Jasmine Star 00:00:00  Welcome to the Jasmine Star Show, where we talk about life, business, mindset and today we are going to talk about productivity, efficiency, communication, making hours and time in your day by not working harder but getting a heck of a lot more smarter and organized. I couldn't be more excited to invite to the show. Nick Sonnenberg, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Okay, so a little bit of a backstory. I want to bring everybody to how you and I ended up in this room. We met, goodness, maybe a couple of months ago through a program called vibe through Vayner. And so for people who don't know, it is a leadership and growth accelerator. And they would bring in guest speakers. So every week we get a guest speaker. And prior to this event, I don't know who you are, but I'm just there. I'm there to learn. I'm there to soak up. So prior to our meeting, they said, please fill out these three four questions survey for Nick to come in and talk to us about optimizing our inbox, what I think was referred to Inbox Zero.

Jasmine Star 00:00:54  So I go through these questions and then we start the conversation. And there was a few people in the room who like said, Oh, Nick, his system could potentially save me 60,000 hours a year. And I was like, what in the world? So for anybody who's drowning in inbox, like, why don't we just talk a little bit there?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:01:10  Well, look, everyone uses email. We've been using it for decades. Not everyone uses slack. Not everyone uses asana like all these tools. But what we found at leverage is like the first place that people should start is their email, because we all use it. We've never been taught how to use it, and it's a single player game. Basically. Like if the rest of your team doesn't follow the best practices, but you do, you get the full benefit versus take slack. If your team half of them are using it, half of them refuse to use it. You're not going to get the value right because then you have to start keeping track.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:01:41  Oh, Nick doesn't like slack. You have to email him. But Jessica likes it, so that's slack her. And then you, you know, what's the value of a cell phone? If you're the only person that owns a cell phone, it's like zero, right? Like you need people to respond to you. So email is a great starting point and usually in less than like an hour or two, we can completely change someone's life. And as it relates to how efficient they use email. And if you're getting more than 5000 emails every day, even if you process in each email a few seconds faster, like easy math, take 120 emails a day, even if that's an extra three seconds, you know, per email, right? It adds up very very very quickly. You know what I mean. Absolutely.

Jasmine Star 00:02:26  And time is the most precious commodity that we have. And part of what piqued my interest is I have a weird relationship with time. I became very aware of time when my mom became very ill.

Jasmine Star 00:02:36  She unbeknownst to us, she had brain cancer but started off with a lot of symptoms and over time she continued to be hospitalized. And then us realizing how finite time is, I thought to myself, if she doesn't make it, how am I going to start maximizing my time and availability for her? And so I think that early on, probably when I was like 24 or 25, I started looking at time very, very differently. Being very strict with it and started creating systems. Now I created ad hoc system systems that were just like, well, I think this is helping me. And when I heard you speak, I realized that the systems that we had been putting together were such a great start for where we were, but there's an opportunity for us to optimize those systems. So before we get there, I really want to bring everybody into the conversation and say, you are watching and you are listening, and there is something in your life or business that feels like it's taking too long. It feels like you're drowning.

Jasmine Star 00:03:31  Which is why when we talk about the CPR method with Nick, it's going to relieve us. It's going to put oxygen in areas that we desperately need help, but then find a way that is sustainable. So before we get into CPR, before we start telling people this is how we're going to change our life and business by getting organized on the front end, which is ultimately saving as time. I'm in an elevator with you four floors down. What do you tell me you do? Because you already made a reference to leverage. So I want to bring everybody up to speed.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:03:58  Well, I have a few things I do, but as it relates to the book and leverage, I'm an operational efficiency consultant and the CEO of leverage. We do operational efficiency training and consulting, so we help organizations and teams maximize their productivity by leveraging all these modern day systems and tools to their highest and best use. So that's like the very quick version. And then the next little bit after that would be in business.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:04:22  Everyone's got their own way of thinking about the purpose and everyone's got their own preference. So I might text you, then I might shoot Jessica an email. Then I'll go to this tool, that tool. And when everyone's got their own idea of when and how to use all these tools, it creates what I call in the book a scavenger hunt, where it takes longer to find what you're looking for than it does oftentimes just get the work done. And it's like speaking a new language. Like work has changed, especially in the last year with AI. But all these tools are brand new. It's like less than ten years old and no one's been taught when and how to, you know, best use these tools in the workplace. So that's what I'm passionate about. My my mission is to save millions and millions of hours of just wasted, unproductive, soul sucking, not interesting time so that people can have a better work experience, add more value both to themselves and to the business.

Jasmine Star 00:05:10  So there's two places I want to go.

Jasmine Star 00:05:11  I want to go to CPR. I also want to get into Origin Story. Where do you think is going to serve like listeners and watchers right now? The best? Do we go into CPR, sell the framework and say we're going to get to it with like real life examples of Jasmine? Or do we get into origin story CPR and then real life?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:05:23  I could do like the very quick origin story. Right. Because but it's.

Jasmine Star 00:05:27  Juicy. It is juicy. I mean, I don't want like the days of Our lives version, but like, I don't want you to like it's good. It's really get your teeth knocked out. Yeah. Take big risks. You're lucky to have a very fortunate family. I'm giving away too much. I'm just heating it up for you.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:05:42  Well, you know, after I got out of finance, I got into entrepreneurship. I've always been passionate about time. So after I got out of finance, I was building a productivity app. And then the first on.

Jasmine Star 00:05:52  Your own, self-funded with the team. What did that look like?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:05:54  I bootstrapped like I funded most of it, and then I did a small a friend and family round. And then who.

Jasmine Star 00:05:59  Is it for? I'm a storyteller. Like, I need to know the T like that.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:06:02  It was called Calvin. And it was it came out around the same time as Calendly. Do you know Calendly? I do, and it was in that space. And if you're familiar with like outlook, when you're within a company, you can see the free busy of people and there's, there's automations and things to make it easy to book times within a team. Yes. I was always thinking, why is it so difficult to do this in your social life? Okay, so on average for two people to find a time to meet, it takes 7.2 back and forth to find a common time. Yes. And it's exponentially harder with groups. So Calvin was trying to solve the problem of group planning. Got it more so where the the app would know the free busy of a bunch of people.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:06:41  You could propose times the app would automatically kind of propose the best times based off of when you're free and I'm free, and then we would vote on it. Okay, so still hasn't really been cracked, but a consumer facing app is, you know, quite difficult. Yeah. Quite difficult. And then I had this early version idea of leverage. But back then it was an outsourcing platform. And so I was having dinner one night with a close friend of mine that became my business partner, and it was on the back end of one of the biggest VA companies going bankrupt. So the day that they went bankrupt, we were having dinner and we were brainstorming, you know what? What did they do wrong? And we came up with this really interesting new business.

Jasmine Star 00:07:16  My restaurant a dive restaurant. Like describe here, because I always like to go into the founder's story and be like, because people what happens is like the best stories are when people can interject themselves. And so what they hear is like this day trader who's like creating an app and he's just so smart and like, that's the good for him thing.

Jasmine Star 00:07:31  And that doesn't resonate because we all sit at these like either these moments. And sometimes I like to be like, was there a smoke in the air? Was it smog outside? Was it sunset like it puts us in there and be like, this was a guy who came off a series of successes also not as big as successes. He's sitting with somebody and at the peril of somebody else's company going under. There is an opportunity.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:07:50  So totally I mean, we were we were at one of the spots downtown New York, that we would always go to an Italian restaurant. Okay. And we were just brainstorming why did they go bankrupt? What's missing in this space? And again, it's like.

Jasmine Star 00:08:02  Were you familiar with this space?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:08:03  We're very familiar with the space because at that point, I was already pretty aggressively using not just the tools, but Vas and a whole bunch of outsourcing. So I was very familiar with it. And back then in the VA space, you kind of had two choices.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:08:18  One, you get a dedicated virtual assistant VA and a limitation of a dedicated person. VA. VA is one. They have a limited bandwidth and limited skill set. And then the third problem is if they leave, you kind of get a little screwed for a little period of time. And then the other model that was quite common was this distributed model. And so every time you post a task, you get a different person. So that that fixes some of the issues. But if every time you need to do something, you're getting a new person. They don't build that connection with you. Right? So the idea was why not a hybrid and kind of the best of both worlds where you get this team and if you like one person in particular to do something, you can assign it to them. Otherwise it kind of gets routed by our internal kind of operator to the right person. Okay. Right. So we came up with this, and at the end of the dinner, I was like, what's.

Jasmine Star 00:09:12  The experience of your co-founder?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:09:13  He was in the productivity space okay.

Jasmine Star 00:09:15  Yeah. Great.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:09:16  Yeah. Speaker. Author. Got it. So he had quite a big following. So I said, look, let's leverage your following. Could you get five clients tomorrow? Because I could build the back end by tomorrow and we'll launch on. This was a Sunday. I was like, let's launch on Tuesday. And so we did that. And this was like duct tape and spitting together a whole bunch of different tools Trello, Zapier, all these things. Okay. But we got it to work. And then you fast forward a month and we got asked to speak at this conference right after Tony Robbins. So, like, Tony Robbins was like the day two speaker. And then we did a half day workshop on productivity, efficiency, what we were up to because.

Jasmine Star 00:09:47  Co-founders like legitimacy and brand within the field that was already was that already established? Like, how are you landing the speaking gig a month.

Jasmine Star 00:09:53  After that was.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:09:54  Really piggybacking off of his relationship with the person that was running the event.

Jasmine Star 00:09:58  Okay, cool. Okay.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:09:59  But anyway, we crushed it. And like out of 100 people in the room, like 95 signed up. So like within a month, all of a sudden you signed.

Jasmine Star 00:10:06  It for what?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:10:06  For this outsourced virtual assistant company. That was the early version of leverage. And so you fast forward a month after this dinner, we're already doing, you know, tens of thousands of dollars in recurring revenue. And we didn't have the systems, though, to support it. And so you fast forward a year and we've got 150 people on the team, fully bootstrapped, you know, doing seven figures of revenue, which sounds great. But back to process, right? We grew so fast and got ahead of our skis that even though we were the tech process people, we couldn't keep up. We got way too of our skis, like we just couldn't keep up. And when you're too busy, you start having to work in your business versus on your business, right? And when you're so stuck in the weeds or you're drowning in work.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:10:52  Which is why I called the book Come Up for air. Like, literally, you're drowning by the time you get through all the issues, problems, responses to people you know, like you're 12, 14 hours into the day, like you got to call it a quits. And so where do you find the time to fix the process or, you know, really understand what's going on and like, spend the 100 hours that it takes to fix the fundamental issues. And so one day in October of 2017, we're having a coffee in the morning. And before I could even take my first sip, he tells me he's out and he doesn't give me two weeks or two days notice. It's like two minutes notice.

Jasmine Star 00:11:27  And you guys.

Jasmine Star 00:11:28  Meet in person for.

Jasmine Star 00:11:28  Coffee.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:11:29  It's always been a remote company, but sometimes we would meet in person.

Jasmine Star 00:11:32  And so you met your.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:11:33  We met like like we would normally meet every once.

Jasmine Star 00:11:35  In a while. And you don't see any of this coming. You know, we were having.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:11:38  Some friction going into it, but I didn't see it happening kind of the way that it happened. You know, it was pretty shocking. Okay. And, you know, this is just my war story, you know. So although it sounds cool to, you know, grow bootstrap seven figures, 150 people. You know, we were losing a ton of money. Like, that's the positive right? Under the hood. It's like negative half a million a year, three quarters a million in debt, you know, 15% churn, but 20% new clients coming in. So it's just like good marketing, masking a broken system and process. So when he left and no one knew who I was, minus maybe five team members and five clients, I had to choose, do I bankrupt this company or do I try to fix it? And I decided to stick it out because I could see the path to kind of cleaning things up. But man, in three months we lost like 40% of clients revenue, as you heard in the past, like, my dad took a second mortgage on his house to help me make payroll.

Jasmine Star 00:12:35  So what's going through your mind, though? Like, we hear this and we don't like Brené Brown calls it gold plated grit. This hard thing that I did, we made it through. I now have this amazing, incredible company. But like when you're asking your dad for this, like, where is your head and what kind of risk? I mean, you would know risk in assessment, I.

Jasmine Star 00:12:54  Think far better than the average person.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:12:56  Yeah, I would say like I'm a professional at the, you know, risk. And in a certain lens, I don't know if this is a positive or negative trait with me. I think I have so much self-confidence that I can just figure something out. And like, if I've got to make a bet on something like, I'm going to bet on myself. Because like historically, I've always been able to figure something out or overcome something.

Jasmine Star 00:13:18  So I want to.

Jasmine Star 00:13:20  Pause for that.

Jasmine Star 00:13:20  Like, man, that like hit deep.

Jasmine Star 00:13:22  I want that skill.

Jasmine Star 00:13:24  I believe it, but I don't know if I've ever put words around it.

Jasmine Star 00:13:26  I don't know.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:13:27  If it's like the best. Like it's gotten me into uncomfortable situations though, that that mentality. But I still to this day, you know, believe that. And so when something comes.

Jasmine Star 00:13:35  Up, uncomfortable positions.

Jasmine Star 00:13:36  For uncommon success, like if we're just going to be like, call a spade a spade, you could not be that uncomfortable situation. Let's just talk right now is like your dad and you saying, okay, if I'm going to make a bet, I'm going to bet on me. Okay. But had you not had that uncomfortable situation, there's just no way that you would have ever built this massively successful business that you have now.

Jasmine Star 00:13:55  Yeah.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:13:55  And look, even before that, right. Like, there was a lot of things like I overcame and kind of just proved myself over the years that I've got that figured out muscle. So anyway, although I was stressed and tired, I still always just had in the back of my head.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:14:11  I'll figure out a way to make this work. So, but the challenge is it takes just like it takes money to make money. It takes time to make time. And so where do you find the time when you're drowning and work already? And so one day I just kind of sat back and I was like, okay, I need more time. I can fix all this. I need like 500 hours just dedicated to kind of fixing this. Where how am I going to do that when I'm already just drowning?

Jasmine Star 00:14:35  That is real, right?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:14:36  And so I just started doing this audit. Like, where am I wasting time? And the first bucket was, well, by the time I replied to the 150 team members clients emails, slack messages. The day's kind of shot. So gotta fix that one. Gotta fix the email slack problem. So I call that communication. So that's the C of CPR right? Then the next thing was I couldn't just click a button and know who's working on what.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:15:00  What do I need to do? What's the status of this project. And because I didn't have a good system for that, it was causing extra communication, right.

Jasmine Star 00:15:08  Because because when you get it.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:15:09  So this is it's like whack a mole. Like you can't like it's all interrelated. So if you don't have a project management work management tool, if like if you can't answer those questions, well, that causes more of the communication overload. So I knew this planning was another thing. Like I wanted to be able to click a button and just be able to answer any question within two clicks. How can I answer any question that I need without having to go and wait for a human, bother them? And like, honestly, I have to pay them to answer me, right? So like, how do I avoid all that? And then the last part was resources. So how does everything work? What are the SOPs? The processes? Right. How does. And I was already pretty good at that because had I not been when he left, you know, we for sure would have gone bankrupt.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:15:53  So anyway, I broke it down into these three buckets and things just started quickly turning around. And then people started reaching out asking me to consult. So I got to work with cryptocurrency companies and poop spray companies and some of the world's top, you know, coaches like Tony Robbins and others. So what was.

Jasmine Star 00:16:08  The offer at the time that then parlayed into the consulting?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:16:12  That was still the outsourcing platform. So we were doing a whole bunch of different things like like lesson learned, you know, the riches are in the niches. Don't try to be everything to everyone. One of the big problems that we had from a business model was we were booking flights, but then we were also doing their social media, and then we were doing this and that. Like it was just a really difficult business, like we should have just started. We do these types of tasks for these types of people, so we could get really good at processes and like hiring for that one thing.

Jasmine Star 00:16:43  Good.

Jasmine Star 00:16:43  So can you walk me through an example or a case study? I happen to listen to you on a podcast, or I see you speak on stage and then I become a customer.

Jasmine Star 00:16:54  And am I investing in a single course around slack and communication? And then there is like, so we get on this podcast, we get into the business of the business. And so all we're going to be getting into like other origin stories and stuff right now, like explain to me the methodology of how you bring somebody on, like what is the Ascension model? How are you looking at LTV?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:17:11  So typically the ascension model is we have an inbox Zero program that's a standalone program. And usually that is just the most efficient way to get started in just a few hours of training for not that much money, you could save three five. Like literally we've had some people saving 20 hours a week. When you think about the percentage of your time that you allocate to email, some people, it's 50% of their workweek, right? Right. Like imagine anything else in your life where you spend ten, 20, 50% of your time with literally zero training. So. And, you know, everyone thinks that they kind of use it, right? But, you know, you don't know, like until you see another way, you think your way is the best, right? Right.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:17:55  So in this program we teach, we have a framework called Rad reply archive defer. So we teach what inbox zero is like. Email should really just be mindset wise and external to do lists that other people add to. Right. Every email you can either reply, archive or defer. Some people have this folder structure where they think it's organized, but it's really disorganized. They don't have a difference between their inbox and their archive. They're deleting emails instead of archiving. They're not snoozing emails. They're not using filters and rules. Right? Like any email that contains the word unsubscribe should just go to an optional folder, right? Oh yeah.

Jasmine Star 00:18:30  So it's a probability.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:18:31  Game, right? If you're getting 100 emails a day, the ones that have the word unsubscribe or opt out probably have a lower probability of importance than like if I email you directly. right? So you probably want to be looking in your inbox multiple times a day for the things with higher probability of importance. And then maybe once a day, this other folder that has a lower probability.

Jasmine Star 00:18:50  So I understand.

Jasmine Star 00:18:51  Why you started the sports betting business. Like the probability here. Okay I'm getting a probability.

Jasmine Star 00:18:56  Oh yeah.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:18:56  And back to my roots.

Jasmine Star 00:18:57  Without self I'm never going to send you a newsletter because it'll probably go into the other inbox. But I did learn a really important thing during vibe. I had asked you during our training. I said I pitched you. It was rather embarrassing, but I'm like, hey, you missed every shot you didn't take. And so when we're in the Vive training, I said, do you do podcast? Because I'd love to get you on my podcast. And you said, yes, but there's been plenty of times that people had said yes. And then you kind of get like the I disappear after. And I said, I'm going to email you, Nick, and then I'm going to set a reminder because you shared that with us to follow up.

Jasmine Star 00:19:26  Oh, no.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:19:27  After you asked, I was honored to be invited to be on your podcast.

Jasmine Star 00:19:30  Thank you, I appreciate that. So somebody comes in through Inbox Zero. What's optimal customer journey here.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:19:35  So usually people start with that get you know x number of team members. We do the transformation. Then they get the rest of their team on that. Okay. And then it depends, right? But usually after that, then they'll go into a yearly program where they get access to all the other trainings that we have.

Jasmine Star 00:19:51  So like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:19:53  Or a song or Coda, then I do monthly ask me anythings or is it.

Jasmine Star 00:19:57  Access or.

Jasmine Star 00:19:57  Team seats?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:19:58  It's per seat per person.

Jasmine Star 00:20:00  Yes. So that's the.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:20:01  Model on the leverage.

Jasmine Star 00:20:02  Side. Got it.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:20:03  And then it splinters off. Right. So after we do that transformation, they might want to get the rest of their team in Inbox Zero or get them trained. They might be like, Holy crap, if you could do this in my email, like, let's do.

Jasmine Star 00:20:15  This in.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:20:16  Slack and it's on and all these.

Jasmine Star 00:20:17  Other tools.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:20:18  Some people also then just hire me for private consulting or do the workshops that we, that we do or things like that.

Jasmine Star 00:20:25  Are so good for.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:20:25  Public speaking.

Jasmine Star 00:20:26  Okay, that was so good. And I went on a tangent, but this is about the business of the business. And so what I like to do is open possibilities for people to look at a particular skill set or how I really like to you just reverse engineered like, hey, because I'm actually doing something that's not scalable. The consulting. I'm actually finding the patterns that can serve a market that wouldn't be able to afford my consulting. And so you're offering like, an entire Ascension model? Totally.

Jasmine Star 00:20:48  That's I mean, we.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:20:48  Started off doing custom consulting and like, you know, it it wasn't I don't want to poo poo on that. Like, you know, some sometimes the money was great. And you work with a huge company and they want to pay you a lot of money, but it's not scalable.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:21:00  And, you know, doing custom rollouts or custom this, it's hard to scale versus training much more scalable, higher profit margin. But also you can help a lot more people without without nearly as much headache. Yes. So for the unscalable stuff, you know, on a select basis, we'll do private consulting. Now we're moving more into the model though, rather than swapping dollars for hours. How do you make it performance based?

Jasmine Star 00:21:24  Oh my God, you're the second person today.

Jasmine Star 00:21:26  Yeah okay.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:21:27  So which is not an easy thing to figure out. Not but ultimately because sometimes it's it's kind of frustrating as the entrepreneur where you know, you're about to add a million, 10 million to the bottom line. And then you get paid nicely, but you get paid a small fraction of that.

Jasmine Star 00:21:43  So how do you get paid for the value?

Jasmine Star 00:21:45  Even right now, this is part of the brainstorming session that I want to like. And I was I felt very uncomfortable bringing it up on the podcast, because there's a lot of aspects to the business that are behind the scenes.

Jasmine Star 00:21:56  These are revenue streams we've built out that we don't really have to talk about, because we have inbound and people, and building out a personal brand to appear a certain way. So part of the brainstorming would be the exact Pooh poohing on the consulting and just the processes of consulting. But then I'm just going to be hella selfish and be like, what did you learn? Because on the car ride here, because you and I were being productive and I was working, much to the chagrin of my beautiful, amazing production assistant who drove us here. And I didn't say a single word. I sent out a bid. And I'm like, this whole system is freaking broken. And so I want your help fixing that. But before we do that, before I get super selfish, we talked about the business of the business. We talked about the Ascension model. We talked about CPR. I want to make sure that we're doing justice to one very important thing that blew my mind. You showed in the call with Viv.

Jasmine Star 00:22:47  You had said there's a lot of miscommunication because the more people that you bring into an equation, the more likelihood it's going to be a hot mess. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a note for our video editor to show the graphic, because you're going to describe it and people are going to be like, what is he doing? Calculus. So to the best of your ability, use words to describe the graphic. But when we put it here we will be expedited.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:23:09  Let's start with a question. Right. Have you ever felt like you're drowning in work and you just need to hire that one other person, and then that's going to be the end all, be all, and it's going to solve all of your problems. So that's let's just use that as the precursor. Right. So but oftentimes you hire that person three months later you're drowning in work just as much before. Yeah. A big mistake that I find entrepreneurs in terms of vocabulary or leaders saying is like, oh, we need to hire someone.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:23:37  You don't need to hire someone. What you're really saying is you need more capacity. You need more capability. And you think that hiring is the only strategy that's going to work to give you that result, right. It's like people don't want to buy a drill. They want the hole that the drill is going to produce to hang the frame. But ultimately they want a frame hung. Right. And so buying the drill is just a step in that process. Right. But if there's another way to do it, you know, right. Maybe superglue or something like maybe you don't need a drill. Right. So let's just start with that. So first it's you want more capacity capability. Now every person that you hire, it's not just the recruiting, onboarding training salary that you're paying. You're paying this invisible extra complexity factor that gets introduced. And that's what we're talking about. So it's the same from network theory, right? If you're the only person that owns a cell phone, it's worth nothing.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:24:27  Right now. Two people own a cell phone. It's worth a little bit more because you have one person to talk to. Every person that gets added to a cellular network, the network becomes exponentially more valuable, right? There's exponentially more combinations of people that you can talk to. It's the same applied to business. Every person you add to your team, to your organization, there's exponentially more ways for information. Get lost, miscommunicated, so on and so forth. So the graphic it's going to show, you know, when you're a three person team, there's three ways to connect three dots. You connect the dots. There's three ways that you can transfer information. When you go to a five person team. Now you connect all the dots with lines. Now there's ten ways that you can transfer it. You go to a ten person team. Now there's 45 ways right 100 person team. There's 4950 ways. So it's an exponential equation. It's n times n minus one over two. So in the 100 case it's 100 -99 over two.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:25:20  So 99 times 50. So whatever your team is you could do the math yourself. And you could see how many different ways there is for information get transferred. And literally every person you add it that's in some cases that's the most expensive part of the hiring. It's not the salary, but you don't see it, you know, you don't see that on a balance sheet or a PNL statement, but it's there and it is harder to manage more people. It's exponentially harder. So everything I'm about is how do you maximize revenue per team member profit per team member. So back to the performance. Like one metric of success could be for something like that is, hey, we're going to take your revenue per team member from X to Y. And we want a percentage of that.

Jasmine Star 00:25:59  Oh, that'd be amazing. That would be amazing. Okay, so as we get into the possibility of brainstorming, how best do we set this up? Like if I'm like, I'm going to bring you my poo so you can poo poo on it.

Jasmine Star 00:26:12  How do we fix this? Like when you come in and you're like, my business, how do we best frame this up?

Jasmine Star 00:26:16  Well, I mean.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:26:16  Why don't we start with this? So what is either sucking your soul, wasting time stuff that doesn't let you up, that you do on a daily or weekly basis. And why don't we talk about that and see if there's ways that we can get that off your plate? And then the next step would be, you know, more generally across your team what's low level work. That's that no one on your team likes doing or that your team is complaining about, or there's just inefficiencies that you see on a team level. And let's talk that through and try to brainstorm. Is there a way to clean that up? Okay.

Jasmine Star 00:26:47  Well, can you just like, call me out? Because what I will say is we've done a lot of work about time optimization and things that I need to be pulled out. We've done time audits. We're currently doing another time audit of myself and the leadership team.

Jasmine Star 00:26:59  So very important to us. We are a systems and process driven team. I feel very proud to say that we're tiny, but.

Jasmine Star 00:27:05  We're how big? How big is the team?

Jasmine Star 00:27:06  There are six full time employees and then four contractors.

Jasmine Star 00:27:09  Cool.

Jasmine Star 00:27:10  Yeah. But when you showed the grid of ten, I was just like, yep, a team of ten and all the different ways. Absolutely. And I was just like, okay, this is where I have this beautiful opportunity to come in and be like, we're going to get bigger. Not because I want to or it sounds cool, but I only once we've completely stretched out our capacity would bring on somebody, but have the systems and processes to something for success. extent, yeah. Now, having said that, I am so stressed. I have no hours in my day and I have looked at everything, and everything that is on my to do list is something that only I can do, at least at this point. And so when we see like there is like a major revenue opportunity for us, a lot of the times that that the people want the consulting, they want to come to me.

Jasmine Star 00:27:51  Even though we have set up preliminary protocols, verifications, see how viable this opportunity or client is or who is making the introduction. We have done all of those things, but it seems like we're not having a standardized way or an offer because everybody wants it done a little bit.

Jasmine Star 00:28:08  Differently for custom consulting. Yes.

Jasmine Star 00:28:11  Yes. And to me I look at this and I'm just like I don't even know. Yeah. The team and I are looking at this like how do we systematize this. It feels like it's very specific to a client. And sometimes they want three meetings for ultimate clarity. And then they want the legal team sitting in and all of these like different structures. And there is a part of me that when you had said, oh, performance based, I think that would radically change the type of client that we would be working with. But then I feel like that's a whole nother exposé because I'm like, well, I'll get into your numbers. How messy are this? Like, what are your conversions? Like, you want me to win, but is the lever broke? And so I just don't even I feel like there's opportunity and I feel like it's a hot mess and I think I.

Jasmine Star 00:28:51  How do I start systematizing at least some aspects of it to start saving this time? So.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:28:55  So tell me a little bit about your business. Like what's the business model? And then also tell me a little bit about the different technologies that you guys use. How do you guys work together?

Jasmine Star 00:29:03  Oh you're kidding. So in the great I think I'm sweating I'm sweating. Let's let's just start there and see where the conversation with like a PhD with productivity.

Jasmine Star 00:29:10  And I'm like, I think I'm good. But I'm like literally like a fourth grader.

Jasmine Star 00:29:14  Let me also say though.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:29:15  Like no one is at full productivity. Like I just make the assumption that I'm doing everything wrong and that there's a better way to do something. So like.

Jasmine Star 00:29:23  Okay.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:29:23  You know, with AI and like all these new tools, there's always a better way. Like there's not a single thing that any of us do where it's like I would say, fully optimal. Now there's something that maybe is good enough and there's lower hanging fruit and you should, you know, focus on that.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:29:36  But I think having a student mindset is really important no matter what stage you are in your entrepreneurial journey.

Jasmine Star 00:29:42  My aspiration is always to be the dumbest in the room, and so I'm very well qualified. So let's begin.

Jasmine Star 00:29:47  Okay, so.

Jasmine Star 00:29:48  I think it behooves that there is like an origin story and there seems to be like a six year iteration and like a beginning. I dropped out of law school because my mom had brain cancer. I decided I wanted to become a photographer and I didn't own a camera. I built a six figure business in 11 months. Then we continued to grow by creating educational resources and starting a digital store for photographers. Companies started looking at what I was doing, asking me to create content for their businesses. For photographers. This was before the influencer. I did that and I realized I was trading time for dollars. I said, I don't want to do this anymore. Then they said, can we hire you as a consultant? I said, what is this word called consultant.

Jasmine Star 00:30:19  I consulted for a year and a half, and then I realized I was still trading time for dollars, although I was making more. I said, what would be the next scalable jump for me to serve more people? I got into course creation. I created multiple seven figure revenue streams on the back of courses. Then I said, people want more continuous. How do I diversify our revenue streams? I created a membership. Create a membership is off to a great start. Another seven figure revenue stream. And then I realized there was a ton of friction between our membership and the promise of the membership, which was to help small business owners market their business. We were making them create the content, pull down the content, either put it out in real time or schedule it. And so we thought to myself, how do we create synergies and remove the friction? So in 2021, hired a CTO, became an official SaaS company. I know, I don't know, a single line of code. I don't know anything about tech.

Jasmine Star 00:31:01  That is the origin story we spent about six years building to that point. We now have a president who sits on the inside of social curator. It is $59 a month. We serve small business owners. It's a machine. The team was like, why don't you have Nick go through our systems for Social Security? I'm like, no, the thing is, frickin it's a chef's kiss. This is what people, business owners dream of. My time there is so small. The team is going with it and growing. Another arm of the business is courses. I feel like we've systematized our courses and the way that we launch our courses. Now, what we don't really talk about is consulting. I used to do small hourly consulting, and then I realized that companies would pay a lot more, not just for an hour before a project. So they would have me come in. I would be consulting based on the project. And then they started asking for deployment, because we possess a skill set that many business owners just don't get.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:31:51  So what's an example of the type of project?

Jasmine Star 00:31:53  Okay.

Jasmine Star 00:31:53  So they would come in and they're like what's going to be our marketing strategy. How do we deploy it to let's say a segment of our audience. How do we start testing this? How do you say we need you to lay it out for us? Our team can take it and run. To me, that always felt like a sweet spot because I'm just like, okay, we've done this. We feel really good about this. Then there's organizations who are just like what you speak of. This digital marketing is pure magic. And I'm like, okay, well, we can't deploy on the strategy because you need these pieces together. And they're like, how do we begin these pieces? And I'm like. So then I think to myself, okay, do I try to take a referral fee to send them out to say like, hey, this company needs a community. Do I send them out to a community manager? And then I lose that lead and I'm like, or do we bring it in-house? We can do this stuff in our sleep.

Jasmine Star 00:32:33  But then I'm like, oh, the pressure on the team to actually do deployment now, it would still be in a strategic way. We're not going to go in and actually physically build the community. It's to go into their team and say, who's responsible for what. But every company wants something very different, but it's very lucrative. If we go in and start doing the deployment, what kind.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:32:49  Of businesses are.

Jasmine Star 00:32:50  Are hiring? It is all.

Jasmine Star 00:32:52  Over the.

Jasmine Star 00:32:52  Place. Today's bid was going to a multi-level marketing company.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:32:57  And but you said that the SaaS company is crushing it.

Jasmine Star 00:32:59  Yeah, it's doing so.

Jasmine Star 00:33:00  Well, I love.

Jasmine Star 00:33:01  It.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:33:01  So is.

Jasmine Star 00:33:03  There the.

Jasmine Star 00:33:04  Nature? I mean, we can we can get into a business diagnostic I have.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:33:07  Yeah. I mean, what if we're going to add the most value to your listeners right now? But I'm just wondering, like if you were to just completely what would happen if you just totally shut down consulting, you put all that energy into just scaling.

Jasmine Star 00:33:20  The consulting thing is new.

Jasmine Star 00:33:21  So we have attempted to scale social care, and due to the nature of the person that we serve industry wide, the turn of the entrepreneur. Despite how sticky we are like, the business itself doesn't survive, so no one's paying $59 a month for marketing if their business isn't surviving. It's a very short time span.

Jasmine Star 00:33:40  Got it.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:33:41  So what kind of who's the end customer? Like a brand new entrepreneur.

Jasmine Star 00:33:45  A small business owner, somebody that's doing less than 60,000, maybe has a VA. They know they need to show up on social media. They don't know the how. They don't have a plan. They don't have a strategy. Consistency is a big deal for them. So we create coaching. We create resources. We create education. It is basically a digital marketing agency. But the problem is because people don't have time, they're like, how am I going to go in and learn even though all the tools are here for me, how am I going to learn how to do this? Then? How am I going to stay consistent with it? It becomes, I need to take you eight steps before you actually get to this point.

Jasmine Star 00:34:13  And people are like, I'm so overwhelmed in my business. Isn't surviving.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:34:16  Got it? Yeah. And is it the same people, these ten people across all these different revenue streams, the consulting, The the tech.

Jasmine Star 00:34:24  Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:34:25  And so all the same collaboration tools like you're using slack for all these things.

Jasmine Star 00:34:30  So notion is like our main hub. It's the Bible asana for task management, slack for team communication. And we don't email each other unless it's on a very professional.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:34:42  Doing this before you read the book.

Jasmine Star 00:34:43  Or know.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:34:44  Okay. So after you read the book, you made a couple changes.

Jasmine Star 00:34:46  No, I'm so sorry.

Jasmine Star 00:34:47  This is how we built the system.

Jasmine Star 00:34:48  Oh, good for you. Yeah.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:34:49  So you figured it out yourself? Naturally.

Jasmine Star 00:34:51  I think that I really want a good, healthy work life balance. And I became, like, very dogmatic. And I'm like, this is what belongs here. This is what's belongs here. And there's clear accountability of who dropped the ball.

Jasmine Star 00:35:02  Where totally.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:35:03  Totally. And then you don't have the scavenger hunt where you have to look in like 16 different places to find. On the consulting side, is there an opportunity to do group workshops or group like, for example, we hit the same thing, right? There's only so much you can scale yourself until you, you know, so productized things or going group was one of the approaches that we took. So we do these two day workshops where we'll get 1520 people together.

Jasmine Star 00:35:27  What's the size of the business that you're attracting for the 15 person?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:35:30  We have people anywhere from 5 to 100 million usually coming.

Jasmine Star 00:35:33  So at 100.

Jasmine Star 00:35:34  Million, they're not hiring you to come in and do the consulting on that level.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:35:37  They might do both.

Jasmine Star 00:35:38  So it doesn't it's not like an either or. Right.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:35:40  But you know, it's good value because it's a fraction of the price of having me come, you know, for X number of days or my team coming X number of days in person and one person's issue, even if it seems totally different, like the issue you're bringing up, there's other people that maybe have faced that or might have an insight that I wouldn't have, and the solution or the ideas generated from your problem might spark someone else to solve something, even if it seems on the surface, totally unrelated.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:36:09  So we found these two day, let's call it workshops. Come with your biggest business issue. Usually people come with a process issue, and we'll figure out a way to use AI and automation to go and automate an AI ify that process. Oftentimes, though, the conversation that we have to solve your problems super interesting for the next person and then that might trigger some other ideas for them. So we found that actually the group much more scalable. And it really didn't take away from the client experience.

Jasmine Star 00:36:39  Impact results or timeliness of.

Jasmine Star 00:36:41  Results, you know.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:36:42  Like private consultants, private consulting. So like if I spend X number of hours one on one, like we're going to move a bit faster than, than a group, but you know, bang for your buck. Like in terms of value like people people are getting a lot of value on the consulting side though. Yeah, it's a challenge. Like I don't have like a magic.

Jasmine Star 00:36:59  Magic was your.

Jasmine Star 00:37:00  So people come to you and have you systematized? I don't need to know like the ins and outs of it, but have you systematized? These are the options that you have to work with me.

Jasmine Star 00:37:06  Or is it you will do some sort of customization based on.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:37:08  So we have a few different offerings. One, hire me to speak. Right. So that's kind of one.

Jasmine Star 00:37:13  That's an easy that's my favorite. That's that's nice. Yeah. We'll see that all day. That one's that one's cool. Right.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:37:17  One of the things that I do on the leverage side with the training, by the way, is since I don't want to do the implementation and I don't want to create courses and content in 100 different tools. So I partner with agencies. And then in the cases where I haven't homegrown all, instead of vetting people, all vet partners, and then I'll bring an agency that's, you know, an expert at a certain tool to come in and then they'll facilitate the training.

Jasmine Star 00:37:42  Oh, cool.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:37:43  And then any of the implementation that happens, we have some type of rev share affiliate.

Jasmine Star 00:37:47  Type of deal. Oh that's so that's cool right.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:37:50  Because then I'm not managing more employees and managing partners, not people.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:37:54  I don't have to create a whole bunch of stuff. My clients, it's a it's a triple win. My clients are getting the best at that thing. The partners are loving it because I'm a lead gen source for them. Right. And so everyone's everyone's happy in that model. I think that figuring out a way to do performance based in any sort of consulting capacity is the is the right move or product sizing, but you know, doing custom stuff, it's a challenge. So for your stuff, I wonder, do you have an opportunity? And I think that if it's a really big company, you can't do performance based, and if it's really small, it's not worth your time. So there's like that sweet spot. Maybe it's in that like 5 to 20 million kind of revenue range maybe or five. So whatever it is for you.

Jasmine Star 00:38:38  But interesting, you know, how.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:38:39  Do you get people to just pay for results at the end of the day, they're hiring you for for what result? Like they want more leads.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:38:45  Yeah. They want to lower their cost of acquiring a customer.

Jasmine Star 00:38:48  Like if I looked.

Jasmine Star 00:38:48  At this particular bid, they had like three very clear objectives.

Jasmine Star 00:38:52  And that was what were they.

Jasmine Star 00:38:53  That was to sign up three subscriptions to sign up three people, three distributors, and for them to post consistently and how they determined consistency is three times a week in a month.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:39:04  But what results are they hoping for? Well, the other two seem concrete. That one. What's the result that they're hoping to get? You know, as a byproduct, the.

Jasmine Star 00:39:11  Halo effect of consistent marketing across like multichannel.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:39:14  So I don't know. Did they tell you a number like what is it worth to them if they got those three? What was the first thing you had three partners.

Jasmine Star 00:39:21  Like they didn't get.

Jasmine Star 00:39:22  Into like LTV but I can do like back of the napkin math and I'm just like they're gonna make a lot of money.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:39:28  So I mean I wonder if they'd be open to a conversation where it's okay that's your problem.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:39:34  How much are you willing to invest. How much is that problem worth to you or how much are you willing to invest to solve that problem? And kind of have the conversation go that way versus pay me a monthly retainer. Right. And it's better for them to like, if that problem is worth $1 million to them and you're like, okay, cool, it's worth a million, I'll do it. You figure out what it's going to cost you, like I'll do it 80% of what you know what it's worth to you. I'll do it for 80%, 60%, whatever the number is. Right? And that's the direction that we're that we're trying to move.

Jasmine Star 00:40:03  Can you give me an example?

Jasmine Star 00:40:04  Not saying that you will, but how are you using pay performance in the consulting that you render.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:40:09  So the the types of ways that we're moving in the direction, it's like what's what is this process costing you. And that could be like accounts receivable. It could be back office, nursing home. And they have physical papers and they've got 100 people, you know, sending out whatever it is.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:40:24  Right. And it's like across all the salaries that you're paying to achieve, you know, to to get that job done. What does it costing you $1 million a month. Cool. So instead of paying me to go in and like clean things up, it's like, how about I just take over accounts receivable for you, right? And like, now you don't have to worry about it anymore. And you were paying a million. How about you pay me 800,000 a month and then it's on me to use AI and automation and asana and all these different tools properly. Now it's on me, not on you. But I think if you're confident in kind of the value you're bringing, it's a much better deal for you to try to figure out performance. Right? So it could be in my context. It could be what are you paying to to perform that process? Could be what's your revenue per team member? Is that a goal for you to get it from 200 to 400,000. Like and then it's just very measurable.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:41:14  And then obviously efficiency plays a big role in revenue per team member. I'm not giving them marketing strategies to affect revenue, but assuming that because it's a partnership at the end, at that point, it's not a, you know, dollars for ours. It's like, hey, is this a two way good fit? Right? Because you have risk to your success and you make money is also relying on them being a good partner. So it's not it's not a one way interview. It's a two way interview. Like right. Let's see. And you know, if I see someone where I believe they can handle the revenue stuff properly and I see gross inefficiency under the hood, and I don't want to come in like the grim Reaper and say, okay, let's fire half the people. But if I see an opportunity where, hey, I can tighten this up, you're not going to need to hire more people, or there's a few underperformers. Let's get rid of that and just put a hiring freeze.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:42:02  And let's just clean this up. You go and take care of revenue. I'll. I'll deal with that.

Jasmine Star 00:42:06  Sounds like the dream.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:42:07  You know, that's that's, you know, the direction that we've been moving.

Jasmine Star 00:42:10  Oh, that's so good. Okay, so this was like, very, very helpful and I feel like it's added a lot of clarity for me about really taking a good cold, hard assessment of like, what do we want to do? Like what are we willing to offer? And like, why would we even entertain the what we could do that?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:42:27  Well, you know, the software company, do you have the opportunity though to charge more like have like a, you know, bronze, silver, gold package, like do you have the opportunity instead of 59 a month? Is there some premium version that's like a thousand a month and you go after bigger clients? You know, that's like another thing that I'm wondering too.

Jasmine Star 00:42:46  And there's also like, you know, not to give like too much away.

Jasmine Star 00:42:48  But there was also a play here where we distinctly felt like we could white label our platform and customize it for this organization, for them to use in all of the language. And we use I like Dottie, she's your social media manager. And so we build profiles into when the prompt is given, they don't have to add things that are commonly added like their name, their city, their job descriptions, what do they call her? So they build out a profile so that the captions are returned and the ideas are returned specifically for their ideal audience to do this at scale with a multi-level marketing company becomes like, amazing.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:43:17  Well, I think also another important question which we didn't get to is like, what? What are your personal goals too? Like how many hours a week do you want to work? Like, how much like, what does success look like to you? Because I think the strategy you have to kind of reverse engineer off of that. You know, if it's I'm trying to build $1 billion company and I'm willing to work 100 hours a week, it's like it's a different to a different strategy potentially than I want to have a lifestyle business.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:43:41  And if I make a couple million dollars a year, but, you know, work 30 hours a week, I'm super happy, you know? Right. And there's nothing wrong with either. But I think your personal goals really drive a lot of the decisions also that you have to make there.

Jasmine Star 00:43:54  What are your personal goals?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:43:55  Well, I want to be intellectually stimulated with what I work on. I want to be making enough money where it covers the lifestyle I want to have without having to kill myself. But yeah, I mean, I want to make a lot of money, and along the way, I want to be doing things that give me joy and light me up.

Jasmine Star 00:44:11  So of the current things that you're doing right now, what is the most intellectually stimulating thing?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:44:15  Well, the algorithmic sports betting has been pretty intellectually stimulating, to be honest. It's like really going back to my roots from, you know, the the high frequency trading days. Okay. And football season is about to start.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:44:24  So we're about to be able to start stress testing everything that we've been building. Okay. So that's pretty cool. There's different aspects of all of it that light me up. You know I, I like the speaking. I love my mastermind group. We do these amazing trips. We do the two day workshops. We also do a week long where I rent out a hotel and I'll bring 35 people down, and it's highly curated, so everyone's awesome. And, you know, back to the Ascension model. We'll do that. And it's really fun. It's profitable, but it's like good people. You build deep connections and then organically things come out after that without having to, you know, be super like, oh, okay. Like let's get them to stage one to stage two. It's just, let's spend six days together. Yes. Have some fun and we'll have some conversation and we'll see. Is there more that we can do together.

Jasmine Star 00:45:08  So these people for the mastermind making a commitment for a designated amount of time or.

Jasmine Star 00:45:12  Just we have a year.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:45:13  Long mastermind.

Jasmine Star 00:45:14  Okay.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:45:14  And so part of that is we have an annual week long event. Okay. And the interesting thing with that, I'm a part of various groups. And the structure primarily in a lot of groups is you're sitting in a room and from like 9 to 5, they're speakers, right? Kind of non-stop and maybe some exercises. I always find that the value, though, in these groups is the hallway conversation, the coffee, the breakfast. It's who's in the room and having good conversations. And I find that a mistake that a lot of these people well, let's not mistake might be harsh. The I always wish why don't we have more break time? So a few years ago I went down to Baja in Todos Santos. Do you know Chip Conley as I do. So I went down to his place down in Baja. And for those of you listening that don't know who Chip is, he wrote a famous book called peak, and he was like the chief strategy officer of Airbnb.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:46:03  He was Brian Chesky mentor, amazing guy. I went down to his hotel down in Baja, the modern Elder Academy and we hit it off. We were having coffee one day, and he didn't know me from a little wood. And I was like, you know what? If you're smart enough to mentor Brian Chesky, you're probably good enough to mentor me. How about we do some calls and see if see if we can figure some stuff?

Jasmine Star 00:46:26  And you just met him.

Jasmine Star 00:46:26  Because you were a patron at his hotel.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:46:28  So the backstory to that is I have Eric and Alyssa, who are now part of my mastermind group, but they're they're good friends. Eric used to be the CEO of Inc and Fast Company, and Alyssa is like the world's number one executive coach. We were having dinner with a group of ten people and they said, hey, we're doing a trip down to Baja, who wants to come? And I was the only one that raised my hand. So I third wheeled this romantic trip down in Baja with them.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:46:50  It was great. We were doing like sunset walks, the three of us.

Jasmine Star 00:46:53  It was just like amazing. It was just really hilarious.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:46:55  Anyway, so then you, Chip and.

Jasmine Star 00:46:58  I went down there.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:46:59  Amazing people, Eric and Melissa. So we had a great time and that's how I got to know Chip. And I made the ask because if you you said the phrase 100% of the things, you don't swing out, you strike out. So I just made the boss. Hey, would you be willing to do this? And he's such a nice, generous human being. He said, sure, let's give it a try. And after a few months, I was like, Chip, I feel bad that I'm just getting this free advice from you. How could I give back? Would it help you if I'm like, maybe one day I organize something and rent it out? I didn't have these aspirations of running a mastermind group, he said, actually, we had a cancellation. How about next month? You rent it out? And I was like, okay, well.

Jasmine Star 00:47:37  For.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:47:37  Weeks to, like, pull together 30 people to come down to Mexico. It's not the easiest thing to figure out, but I'll figure it out. So I started thinking like, what's missing from all the groups I'm a part of? And it was how do we just it kind of just struck me. The formula was simple go to a great place, curated group of people, and just give them a lot of free time. And like, no one's going to have a bad experience. And so that's what we did. Like I organized it. It's free time all day until 2:00. And then one of the guys, you're going to meet him at dinner tonight, he used to play for the for the Jets. His name's Josh Martin. Awesome. Awesome guy. He would lead morning workouts or they had, like, a meditation teacher there. This guy Teddie. Amazing. But all optional. So we do morning workout optional, then breakfast together. Talk to people. Sometimes people want to do like a morning sunrise coffee with me and we'll look at asana or whatever it is and.

Jasmine Star 00:48:26  Talk process off the clock. I'm talking about my dream.

Jasmine Star 00:48:29  Trip, a.

Jasmine Star 00:48:30  Sauna and coffee. Let's go. Oh yeah.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:48:32  Like or whatever you want. Or a.

Jasmine Star 00:48:34  Beach walk.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:48:35  You know, and then, you know, then it's free time. Go to your room, to your zooms. Connect with people. Like when I had my book coming out, one of the guys was a well-known New York Times bestselling author, John Levy, and he sat down for like, four hours with me and mapped out my entire marketing launch plan. So you get these experts in different things, right? If you came, you'd be an expert at marketing that a lot of people would be able to get a lot of value out of you. And like, you would meet, you know, the former CRO of Chipotle or the CMO of Sony or like other good connections. And then from 2 to 6 we have hot seats, so people share anything they're stuck on that could range from a business, but also personal.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:49:12  Sometimes people should I break up with my boyfriend? Should I have a kid? And so we're talking that through. And then there's also talks on cybersecurity or culture or whatever it is. Chip is there. And he'll give a talk. And then we have dinner and you know, have drinks, go to the Jacuzzi, whatever. And we do that for six days. So you really get to know people. And so we did that the first, you know, a few years ago now.

Jasmine Star 00:49:36  And it went so well. 30.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:49:38  Yeah, we sold it.

Jasmine Star 00:49:39  Out in a month.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:49:40  And it just went so well. People were like, can we do this again? So that was the genesis.

Jasmine Star 00:49:45  Of the.

Jasmine Star 00:49:45  Mastermind. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Well, I feel very fortunate and blessed to be able to meet these brilliant people tonight.

Jasmine Star 00:49:52  Yeah. They're awesome. Yeah.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:49:53  And that's just fun.

Jasmine Star 00:49:53  Okay. Right. But I think you have to teach me how to be fun because I full on land in, and I'm like, optimize for business, you know?

Jasmine Star 00:50:01  So just like I'm kind of.

Jasmine Star 00:50:03  I'm more like you, actually. Okay, well, anyway.

Jasmine Star 00:50:05  Somebody's going to have to teach us. Somebody will have to teach us. Like this is the system for fun.

Jasmine Star 00:50:08  Do you have a.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:50:08  Mastermind group or.

Jasmine Star 00:50:09  Have you tried one? So what's your mastermind?

Jasmine Star 00:50:11  I swear, I swear by mastermind is literally like, this is a cheat code for success. Totally. And started them early in my digital marketing experience. And now I'm doing three programs. So I do something called Hampden. I do a peer based mastermind and then the Viv program. So.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:50:26  So you're a member of three?

Jasmine Star 00:50:27  I am a member of three. I also host the Jasmine Star mastermind.

Jasmine Star 00:50:30  Who and what's that about? It's for seven figure entrepreneurs.

Jasmine Star 00:50:33  We talk about scaling and a lot of things that we see a lot of the pressure points and deep desires from that, like 1 to 5 stage is optimizing their systems. I take very little credit. I work with a team of just system ninjas, and so being able to like go through that, speak to those pressure points.

Jasmine Star 00:50:48  But we also do hot seats. It's like where that and then that 5 to 10 range is really going to be like scaling the team. What is the culture? How do we start leveraging this? And I've always believed the first mastermind ever hosted the number one piece of feedback that I'm like, hey, I want to know how to get better. It's give us more free time. And I was like, yeah, lesson learned. Lesson learned. It is free time in the connection.

Jasmine Star 00:51:06  Totally.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:51:07  The hardest part of for me is just curating the right group of people, right? And saying no to a lot of people in order to really get the group to that really tight, high level group that you want it to be.

Jasmine Star 00:51:19  Absolutely.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:51:19  So on your side, what's the key area of focus for you going forward right now or what's most exciting for you?

Jasmine Star 00:51:26  Oh, are you turning this podcast on me? Yeah.

Jasmine Star 00:51:29  Now are we really going there? Are we really going to my podcast? This is your host, Nick Sonnenberg.

Jasmine Star 00:51:35  that's a takeover, man.

Jasmine Star 00:51:37  Oh, man. I think I really, really, really want to get a good idea of how to start attracting and cultivating and courting a players.

Jasmine Star 00:51:46  I think that on your team.

Jasmine Star 00:51:48  I feel like I do a if I could say something nice about myself, I feel like I'm really good at establishing long term relationships and finding a really good fit for a role. I think that's why we don't have very high churn. We do have a very small team, but these people are hard wired for systems and hard wired to win. It's a very scoreboard driven team.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:52:05  Nowadays with ten people. Or you can get a lot done with AI. And are you guys using a lot of AI?

Jasmine Star 00:52:09  Yeah, I mean big time, like the premise of our digital offer is to facilitate that and make it easier for the small business owner. That feels like really intimidated by it. But how we leverage it on the inside of the team is like, incredible.

Jasmine Star 00:52:19  I mean, I.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:52:19  Think we're going to start seeing for the first time in history, you know, the first billion dollar solo companies like one person teams, two person.

Jasmine Star 00:52:27  Teams that are.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:52:28  That are hitting billion dollars, I.

Jasmine Star 00:52:30  I completely see that. So I think if I'm like actually thinking about the future, it's how do I attract a level talent? How do I have that like Olympian mindset? How do I get somebody who's humble, gritty, who's somebody who wants to win systems driven? I think it's like a perfect.

Jasmine Star 00:52:44  I wonder if you.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:52:44  Need to hire more people, or if you could get another 20 or 30% out of each of these people that you already.

Jasmine Star 00:52:48  Have.

Jasmine Star 00:52:48  I think if I was being really honest, 90% of the team, it's like, I feel like I'm getting 100. I feel like I honestly my team is going to listen to this. So I'll just be like, very honest. I feel that at least three of our team players are literally doing the job of three people.

Jasmine Star 00:53:02  I say that to their face. I'm like, I would take you on your worst day than anybody else. That's awesome.

Jasmine Star 00:53:08  I know, I mean, that's.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:53:10  Honestly kudos to you. It's the best skill, I think, that you can have as a CEO. An entrepreneur is the ability to attract and retain and and recruit good talent.

Jasmine Star 00:53:20  Thank you.

Jasmine Star 00:53:20  I think that's my biggest takeaway is other than like celebrating our systems and looking at how to get a heck of a lot better with them and then reminding people that we had to learn the hard way. But it's not necessary because I read come Up for After five survive, send us all a book. And so I think I took a picture and I sent it to you. I was like, legitimately, I'm reading the book and it's all buttressing this stuff that we spent years trying to build. So if there is a person who wants to get the book, would you want them going to your website? Do you want to go to Amazon? Do you want so they.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:53:46  Can go to come up for air.com for that. And we have bonus resources. So the the book's like a 320 pages. So book and I'm a productivity nerd. So like if if I weren't this would be like a 1200 page book.

Jasmine Star 00:53:58  I would agree, I would agree I think you want a lot into I really packed it.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:54:02  I packed it tight in there. You know, when I was pitching Harpercollins on the book, my publisher, I said, look, nowadays there's a lot of books, and it's like one concept. And they somehow dragged it on for 300 pages with a bunch of stories, I agree. How about we write like a real dense but like actionable tips and tricks? Every page there's something to take away, so we couldn't fit it all into the book. So on come up for air.com. There's a bunch of bonus resources that go go along with the book, quizzes, cheat sheets, so on and so forth. So if you're interested in this material, the book is a great place to start.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:54:35  And then if you need training in any of these things, get leverage. Dot com is where you can find more information on the training R.

Jasmine Star 00:54:41  Nick, thank you for coming and speaking. So and this podcast totally took a different turn than I had expected. I feel like I feel very open and I'm like, oh, I'm very private person. And so for us to be talking about like where I'm at in the business, the systems of the business, the teams at the business, like the reality of it. And I'm like, thank you for just showing me how to show up in more humane way, but also teach people along the way.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:55:03  Well, I mean, after the podcast separately, if you want to do a zoom with you and your team and just do like a quick, you know, our zoom jam session share screen and have me take a look at things if there's anything that I can see.

Jasmine Star 00:55:14  To so optimize anything, I'm happy to.

Jasmine Star 00:55:16  And and I would only do that.

Jasmine Star 00:55:18  I would only do that on the condition that I would be able to sit with you in your team. Talk about how to optimize way for organic traffic, get this message out because it is so needed and it's so good.

Jasmine Star 00:55:27  As good as I.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:55:28  Am in operations, that's how bad I am at marketing.

Jasmine Star 00:55:30  So I would take you up on that one then.

Jasmine Star 00:55:32  It's a win win, but I will take you up on the condition that you take me up. Ladies and gentlemen, come up for air. Com this is where we want you to start the journey of getting to know Nick. Do you like to connect on social? You said you're not that like, maybe marketing is not your strength, but do you want people connect with you? Where do you want to send people in social. Where are you most active? Where are you sharing this?

Nick Sonnenberg 00:55:50  LinkedIn is where I'm most active.

Jasmine Star 00:55:52  Beautiful and just search.

Jasmine Star 00:55:52  By your name. Nick.

Nick Sonnenberg 00:55:53  Nick Sonnenberg. Beautiful.

Jasmine Star 00:55:54  We'll be sure to link it in the show notes.

Jasmine Star 00:55:55  Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for watching and listening to The Jasmine Star Show.