E018 - Transforming Chaos into Harmony with Nick Sonnerberg's CPR Framework and Operational Insights

Join us in this enlightening episode of the Employee Onboarding Podcast as we delve into the world of operational efficiency with Nick Sonnerberg, former high-frequency trader and CEO of Leverage. Discover how Nick's unique CPR Framework revolutionizes employee onboarding and operational practices, drawing on his extensive Wall Street experience. 

Learn about the transformative power of technology and automation in creating efficient, streamlined business processes. Whether you're scaling a startup or part of a Fortune 10 company, Nick's insights on time management, efficient communication, and strategic planning are invaluable. 

Tune in for an episode packed with actionable tips and real-world solutions to optimize your team's performance and onboarding experience.

Transcript

Erin Rice (00:04.096)

Welcome to the Employee Onboarding Podcast where we are unpacking great onboarding ideas and best practices from the world's top HR practitioners and thought leaders. At Process Street, that starts with our mission to make recurring work fun, fast, and thoughtless for teams everywhere. My name is Erin Rice, and I'm the People and Operations Coordinator here at Process Street. Today, I'm joined by Nick Sonnerberg. Nick is an entrepreneur, columnist, guest lecturer at Columbia University.

and the Wall Street Journal's bestselling author of Come Up for Air, how teams can leverage systems and tools to stop drowning in work. Nick is the founder and CEO of Leverage, a leading operational efficiency consultancy that helps companies implement the CPR business efficiency framework, which is the culmination of Nick's unique perspective on the value of time, efficiency and automation, which stems in part from the eight years he spent working as a high efficiency trader on Wall Street.

Nick and his team have worked with organizations of all sizes, across all industries, and from high growth startups to the Fortune 10. Thanks so much for joining us today, Nick.

nick (01:08.066)

Thanks for having me.

Erin Rice (01:10.099)

So before we dive in, I'd like to ask an icebreaker, what is in your Amazon cart that you haven't hit purchase on yet?

nick (01:18.958)

Um, so there was a Tom Ford beard oil randomly. It's getting dry right now in New York. And then a, there's this pre-workout, um, powder that I like called pre-caged. And those were the two things in my cart.

Erin Rice (01:23.807)

Hahaha

Erin Rice (01:37.511)

Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that with us. So what we really came here for employee onboarding, I'd love if you could start by sharing a little bit more of how you ended up starting your business leverage.

nick (01:49.058)

Sure. So as you mentioned, I used to be a high frequency trader on Wall Street for eight years. So I was developing algorithms and coding computers to trade stocks at literally micro and nanosecond speeds, purely just based off of math. And I developed a really deep appreciation for automation and the value of time, because in that space, literally a microsecond could mean millions and millions of dollars. So after that, I got into startups.

The initial version of leverage was this freelancer marketplace. So I've always been passionate about figuring out something, some way to saving time. And so the initial was how can we just get freelancers to do stuff for you to save entrepreneurs and business owners time. And we scaled really quickly. We scaled to, I had a business partner at the time. Um, and together we scaled to like seven figures in the first year and a hundred and fifty people on the team.

which sounds impressive, but under the hood, we were a complete mess. The Org Chart was literally just the two of us. He was people-facing and I was the non-people-facing person. So I was like the wizard behind the curtains developing strategy and automation and various things. And also we were like three quarters of a million dollars in debt and losing half a million a year. So we grew really fast, but we had a lot of

issues under the hood. And one day we were working at a coffee shop together. And I'm sitting there holding my coffee and he comes up and taps me on the shoulder and he drops the news that he's out, not in two weeks or two days, literally he's out in two minutes. And so I'm holding my coffee and thinking to myself like, yeah, this is pretty bad. Like we might not survive this one. Um, and it was really rough after that, within a three month period,

We lose 40% of revenue, team members, clients, and I'm cashing out my 401k. My dad had to take a second mortgage on his house. So that was a fun car ride with him, driving up to the bank to get that second mortgage. So it was a rough three months, and I had to make some hard decisions. Do I stick around or do we bankrupt this company? And I was working, you know.

nick (04:15.566)

24 seven and really started analyzing how did we operate and what would need to change for this to not just completely fail. And I started seeing one of the key things was time. You know, with enough time I knew I could fix it, but you know, it's hard when you're drowning in work and you're literally losing money and team members and clients left and right. You know, how do you clean something up

I'm just trying to generate enough revenue to make payroll. But I knew with enough time I could figure this out. And with more time, I could do more sales calls, I could fix more processes. So how could I immediately get back some time? So I started doing a time study on where the biggest holes were in terms of time sucks and inefficiencies. And I realized that there's kind of three main buckets where I was wasting time.

how we were communicating. There was, with 150 people on the team, it was just nonstop pings and dings. Text, email, Slack, and it was all over the place. It was nonstop. And if you didn't have even the right notification preferences, it was hard to get anything done because it was just nonstop ding, ding. So, cleaning up how we communicated and building a framework that the team could follow for when to put things in which communications tool. The next was

a project management tool or work management, which I call my book. I couldn't answer questions like who's working on what. There was no place to click a button and see what the status of work or projects or tasks was. I didn't know what I delegated last week. Did it get done or not get done? So I knew those were all really critical questions to be able to answer, and I couldn't. So I knew I needed to clean up my communications, clean up how we planned. And then lastly...

our resources, our knowledge, our SOPs, our processes, these are all assets. And I knew that those were critical too. And we were, I had the foresight to do a pretty good job on documenting processes. So when he did leave, at least I had stuff documented if it had I not, and I didn't know how to run certain processes, we definitely would have gone bankrupt. So, you know, these three key areas, communication, planning, and resources.

nick (06:43.378)

I started focusing on those and very quickly I started getting back my time and I was able to reinvest that time back into sales and things to fix the company. It started happening really quickly and at the same time people started reaching out to me asking me to consult them on operations. People like Tony Robbins or Poo-Pourri or Ethereum started reaching out. I had my freelancer marketplace and then on the side people started paying me to do day

help them with Process Street and Slack and Asana and Zapier and all these tools that most companies had never heard of or had no idea how to use. And the same impact that we saw at Leverage was happening with all these other companies. It didn't matter if you were a 10 person team or a 100 person team, a poop spray, a cryptocurrency. And so I started realizing that actually teaching people best practices of how to leverage all these new systems and tools like a Process Street.

or Slack or Asana, there was no good trainings out there. There was no good frameworks. It's all so new. So we really kind of started going deep. I had this light bulb moment that the real opportunity was helping companies be successful with all these tools. So over time, eventually we've kind of killed that freelancer marketplace. And now what leverage does is we're trying to be best in the world at operational efficiency, training and consulting. And so...

really with a big emphasis on training people on our best practices that we've developed now over the eight years that we've been in business.

Erin Rice (08:23.099)

Yeah, that's great. What a journey. So I bet in this process, you have obviously onboarded at least 150 people, but probably well over that.

nick (08:33.714)

I've, I mean, especially back in the freelancer days, it's probably, you know, well over a thousand people that we've on boarded.

Erin Rice (08:41.219)

Yeah, so what would you say are sort of the key pieces to a successful onboarding?

nick (08:47.614)

Well, you know, I guess it matters where do you define onboarding, onboarding to start and end, but onboarding for me is successful where someone at that point should know how we work and what their expectations are. So successful onboarding would be they know all the systems, the tools, they know our culture, they know what they should be working on and how their success is measured.

You know, to me, that's, you know, at a high level, the critical aspects of what needs to be covered during onboarding. So, so it sounds simple, but most companies, you know, they don't have things well documented to just be able to hand that over to someone. So, you know, onboarding typically is like an hour long meeting. And then all of a sudden you're thrown in the deep end and getting thrown a bunch of work that needs to get done.

And the problem is if you don't onboard someone successfully, it's an investment, you know, say it takes a day, two days a week, whatever it is. Um, but if you don't make that investment and you just throw people into the deep end too quickly, they're never going to have time to go back and learn those things because there's always some urgent fire or a client that needs to get onboarded or something. And oftentimes that onboarding can really can get people

20, 40% more efficient if you invest the time getting them up speed because now they're going to have an understanding of the culture. They'll have an understanding of how the company operates, their expectations, how to use the systems. So when I hire people now, it's days before they actually start doing any work. We've got all the trainings that we do for our clients, we make them go through it. Like I don't want anyone touching a sauna.

starting to do any tasks until they know how to use Asana the way that we teach Asana. Otherwise the amount of slippage and wasted time is just going to be too high. And even within a few weeks, we'll be losing money by not having done it, if that makes sense. So we make sure that people understand how to speak our language, so to speak, both what our culture is, how to use our tools. We have...

Erin Rice (11:01.295)

Yeah.

nick (11:13.986)

a pretty robust process for making clear what the expectations are. You know, most people when you get hired, you don't... You had a job description that basically said, hey, Nick, congratulations, you're the new head of client success. You have to be a good communicator and make sure clients are successful. That doesn't really, when you start pulling back the layers, give you a clear idea of what the day-to-day is. On a more... Not even super micro, like...

just one level down. So when we have something we call org GPS, and it's basically like taking an org chart, but on steroids. So when someone gets hired on a silver platter, silver plate, we hand to them. What does it mean to be that role? Like what are the key initiatives? What are the responsibilities? What are the metrics of success? Who do you report to? Who reports to you? And it's all, it's all in, uh, we use Coda, um, for things like that. And so.

There's no confusion whatsoever. It's crystal clear. If you don't like doing something down the road, there's a button to click off board. So then the manager gets notified that you don't wanna do, it might mean, not mean that you don't wanna be head of client success anymore, but there's like one out of say 15 responsibilities that you don't want anymore. And you can click a button so now we're notified and we could try to work towards figuring out a way

to not transfer the entire job, but just that responsibility. And so, we've put a lot of time into that, but oftentimes, the initial investments of getting someone set up for success, or the investment of documenting a process, or the investment in anything foundational to your operations, it's an investment, just like an investment in, I don't know, buying a house or a stock market. It's an investment, but just like...

buying a stock or a house, like you're hoping to get a positive return on that investment. So for us, what we've seen is the more you invest on the front end, getting someone set up for success and in some of these SOPs and processes, you get multiples of return within a pretty short period of time because of that upfront time investment.

Erin Rice (13:35.231)

Absolutely, and that's starting once you've made the decision to hire them. What about the interview process? I bet that's factoring into that investment as well.

nick (13:45.642)

Yeah, well, you know, the more that you can put, you know, we've done various clever tricks. Like we make people submit a video, and you know, if you write in, you know, our old process was, you write an email to one email address, you would get an automated email back with instructions. There'd be like a hidden word, like banana in there, and instructions like.

write a new email to another email address, put the code word banana in the subject line, and send us a two minute video, unlisted in YouTube, explaining kind of who you are and why you're a good fit. Right? And so that filtered out, especially when we were doing freelancer stuff, because we were getting so many, like thousands of applicants a week, or a month, sorry. That would filter out like 90% of people, because they just wouldn't follow instructions. And we only checked,

the email inbox that we told them to write to. So like we don't, we didn't even look, if they replied in the wrong place, like no one ever saw it, cause like no one was checking it. And I find that a video tells you so much more about a person than a resume. You know, do they have a messy background? Is the quality low or weird? Like, I don't know, you can tell a lot.

about someone's character from a video that you just don't get in a resume. So, you know, I really support the asynchronous video as a, as kind of like a screening before you invest more into it on a live call. And try to, try to, you know, if for me, operational efficiency is pretty important. So, you know,

giving people kind of some tests on that upfront, or even giving them, if they get further enough along in the interview process, giving them access to some of our content, and then seeing, taking a look and seeing like if they were able to implement it on their own. And then if they were, that speeds up the onboarding process. You've just moved, you know, a cost out of being a cost, because when you're onboarding, you're eating that expense. If it's an interview,

nick (16:05.162)

you know, it's not an expense anymore. So the more you can shift from onboarding to interview in a fair and ethical way, that's, you know, from a business owner standpoint, a pretty good thing.

Erin Rice (16:17.339)

Yeah, 100%. I took inbox zero training from Leverage about employee, yeah, email management. And I'm also an efficiency nerd, and I have three kids, a full-time job, volunteer opportunities, and just a lot in my life. And so I don't have time to waste on fluff in my life.

nick (16:23.553)

I guess.

nick (16:41.026)

How much? How was the training?

Erin Rice (16:43.979)

It was incredible. We now have it as a part of our onboarding for all of our team because I thought I was really good at email management. And then I took the course and I realized how much room I had for improvement, even though I am an efficiency nerd. And it was amazing.

nick (16:59.118)

Isn't it incredible? Isn't it incredible in just a few hours of learning how to use your email, something that you've used for decades, you can learn just a few key tricks and how many hours a week is it saving you now by staying at inbox zero?

Erin Rice (17:14.427)

Gosh, probably at least five. And the piece that was really important, because I'm in people, so people are constantly emailing, I'm getting all kinds of random stuff that doesn't need to be prioritized, especially externally. And so now that I have all of my email notifications turned off, I check my email in the morning, I check it before I take a lunch, and I check it before I end my day.

And like that in itself has saved me quite a bit of time.

nick (17:45.618)

Yeah, right now, yeah, well, it's great to great to hear. I'm glad that you found value. Have you have you done our other trainings on Slack and Asana? And you don't use Asana a process treat, right? You guys use Airtable.

Erin Rice (17:57.915)

We don't. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yep.

nick (18:01.198)

Yeah, we're starting to roll out air table training in the coming months. So that might be something helpful for you.

Erin Rice (18:09.039)

Yeah, for sure. So when talking to new hires, one of the things we do, obviously, is assign the inbox zero training. How do you all help new hires absorb this efficiency and really start contributing?

nick (18:25.386)

We welcome through the core trainings that we offer to our clients, right? So it's kind of a, it's pretty cool. Like our core business is training clients on how to use all these tools. So we just take all that and now any new hire goes through the same thing. And like I said also before, we also have this org GPS that we've internally built and that's part of it too.

I find that just getting really clear on what are the, how are we gonna measure success up front? Not every role maybe will have objectives and key results, but every role has responsibilities and expectations. And getting really clear on what those are. Like, hey, you're head of sales, like your expectation is to grow from 1 million to 2 million dollars next quarter. Like that's a very clear cut, quantifiable thing. And the more,

that you're able to align on a metric or an OKR objective and key result, the less pressure it is down the road, that investment of time upfront is going to save you so much time micromanaging and telling someone, hey, this week, can you call 15 clients or prospects? It's like you don't have to do that anymore. They know they got to increase revenue from 1 million to 2 million. As long as they have a certain level of intelligence or experience.

they'll be able to figure out that they should probably do those phone calls. So the more upfront alignment you can do during onboarding, the less micromanagement on the backend.

Erin Rice (20:01.895)

Yeah, and we've heard time and time again, people just don't like to be micromanaged.

nick (20:08.371)

I like to macro manage.

Erin Rice (20:11.438)

I haven't heard that before.

nick (20:14.316)

I created it.

Erin Rice (20:16.55)

We gotta hear more.

nick (20:18.606)

That's it. I mean, it's like self explanatory opposite of micro.

Erin Rice (20:21.191)

Yeah

Erin Rice (20:24.419)

So when thinking about onboarding, obviously you've seen probably so much in your career with thousands of onboarding situations. What do you sort of see as the future of onboarding and the changes that we predict are coming in the tech industry?

nick (20:43.93)

Um, I think that, I think that the way that we're on boarding is going to start becoming more and more the norm and you know, being giving people metrics, clear responsibilities. I think that operational efficiency should be part of every single person's onboarding. I think it's almost irresponsible. If you're a business owner, an entrepreneur, literally.

training people on how to use email and the core tools that you use as a team. It's like speaking a language. You wouldn't wanna hire someone that speaks Chinese and you're an English speaking team and you throw them into projects and you can't speak with each other. These tools are like a language. So it's almost irresponsible to not give every new hire training on these things, which doesn't take a whole lot of time.

so that you get everyone speaking the same language. Like it literally is the difference. Like Inbox Zero for you was five hours a week, right? So, which is massive. If you work a 40 hour week, that's 12 and a half percent just on Inbox Zero, right? Now, if you start stacking that with all the other tools that you use, you know, and they're all about the same, like you could get 20 to 40% more productivity out of every person, most likely, if they're properly trained on the core tools.

You know, if you're paying someone $100,000 a year and you get an extra 20% out of them, that's like $20,000 back to you. It's actually more. If you want to think of it this way, out of a 40 hour work week, you're probably getting, if, if between, if you start adding up the amount of time people spend searching for things that are misorganized email meetings, you know, whatever.

probably adds up more to like 30 hours a week of that and only 10 hours a week to key initiatives. So if you're able to give someone back say 10 hours a week and they beforehand only had 10 hours for big meaningful projects and you've just doubled it to now 20 hours, like you're doubling their output or their efficiency. Right, oftentimes.

nick (23:06.658)

There's like stuff that just needs to get done to keep the lights on. And it's like, once you start getting into kind of that over time territory is really where you're able to start making a dent on those, you know, more innovative key projects. It's just, you get pulled into all this other crap and. You know, fires come up and all that stuff. So an extra five hours isn't even just 12 and a half percent that you, it's actually quite, quite a lot more.

when you start factoring in the actual available amount of time you have for those key initiatives.

Erin Rice (23:42.587)

Yeah, and 1,000%. And also, just the distraction. That's what I really noticed is I can get deeper into a focus time and really add value when I'm not distracted by all the notifications and things like that as well. It's interesting. Awesome. So last question. What is the one thing that companies can do to create a wow moment for their new hires?

nick (24:13.55)

I think having like a documented wiki, we've really been recommending, I know in Process Street you guys have a way to build SOPs, whatever it is, SharePoint, Coda's a wonderful one, Notion, but like having like a really clean digital handbook and it's like well organized, it's visually appealing, there's emojis, there's.

you know, bold, highlight, underline, all that stuff. And it's like, this is everything you need to know about the company. It's much more impressive. And if you kind of want to compare two companies, like if you're on the other side, take even before onboarding, if you're interviewing with people, I would highly encourage you to...

try to get a bit of an understanding of the operational efficiency culture at the business. If you ask someone, hey, what tools do you use? And they say, oh, we use email for everything. We don't use any of these modern tools like Slack or ProcessDri, or Asana or Coda, you know, and you have like a physical server, instead of using like a Dropbox or something like that, you're going to most likely, that's a reflection of

things are going to be a little bit like a clown rodeo circus at that company. Um, versus during the interview process is like, Hey, can you show me like what your Wiki looks like, or show me like how you manage projects and tasks. And they can like share screen and show you a very clean, visually appealing. Hey, like these are our priorities. And when I click this button, this is what I need to do today. And when I click this button, these are our core values. If, if you're an applicant and the interviewer is able to do that,

you can probably be sure that the culture is going to be a better culture and it's going to be a better work environment. So I think it goes both ways. I think that applicants should be looking at this and factoring that in. It's not just about compensation. It should also be how much growth there is for you and how much chaos there's going to be. And when someone's got

nick (26:36.834)

there's systems in the right order, there's going to be far less chaos.

Erin Rice (26:42.267)

Yeah, absolutely. And who wants to join chaos?

nick (26:46.67)

Well, yeah. You know, there's an, it's inevitable. There's always gonna be chaos, but, you know, there's different levels of it.

Erin Rice (26:56.215)

Well, before we go, I'd love to hear a little bit more details. I know I've actually read your book and a lot of what you've talked about is in there. But if you want to share a little bit more about your book, I'd love to hear that.

nick (27:08.166)

My book covers my CPR framework, communicate, plan and resource. That same framework that I mentioned helped us avoid bankruptcy. And we've now used with thousands of companies from, you know, teams of one up to some of the fortune 10 companies. And so the book is really all around how teams and organizations as a whole can be productive and it's not, it's, it's for the most part tool agnostic. It's really more.

to lay out a framework and the theory of how teams can be productive. And the general principle in the book is to be a high performing team. You have to be, you have to have a strategy to optimize for speed of retrieval of information versus what's happening now as people optimize to transfer information fast and that, that builds a scavenger hunt and where, you know, if you're always optimizing just to do things quick and you start putting things in the wrong bucket, it becomes a mess.

and you want to avoid that.

Erin Rice (28:12.736)

Well, thank you, Nick, so much for your time. I don't want to take any more of it. I'm sure you have efficiency to get back to. But we appreciate all of your time.

nick (28:22.314)

Well, thanks for having me. If people want the book, they can go to come up for air.com. We've got a bunch of bonus resources and links to buy the book. And if people need any help with the training of the things and want to take it to the next level, my company get leverage.com does all the trainings of all the tools that we talked about in the book.

Erin Rice (28:41.407)

Sounds great. Awesome.

nick (28:43.894)

Thanks.