next week, have a good one and we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks.