PodCrash with Matt Ebert
PodCrash with Matt Ebert
Why You’re Always Busy But Getting Nothing Done with Nick Sonnenberg
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I'm Matt Ebert. I turned one collision repair shop into a multi-billion dollar business called Crash Campbell. Now I'm sitting down with people who have also built great things so you can build something of your own.
SPEAKER_00Alright, Matt, we have another guest that is going to crash the pod today. Our listeners are going to learn a lot as our guest today is Nick Sonnenberg. So Nick, he's the founder and CEO of Leverage, and it's all about efficiency and how to run better at scale without any chaos.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a great conversation because there's one thing to work hard, but by looking at some of the things that you have to do in business, what Nick concentrate on is a little bit of working smarter, not harder. So combine smarter with hard work and you get some amazing results. It's a great conversation.
SPEAKER_00You also get a chess boxing champion. Apparently, he's a chess boxing champion.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he is though. We had to look it up, right? Because I know I never heard of chess boxing before. So I actually asked him about it in the interview. It's great. It's it's literally what it sounds like. You play chess and then you fight. Little bit of chess, a little bit of boxing. Who wouldn't think of them as a great combination, right? So yeah.
SPEAKER_00All right, let's get this fight on then.
SPEAKER_01All right, everyone. This is Podcrash. How'd you get into the business that you're in?
SPEAKER_02I'm a mathematician by background, and I was a financial engineer for a long time. So I when I got out of grad school, I was a high frequency trader on Wall Street. So building algorithms, coding computers to trade stocks at you know nanosecond, microsecond speeds purely based off of math, fully automated, using a bunch of AI stuff, you know, 20 plus years ago.
SPEAKER_01Okay. And so and the speed would give you the advantage to make money, I take it.
SPEAKER_02Well, you needed everything, right? Like you couldn't just have good math but be slow. Um, and you couldn't, you know, just be fast, but with bad, you needed to be be good at everything. Uh and it really taught me how to look micro at things and celebrate small wins, you know, like literally a a millisecond, a microsecond could could be massive in terms of performance changes. So we were always just trying to optimize even the smallest thing, okay, whether it's production stuff or you know, analysis, you know, like how so I I've been programmed through you know my early career to no pun intended than programmed, to look at things from a certain lens. So when I got out of finance and I got into you know building startups and my current startup, I applied that way of thinking. And you know, I've always been interested in productivity. Uh, even before finance, I was always interested in just being efficient and you know, how do you find the most clever shortcuts to get somewhere? Like in college, I graduated in three years, not because I'm a genius, but I was strategic with how I mapped out which courses I should take that would tick off the most elections in one course. And so the first week of school kind of mapped out the game plan and and I partied my my ass off. I had a I got good grades and I graduated early because I was able to kind of be be clever with it. So I've always been interested in that. So when I got into startups after high frequency trading, there were it's always been in the productivity space. And I I it didn't start off doing what I do now, which is you know, running. Well, I have a couple things, but one the main one is I run a firm called Leverage and we consult organizations. Now a lot of it's to do with AI and automation, but just in general, how do you run an efficient organization? So, you know, to get there, there that's a longer story, but it's always been in the productivity time-saving space. And, you know, funny enough, even though it's very different than high frequency trading, a lot of the, you know, thinking uh process that I've developed through those years, it's been it, it's kind of given me a unique vantage point and way of looking at process that I think uh when when I look at other, when I meet with other process experts or consultants, we tend to look very differently at problems. And I think it's because of this unique background.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm gonna love this conversation because I've spent a lot of my life wishing I had more hours in the day, which can never happen, right? And so you've tackled it a different way, basically, and figured out how to get more out of the hours that you have.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's how to get more hours back, it's how to optimize the hours that you've got, you know, and um yeah, you can go bankrupt and but make back your money, but when you lose time, you're never getting it back. So it's really the most scarce resource. And I'm sure a lot of listeners right now have heard different variations of that, but it's really true. And um, you know, you only live once, potentially, uh, depending on your religious beliefs, but you should really just take advantage and live, assuming that it's you got one life and you want to, you know, do things that give you joy or take advantage of what you're best at. And anything that is energy draining, that isn't high value type of work, you know, how can you figure out ways to get rid of it? And there's a lot of strategies to implement. You might hire an offshore assistant, maybe you can automate certain things, maybe you can use AI now. Depending on what the issue is, there's different strategies that you might be able to implement. And different things might be easier to fix than others. So kind of back to finance, you've probably heard of return on investment. Yeah. I like to look at things that is return on time. So how long is it going to, how much time can you save over the course of a year if we fix this thing compared to how long is it gonna take to fix it? And then you know, my specialty is really organizational level. So multiply that by the number of people that will benefit from fixing that thing and their time savings and you know, look at the cost and aggregate annualized across across your entire team. I think oftentimes people might overlook something because it only might save 10 minutes, but they're they're forgetting that it's, you know, if it's 10 minutes a day, by the end of the week, it's around an hour or like four hours a month, or you know, roughly 50 hours a year. If you're a team of 20, that's a thousand man hours a year, that 10 minute time savings. And so if you don't look at it from the the right lens, you might completely dismiss that fixing that thing could be valuable to you. And if it only takes you an hour to fix that thing, and now your company is gonna save a thousand hours over the course of a year, you know, what other investment are you gonna get a thousand to one ratio on?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so my company, you know, 11,000 employees. If we could find an hour every week, the math on that is enormous, right? Yeah, huge. So in the origin, you know, you left the the finance world, started your own company. Um, you you started with a partner, I believe, from the story that I know, right? Um, and that that kind of broke up pretty quickly. How long, how long did you have the partner, and maybe you could tell us that story?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, not to go into too deep too much detail, but it lasted around two years. And at the beginning, it was great. You know, the typical, he was my best, you know, we were best friends. And, you know, partners are hard in general. You know, doing business with friends, doing business with family comes with risk, right? And uh, you know, this one didn't work out for a variety of reasons, but when it was good, it was great because being an entrepreneur, it's lonely if you're by yourself. And having someone that you could share the highs and the lows with uh can be super beneficial. So like I've I've missed having a collaborator. Now, it wasn't the right fit. So I'm it's better to, you know, better to be solo than with a wrong fit. But yeah, I I mean, if I could go back and kind of give my self-advice, I think laying out, you know, thinking before you just jump into something with someone, kind of really laying out expectations and personal and professional goals, uh, I think is a valuable exercise. And it's so easy to just jump into stuff without you know thinking through scenarios and spending a little bit of that as a general principle, whether you're coding, whether you're doing a you know some some big project, I oftentimes just slowing down at the beginning to think things through properly gets you to the end, oftentimes, you know, exponentially faster. But yeah, you're busy, you don't have who has the time to sit down and do that stuff, let's just get going. So oftentimes, you know, that upfront investment is a really good investment.
SPEAKER_01So being an entrepreneur is usually a hard thing. It it was for me, took a lot of years to get get somewhere. Um, what was going really well for you uh at first and and then what challenges were you facing um early years?
SPEAKER_02So at the very beginning, what worked well was, you know, all these different I got super interested with not the final product of the company. I was always more interested with, you know, what's the best way to operate a company? You know, like how do you build the best mousetrap? And over 10 years ago, I started the company now. And this is leverage we're talking about, right? Yeah, we're talking about leverage. And so, you know, we're talking like say 11 years back, some of these tools that maybe now are common names, like Slack or Zapier, some of these tools, no one really had heard of it. So we it was super exciting to be at the forefront of uh looking at these tools and uh figuring out the right way of using these brand new tools because there's no playbook for these things, and there's also flexible, there's more ways to use them wrong than right. So I really got obsessed with and I really saw that if you do invest the time to use them right, it can really create a meaningful change to the business. Um so what went well for us was we identified some some target audiences that we also had kind of our foot in the door to get in front of.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02And so we had from the beginning like a really, really good pipeline of where to get customers, and we had a really compelling offer. Um at the beginning, it wasn't consulting services, it was virtual assistant services. Okay. Um, and we were behind the scenes using a lot of these tools.
SPEAKER_01But customers out of the gate is a great thing. So DevChecks a bit.
SPEAKER_02You know, you're you're getting new people in, but then they're walking out the door because you're not delivering on the promise, you know. So the problem we had was we had too many customers and we were growing too quickly, and we never had the time to build the right processes. So, you know, as good as we were at marketing and getting clients, you know, we we had issues and holes in the delivery part of the business. So the the issue that we faced in the end was we were growing 20% a month new customers, but we were losing 15% every month.
SPEAKER_01Because you shouldn't service them.
SPEAKER_02And to make matters worse, my former business partner was the face of the company, and I was the behind-the-scenes guy. So when he left, like literally no one knew who I was. Like out of 150 team members, maybe three knew who I was and maybe three customers. So, you know, when when he left, the 20% went to zero, and I'm left with a 15% churn business. So you can do the math, you know, how long that's gonna last until you know you go bankrupt.
SPEAKER_01So you probably found yourself drowning in work a little bit, um, which you you've said is not really a motivation problem, but it's a a system problem. So uh is is that what you had to go to work on then your systems in order to grow the company?
SPEAKER_02When he left, I mean I was always systems-oriented in thinking, but when he left, it really was like a gun to my head, I had to figure something out. And by the end of the day, you know, you can you can only work, you know, 12, 14, 16 hours in a day, and then you need some rest because at a certain point, you're too tired, you're not even, you know, you're just making mistakes. And so the issue I had was, you know, the house was on fire. And, you know, if the house is on fire, you got to put the fire out. You can't, you know, work on fixing that process or that foundational thing because you gotta, you know, deal with this client that's complaining or issue this refund or, you know, this other. So it was it it's a challenge. It's like when you're completely out of capacity, and it's like the feeling of being in a tight box with no wiggle room. And then you, you know, you have to figure out how to make things work, but you have no no capacity. So one day I was in Portugal, uh, this was like 2017, and I would it was like one of those days where I'd worked 16 hours, I was exhausted, and I was like, this isn't sustainable, nothing's gonna get fixed if all day long I'm just putting out fires. And it wasn't rocket science, what some of the things to fix. I just didn't have the capacity to do it. Okay. Oftentimes more capacity is all you need to kind of get, you know, to achieve the goals that you need. You know, if if you think do you is it really that you don't know what to do, or is it, you know, it might be might be a bit of both, but oftentimes I think people have somewhat of a decent idea of what they need to be doing. It's really just they're at full capacity. And if you could give them back a few hours a day, uh it would make a it'd be the night and day difference, right?
SPEAKER_01So um I'm I'm curious, Nick, if I could could, because when you're consulting or helping people, you have to kind of get them to think a little differently, it's it seems, because um this is a little bit of a different mindset of maybe easy say phrases work smarter, not harder, harder. But I you know, I see it all day long where people are working extremely hard but not getting any results. Um, and what really matters uh in in my business is the results more than it, you know, I recommend the effort, but if you can't get results, then all that effort is is a shame. Um so how do you how do you help people think about things the way it seems to come naturally to you? But from what I can see, a lot of people put their head down, work harder, but don't necessarily get anywhere.
SPEAKER_02Well, it starts with what I was saying before, which is I sat down and I did like a time audit of where's the leak in this bucket. So that's when we when we start with clients, we do that that audit. And it was through that process of me really trying to break down what are the buckets where time is leaking that allowed me to kind of have this like breakthrough, which ended up being like the main framework in my in my book. Um and so when I sit with a client, we start with a time audit so that we can get visibility and then everyone can kind of just see black and white what the issue is, you know. And I so I have about a dozen or so different uh places that are the common places where time is getting sucked. And so we'll go through as a group, fill out a Google sheet, go through it, make sure everyone did it right. And then that usually brings enough awareness both to themselves, but also to their boss, where pretty much every time I do that audit, they're at their time is fully utilized just on keeping the lights on. You know, when email, pre-existing meetings, how much time they spend in Microsoft Teams, Slack, when you add it all up, it's usually pretty close to 40 hours a week. And so, you know, when the results aren't happening, it's most of the time the results are not those things. Like you don't achieve the results by doing more email and Slack, it's by sitting down and having some focused time to work on that key initiative.
SPEAKER_01Is this like a literal audit, Nick, or are people estimating in estimating okay?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Like it doesn't have to be, you know, even if each thing is off by, you know, whatever percentage, it doesn't really matter. It's it's the thinking process to really highlight that there's this problem here. Because to have any transformation, it requires behavior change, which is always hard. So you have to you have to really hit them over the head with with black and white visibility that there's this problem, and you're spending all this time in these places that isn't probably adding that much value to the company. And you probably don't love, you know, spending five hours a day in email. Right. And so then once we do that and we see where the biggest leaks in the bucket are, you know, then we start prioritizing what to fix first. And we're looking through that lens I mentioned before of return on time. So, you know, maybe some leaks are really hard. It's gonna take, you know, we have some clients where they've got huge leaks and it's gonna take months to fix because they've got like databases from 1990s and they need to get onto a CRM, and that's a big lift. Sometimes, though, you know, people are spending four hours a day in email, and we've got great one of our most popular things that we've done is come up with a framework to get to inbox zero and use Outlook and Gmail properly, and you miss no emails and you process them way faster. So if you could quickly get from four hours a day to two hours a day, that's a quick 10 hours a week back that you give someone.
SPEAKER_01So isn't there an easy tip you give on email? Um, or is it completely gotta completely relearn and rethink the way we use it?
SPEAKER_02It's a relearning, you know. The the good thing with email is it's probably the most common place where time is sucked and easy to get back. Um, you know, not every company uses Asana or Slack or those tools. Everyone's got Outlook or Gmail pretty much if they're doing business. So the benefit is it's probably in general, 99% of the time, the starting point to save time, get back capacity, and then you could reinvest that time elsewhere. The but the challenge with email is you've been using it incorrectly for 30 years, and you've got your own, you know, methodology that you think works. So you have to kind of uh teach people to unlearn stuff and you have to show them a better way so they're not so stuck on their folder process or their mark unread process that they think is fantastic. Okay. So I gotta, I gotta show them why that sucks. Which there's depending on you know the person, there's resistance. But a hundred percent of the time we've been successful and eventually showing them, you know, this new way of dealing with it. And at the end of the day, I'll, you know, we we I could talk to you for hours about email, but think about your email as an external to-do list that other people can add to. And just like you want to get through your to-do list, you want to get through your email. And regardless if it's unread or read, your eye is still processing it. So you you just want that inbox, that inbox slash task list to get, you know, as small and manageable as possible. So you're not wasting time scrolling and looking and searching. Like the a huge invisible slippage in your day-to-day is the scavenger hunt, as I describe in my book, which is, you know, was where's that email? Where was that message? Is that in a text, an email, or whatever? And there's no stop clock next to you to tell you how many seconds you've wasted searching. But at the end of the day, if everything is like instant that you want and you can get it at your fingertips, and you don't waste a minute here, five minutes here searching for things, that's a huge invisible slippage that's happening right now in your workflow that is adding up to hours and hours and hours.
SPEAKER_01So you help individuals and companies lay it out in a way they can easily find it when they're going back to find it.
SPEAKER_02At the end of the day, like my core principle, if I had to summarize my book and philosophy, is to be a high-performing organization, you have to totally change the mindset. And right now, the mindset in basically every organization is people are just trying to transfer information as fast as possible. It's like hot potatoes. It's like, hey Matt, take it. And everyone's just optimizing for themselves to get it off their plate and give to someone else without worrying about, you know, where where it's being put. But if you completely change if and flip the mentality, instead of being a culture of optimizing to send, but rather be a culture of optimizing to find information, and then everyone, it's a complete different mindset, right? And you know, if it's six o'clock and you want to get home to your wife and kids and have dinner, it, you know, it might take you 10 seconds to put it in the Asana project versus a text, but that extra 10 seconds might save your colleague 10 minutes to find something. And then what goes around comes around. So if they're spending the extra 10 seconds to put it where it belongs, it's gonna save you 10 minutes. So if everyone can kind of get behind this mindset of, hey, we're gonna optimize as a collective and just, you know, we'll we'll each invest a little bit, put things where it belongs. So it's easier for all of us to work together. It's like your laundry. When you do your laundry, the fastest way to finish, you could take it out of the dryer and throw it in one drawer. But rather, you're better off of most people invest the time, you know, back to finance. You can spend and invest. You invest the time to stick your socks in one drawer, your underwear in another drawer. And you do that not because it's the fastest way to do your laundry, but tomorrow when you need an outfit, it's faster to find what you're looking for. And so it's the same thing in business. You got all these drawers, and it's a shared chest of drawers with not eight drawers, but like 80 drawers. And people just need to align on what this chest of drawers looks like and all mutually commit to trying to keep that chest of drawers as organized as possible so everyone can save time looking for what they need.
SPEAKER_01That makes sense. What a great illustration. Can't get more practical than that. Um, you've mentioned a couple of times your book, um, which has come up for air, great book, by the way. Uh in that book, you talk about a CPR framework. So um, how'd you land on that? And for those listening that haven't had a chance to read the book, how would you describe it?
SPEAKER_02So when I was in that hotel in Portugal and I was doing my own time audit, I broke down where my time was getting sucked into these three buckets. And the biggest time suck was in the communication bucket. Okay. So what I threw what I threw into communication was, you know, text, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, the amount of time, you know, and again, it was extreme, but you know, having a co-founder leave, and now I've got 500 clients and 150 contractors all, you know, all coming to me, there was an influx in communication. And so by the time I responded to everyone, like the day was pretty much shot. Okay. So that was that was kind of the first high-level issue. And then obviously there's sub buckets. So the first bucket was communication. So that's the C of CPR. The CPR is a holistic framework. They all of these things work together. So P is for planning. And I couldn't click a button and know basic questions like what did this person do today? What did they do last week? What's, you know, what are they working on right now? What's the status of this client's project? You know, basic things of transparency and being able to hold people accountable. I wanted to be able to just click a button and be able to answer these questions. And because I didn't have a system where I could just click a button to answer those questions, it reinforced the issue back on the C part because in order for me to answer those questions, I had to go and communicate with someone to ask them instead of just clicking a button and having the visibility because it's in a system. So by not having the P part solved, it was causing a huge part of the C problem of communication. So that's how I kind of figured out the planning part. And then the resources is all of the company knowledge, your standard operating procedures, your processes, you know, where where have you documented how you onboard a client, offboard a team member, do payroll. This one I was good at. Had I not have invested in that, and my, you know, my partner left and I didn't have stuff documented, I was as close to bankruptcy as possible. And that would have definitely been the straw that broke the camel's back. And now with AI and being able to build custom GPTs and stuff, there's a there's a lot of cool things you could do on the resources side of things. But anyway, I broken into these three buckets and things started immediately turning around for me. And then word got out about, you know, how I'm operating my business. And, you know, I before I know it, you know, Tony Robbins is reaching out to me, or, you know, Ethereum, the cryptocurrency. And, you know, at that point I was running a freelancer marketplace, but these people were asking me to go and take a look at how they operated. And it was very early days with you know the this CPR framework, but it was just it, it was just as helpful for them as it was for me. And that was kind of the light bulb moment for me where I started realizing, hey, this is not just a, you know, hey, this is helpful for a young startup. This is helpful for a big company, a small company, a cryptocurrency company. And and the the light bulb went off that, hey, the real opportunity is help organizations on being more efficient and leveraging all of these new technologies and smart ways. Because just because you've heard of a tool doesn't mean that you know how to use it, when to use it, you're getting value. If if you don't roll out a tool properly and train your team on when and how to use it, oftentimes it's just another place to look and you know could hurt your productivity more than help. So that's the genesis of CPR. And that was the light bulb. After a few clients, that was the light bulb moment where I pivoted and shifted towards a consulting company and then just did more and more client engagements and then you know, just realized that I got a book here uh after enough, you know, after thousands of clients seeing it, how it helped them, uh, you know, a bunch of people were just saying, encouraging me, hey, why when when's your book coming out on this? So that was kind of what lit that fire.
SPEAKER_01I I think it's great. So if you talk into a company, what if they're a hot mess? What if all three are broken? Um, is there one that you attack first, or you gotta do all three equally?
SPEAKER_02No, you're you're better off in general, focusing on one thing at a time because oftentimes, you know, as a general statement, you don't get benefit from fixing 10% of a problem. Like usually you gotta fix the problem to get the benefit. So if you are simultaneously trying to fix multiple things, that return on time that we were talking about is not gonna be as high as it could be because you're delaying the amount of time till you get benefit if you're trying to do too many things. So what we really gotta, what we really do is you know, what's the first thing that in the shortest period of time is gonna yield the most amount of capacity increase? Great. We we focus just on that. And then once you get that breathing room, and again, every company is different. You know, sometimes off the oftentimes it's email, but sometimes it's not. And you know, so it's better to do one thing at a time and do it in a strategic order. And there's not like a one size fits all. We've most companies are broken in all three.
SPEAKER_01You talk about um no sort of no source of truth being dangerous for for companies. Um why is it such a danger? What does that look like in a in a day-to-day company when when it's not right?
SPEAKER_02Well, a couple of things, right? Back back to how this is holistic, if you don't have a source of truth, another thing that causes a lot of communication noise is people asking questions, right? If I were to ask you, like, hey, how much do we charge for this widget, like that's wasting the both people's time in that communication circle when it doesn't need to even be it shouldn't even have to be communicated on. If you have one place to look, you're gonna get consistent answers. You're gonna save you're gonna save all the wasted time of bothering someone. And it's not just the five seconds to answer the question. It's, you know, if you're in a flow state and you get taken out of a flow state, it takes on average like 13 minutes to get back into a flow state. So um it's time savings and energy savings. It's you get a faster response. Like now with AI, you can integrate so much of your company's knowledge directly into these platforms that in five seconds I get an answer. If I, if we work together and you're busy, it might take you the whole day to answer me. Versus now I could get an answer in five seconds. So I can get a accurate, official, consistent answer way faster without bothering you and pulling you out of your flow state.
SPEAKER_01That's the real number, how you lose 15 minutes stepping out of the zone, so to speak.
SPEAKER_02Well, that you know, Cal Newport wrote deep work. There's a lot of you know, flow state books. Um, not to mention, if that person leaves and all the knowledge is in their head, yeah, you could be in a bad spot.
SPEAKER_01Yep. Um can really appreciate that. So you mentioned at the beginning, um, taking a look at not just return, you know, everybody kind of talks about return on investment, but you mentioned return on time. So is that simply a prioritization of what's the most valuable thing I can do with my time today? Um, I speak of things, for example, on a to-do list, like most people will concentrate on the all the easy stuff and and the real like hard stuff that'll really move the needle, they never get to. Um so I kind of prioritize my time of like what's really going to move the needle, try to do that first instead of the simple tasks that everybody tries to to list and knock out so they feel like they're getting something done. Is that how you look at it, or do you have a different way of kind of looking at it?
SPEAKER_02Well, I'm looking at return on time from the lens of like the context of when I'm using return on time is um is prioritizing what behind the scenes operations initiatives we need to implement so that we free up capacity. It's not, hey, today what should Matt do? It's more, you know, here are all the problems in the company from an efficiency standpoint, and which ones should we tackle first? Okay. In terms of, you know, how do you kind of optimize your to-do list um and figure out what what you should do? There's this, there's art made science, everyone has kind of preferences, you know. For me, like as it relates to like scheduling, you know, I'll try to avoid having like huge holes in the calendar. So, you know, if Tuesday is going to be, you know, a day of meetings, I'll try as much as possible just to knock them out back to back versus you know, have one at 10 o'clock and then three hours later have another one. Cause then then it reduces my flexibility to to leave or do other appointments. So I'll try to, you know, a productivity principle is batching. So I try to batch as much as possible. Okay. And back to laundry. You don't do your laundry every time you uh have one pair of socks that's dirty. You know, so I I try to batch as much as possible. As it relates to um, you know, prioritization, sometimes I find it more productive. It depends on the impact of the easy things and um how long it's gonna take. Yeah, like the typical framework people use is the Eisenhower matrix of impact and effort. Um, if you got ADHD and uh you get overwhelmed if you've got too much stuff on your plate and there's like 50 things sitting staring at you on a task list and it becomes overwhelming. And if by reducing that overwhelm, it creates mental clarity, reduction of anxiety, and now you can go and do a better job on the hard stuff. You know, you can make an argument that if you fall into that bucket, you know, do that. But if you got a deadline with your most important client in three hours and you're not working on that because you're, you know, futzing around with small stuff. So you need a, at the end of the day, you need a system where you can trust that if you push something off, it's not gonna get lost and it's gonna come back. So when we teach email, one of the things is snoozing so that things leave and come back. When we teach tools like Asana, we show you how to set up automation so it can leave and come back. And so you you need to have systems where it's getting that clarity so you can reduce the length of that task list. The only strategy isn't to actually do the work. But if you can push it out and trust that it's gonna come back and you're not gonna lose it, you know, oftentimes the best thing is to push it out, trusting that you've got a system and you know when it's gonna come back and where to find it. But if you don't have that system and you've got a graveyard of tasks, and rather than your to-do list really being a to-do list, it's more of a reminder of everything you're not doing. You know, if it gets too big, it becomes useless, right? So you need to have a system to prioritize and push out and know that you'll find it again.
SPEAKER_01So it sounds like you think about things as like when a new task comes in, dropping everything to do it isn't the right thing to do, which I I've never done that either. Like it let me finish what I'm doing now, or or I'll I'll get to that in a minute. But where I see others just try to, they can't stand anything sitting there in the in their inbox, so to speak, and have to have to respond immediately. I find that very like you're never gonna be done anyway. So I have no problem like prioritizing and letting things sit. Totally. Totally.
SPEAKER_02Well, again, if you don't have the tools at your disposal of knowing how to push it out and trust it's gonna come back and you know your system sucks, and if you don't do it now, it's gonna get lost. Then, you know, sometimes you don't have a choice but to, you know, do low priority things. But that's why it's important to have a system. So then you can trust it's not gonna get lost and you can just focus on what's most important right now.
SPEAKER_01What are your thought processes on um, or maybe you don't have any, but how do you think about meetings, like reoccurring meetings, meetings before the meeting? Um, do you find reoccurring meetings are are are something that wastes a lot of time too, or do you not touch that space that much?
SPEAKER_02No, we do. When we do a time audit, meetings is one of the line items. It's you know one of the biggest percentages of where time's allocated over the course of a week. Look, I I think meetings are important, but like anything, it it's like a it's a tool. So you got to use it right. You know, email is a great tool, but you should use it right because if you don't, you might be wasting 10 hours a week. You know, meetings are a great tool, but you should do meetings right and maybe, you know. So when I say meetings right, it's being clear on an agenda, pre-work, you know, having the right people on there, capturing decisions and action items, right? Um a meeting really should be for back and forth discussion. If if someone's just like to right now, this is a back and forth discussion. It would have been pretty hard for me to pre-record my portion of this, send you a recording, and then you stick it in your podcast. Right. Right. So you know, so if someone is giving a presentation for 10 minutes to give get feedback on this new thing that they've done, that should be a pre-recorded video that gets sent out a few days before. People watch it on their own time. If you think about all the dead time you've got, you know, when you're on a walk or you're in the back of an Uber or these things, if you can fill those dead time time slots watching that video, well, now at a high value time slot, live on a meeting, instead of the meeting being an hour, maybe it could be 45 minutes. And again, it's not going to change your life one time, saving 15 minutes. But again, like think of everything annually across your team. You have you said 11,000 people. Yep. So over the course of a year, if every meeting you optimized by 15 minutes times the number of people times the number of meetings times over the course of a year, it's millions of dollars.
SPEAKER_01It's enormous. Uh we we've spent a lot of time trying to have less meetings, less reports, just concentrate on the numbers that matter, um, less emails. Um sometimes just send a few less emails, it makes your life a lot easier, too. Well, there's a boomerang effect. The more emails you send, the more you receive. Yep. So I want to run you through a a few scenarios and um maybe you could tell me where you start. So yeah, we're a service business, so we've got, you know, a front of shop, which basically handles all the administrative, the customer uh experience and and things like that. And then we have the the back of shop, which is where all the production takes place. Your framework is sounds like it's more beneficial to the administrative side. Is is that right?
SPEAKER_02Well, the whole, I mean, all sides, like salespeople write a lot of emails, you know. If it if they could process emails faster, you could argue almost that you know, the the salespeople, like it's for everyone. It's not just for an your admins. It's you know, every single role in a company is in meetings. They all communicate with, you know, some might communicate more with the outside world, some might communicate more with team members. You still want them to do that in the best way possible without wasting time searching for stuff. You know, your salesperson, you don't want them taking 15 minutes to prepare for a meeting when it could take one minute to prepare for a meeting.
SPEAKER_01Where do you find that chaos creeps in first, usually? Uh with what? With role or what with people's day, um, with with time.
SPEAKER_02You know, the top three things usually is email meetings and what I call scavenger hunt.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Yeah, you've mentioned all three of them already. And getting these in order, do you find it affects the stress level of the individuals? Does it help? Totally.
SPEAKER_02I mean, they're happier, you as the business owners happier. Because like, look, at the end of the day, you should be results oriented like you've are mentioned you are. But at the end of the day, if also the expectations of 40-hour work week, if people are wasting you know, 10 hours a week, maybe sometimes 20, especially now with AI, um, if you use that right, it it's it's even more time savings than what we're talking about right now. But if you could give someone back 10 hours a week and five hours of that they keep for themselves to, you know, spend more time with their family or study or learn a new skill. And the other five is put towards initiatives and projects, you're gonna get more output from the business uh as a business owner, and they're gonna be happier, they're gonna stay longer, you'll have more retention, they'll produce higher quality work if they're not as stressed.
SPEAKER_01So it's just it's it's a win for every role. How do you get past the whole open-minded and people don't like change? How do you get people to think differently across the company? Um do you find it where you can present it in a way where people are hungry for it, or or is it you have to push it?
SPEAKER_02It really depends on your culture. Um, and it also depends on you as the leader. So I I think for any change to happen, it can't be a do as I say, not as I do. It has to, you have to demonstrate these behaviors from the top because it's a bad look if you're telling everyone that they have to do something, but you're still, you know, text in or something. So the the leader has to be bought into and and be one of the you know championing uh this change. So it doesn't look like what I was just mentioning. Uh it also depends on the demographic of your of your people and you know the type of people that you're hiring for. And you know, maybe right now you've got people that aren't tech savvy that are you know allergic to these tools. But but if you know, if you're bought in as the business owner, this is important. Important, maybe you have core values and core principles. Efficiency, you know, if it's not there, maybe you start by putting it there. Maybe you identify some high-level company goals. Like, you know, if your team already knows what your revenue targets are, if this is important enough, set some targets for efficiency and let them know that it's on the same level as the revenue goals. Uh, you know, if you do performance reviews, have it part of the performance review conversation. If you are hiring people and you're looking for certain things, add some of these skill sets to what you look for for hiring new people, include it in your onboarding process. So before they even get started, and then they're too busy to find the time to learn this stuff, before they even start, you know, upskill them for a week. And then even though it's a week delay, that investment might double their productivity for the entire longevity of them being an employee with you.
SPEAKER_01This is obviously gonna take, even if it's minutes, it takes some time to get organized in a way to be more efficient. Just similar to, you know, if you train somebody to help you do something, you spend that time training them, they can help you for forever. But people still are so busy they won't take the you know, the the few minutes to stop and actually train somebody to gain the efficiency forever. How do you help with that? I don't know if it's a mindset or the way I see a lot of people operate, they just won't take the time to make it better in the long run. How do you overcome that? What do you have a trick around that, or is it just so practical to you that people just should get it?
SPEAKER_02Well, there's three parts to that, that answer. Um, yeah, the first is back to this return on time, you got to find the quick win. So if I can totally change your productivity in three hours, and now you have 10 hours a week back after a three-hour investment, you know, you're gonna get 500 hours for yourself back on three hours. It's a pretty big return. Right. So we got to find the three hours. Once we find the three hours and we deliver on it, and now you have that extra breathing room, you trust, you trust the process, and you have more capacity to do the next thing. So really it's all about how do we, you know, what's the first thing? How long is it gonna take? And how do we free up enough time to solve that that first thing? Because once you get past the first thing, it's you know, a lot easier sailing. So you know, the uh some of that is you know, you as the business owner, enforce it. Maybe if you're giving people individual goals, you lighten up a little bit of an individual goal that you have, but you add, you know, this efficiency stuff as another goal. Right. So your salesperson, your targets to do a million, hey, this quarter it's 900 grand. So we're we're making it easier for you to hit that. But what we want is instead of doing the million and you and the nine, now you're doing 900, we want you to um to add this other stuff. And then, you know, maybe the next quarter, you could give them 1.2 million target or 1. like who knows? Right. So it's you know, that's really at a high level the way of thinking about it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I asked, because uh I I really appreciate that. I because we face it in our company in a really practical way, in that um there's not enough auto collision technicians in the world today. So we need to train and mentor and convincing guys, even though they make more money with the mentors, and we can show they can be more productive if they take the time and teach somebody else, it's tough to convince them to want to do it. Um a lot of times they don't want it to slow them down, so to speak.
SPEAKER_02Well, are they commissioned?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So we we we try to make up for the gap with and and reward them for doing so, but but still they feel it's gonna be a tremendous strain on their time. Um it's a little it's a tougher sell than than you might think.
SPEAKER_02Um I don't know, sound sounds like a bigger conversation, but I would I would want to know, I guess, from the mindset of these people, um what's the return on investment that they're calculating by doing it versus not doing it? So, you know, are they thinking, is it a harder sell because they think the mentoring is gonna take hundreds of hours and what you're making up when you divide it by, you know, say you make up, I'm just gonna make, I'm just gonna put easy math numbers. Say you give them a thousand dollars to do it, but they think it's gonna be a hundred hours of their time. In their mind, they're making 10 bucks an hour versus uh maybe they're making a hundred an hour doing the sales or commission stuff. So I I think it would start, that's where I would start looking at this, which is what is the hourly rate that they're calculating or maybe subconsciously calculating on the mentorship, unless they just hate mentoring and like maybe they do the calculation, it's like, yeah, I know it's a better hourly rate. I just absolutely hate mentoring people. That's different. That's a different conversation. But if it's if they're if someone, which I would imagine is the case, if they're completely indifferent, and whether they're calling someone to sell them something or they're calling someone to teach them something, if they're indifferent between those two things, then it's purely a math problem of what the implied hourly rate is between those two things. And once you figure that out and you figure out what's eating the time, like I would figure out how do we make the mentoring more efficient. So do you have custom GPTs that you've built or things like that? Because like maybe a lot of the things that they're mentoring, if they're if it's just one off and they're not producing an asset out of it that's repeatable, it's gonna be negatively impacting their implied hourly rate. Very logical. If they but if they, if you give them a process where they can and you know, spend time build an asset, that asset could be in many different forms. One form could be an AI agent, right? Like you hire me, I'm a mentor, I've got a hundred mentees. You know, yeah, like my hourly rate could suck if I'm like doing the same thing every single time with a hundred. But if I invest the time to sit with the first one, figure out what we're doing, I record the call, I take the transcript, I break it out into standard operating procedures, I stick that into AI agents or custom GPTs. And then I just continually continuously enhance that. And then my mentees, instead of getting me for an hour, I'm just making up numbers, but you get the point, instead of getting me for an hour, they get my AI agent and they get me for 30 minutes. And then on the call, anything that the agent didn't produce a good thing with, we go over it. And then now I go back, I fix it. And now over time, maybe I can just keep producing those live components because I keep behind the scenes increasing my leverage by um making this asset better that is high leverage because all hundred people benefit from it and it's not linear with my time investment.
SPEAKER_01Good stuff. Yeah, appreciate you taking a couple minutes on that one. Here we're kind of running out of time, so I gotta make sure because uh in learning about you ahead of this interview, I saw um chess boxing as uh something that you were into, which I had never heard before. So did you see the YouTube video? I'll send it to you. Yeah, I checked that out because of it. But um, how did you get into that? How did you find that? And it's literally box one round, then play a round of chess, right? It's literally that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so you do a round of boxing and a round of speed chess back and forth until you checkmate the person or knock them out.
SPEAKER_01And one way or another, somebody's going down. I got it.
SPEAKER_02All right, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're losing someone's losing either physically or mentally. But um, if you're familiar with speed chess, you you've got time on a clock. In this case, it's if it's pretty fast chess. You each have four and a half minutes total to play your game. If you run out of time, that's considered a checkmate. And every time you make a move, you hit the clock, and then it's decrementing the clock on your opponent. So you start at four and a half, four and a half. You know, I make my first move. Now the guy's at 429, 428. So the longer you think, the less time left on your clock. So you have to be thinking fast. And then after three minutes of chess, you pause the clock, whatever the time is on each side. You pause the position, and then you go and beat the crap out of each other for a few minutes. And then if no one's knocked out, you go back and you keep playing chess, and you know, you've just been hit in the face and your heart rate's like 180, and you're, you know, a bit turned around and frazzled. And now you got to go and play fast chess and think quickly for another three minutes, and then go, you know, if no one's checkmated or runs out of time, you go back into the ring, and that's chess boxing.
SPEAKER_01Now I assume you were into both of them separately, and then finally together, or did you have to learn one of them?
SPEAKER_02So I love chess, and if I have any free time, I live in New York, I'll go and play with the hustlers in Washington Square Park. Okay. So, you know, I would say I I would have I I would say I have a chess background. Boxing, I lived in Asia for a bit. I got into tie kick boxing in New York for the last year. I've been going to boxing classes, but you know, we I would do pad work and bag work. I never actually done sparring or a fight. And as it turns out, that's very different. And, you know, when I said yes, I got, I was having dinner with a friend, and his brother was on team USA for chess boxing. And I was like, oh, that sounds cool. That's like two things that I'm interested in. Put me in touch. So I spoke, uh, his name's Barack, chatting about my background. He put me in touch with the coach of Team USA. This is like end of July, a few months ago. And not because I did a tryout or he saw any footage, but I just told him my background and he literally had no one in my weight class or age. So he's like, well, if you want to be on Team USA, um, happy to have you, and you can come to the world championships in Serbia in September. And it was just too random of a thing to say no to. So I spent, I said yes, and then I kind of put a team together and I started learning how to fight and started getting the crap kicked out of me every day. How'd you do it? Sparring. Uh, I won. So I'm I'm the world champion of uh chess boxing.
SPEAKER_01That is awesome. Two months later, three months later.
SPEAKER_02Look, it's all about efficiency. You know, I got the right team and I mapped it out, and yeah, you can apply efficiency to every aspect of life.
SPEAKER_01Great stuff. So, last question here. We always close this pod crash by uh, you know, we're all about championing people. And so if I before I let you go, if I were to ask you what one person or who's a person in your life, past or present, that you would want to champion right now, who would it be and why?
SPEAKER_02Hmm. I mean, I I got so many people. My my best friend Aaron Schiff has just had like three, about to have his fourth exit in 18 months. Um I got I'm I'm really blessed to have some amazing people in my life. You know, we met through Jay Abraham. Yeah, he's you know, he's in a uh collat. We have a podcast together, he's a mentor. Um uh John Levy just had a book come out. He's like one of the top people in the world with team performance and culture and trust in the workplace. Blake Eastman, my another close friend, has a a book uh coming out, and he's a nonverbal communication expert, great guy. So there's there's too many, too many people. But yeah, I I'm I'm grateful that I've got some super smart people close to me that I'm able to learn from. Nick, this time flew by.
SPEAKER_01Thanks so much for spending it with me. Oh, thanks for having me. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you want more podcast in your life, which of course you do, make sure to like, follow, and subscribe to us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Catch you next time.