Why Dave Decided to talk to Nick Sonnenburg:
Nick Sonnenburg has found that speed in a business is not just doing more in less time. Why grind out more work with less value when optimization saves you both time and money. With Nick having been employed by people like Tony Robbins, Aetherium, and many other big name companies he saw this first hand. Oh and did we mention he saved Aetherium $1,000,000/month just by optimizing their use of Slack?
Tips and Tricks for You and Your Business:
(1:54) “You’re Going to be Learning Be Rocket Science…”
(3:16) Nick’s Super Power is Easily Pausing to Go Faster in Business
(6:54) Nick Shut off His Company’s Marketing For a Year...Yeah Dave Was Shocked to
(8:18) The Disadvantages of Moving Fast in the Wrong Direction
(10:17) How Do You Know When to Use Each Tool for Your Business?
(14:36) Your Brain Should Not Hold the Company’s Secrets to Success Hostage
(17:40) Leveraging the Agency System
(21:07) Conversion Auditing, Do You Know How to do it? Better Yet, Do You Know What it is?
(26:03) Outsourcing is Some Awesome Sauce IF You Know What Needs Outsourcing
(28:02) You Increase the Speed of Your Company with Getting Rid of Roadblocks
(29:57) Optimizing Slack to Increase Your Company’s Speed
Quotable Moments:
(4:32) “I suffer from PTSD as an entrepreneur. Having cycled a couple of times and understanding the fear of ‘Oh my gosh what it if I lose it..’ so I just had the gas going the whole time.”
(8:22) “A lot of people move fast, but moving fast in the wrong direction doesn’t help you either.”
(15:38) “You can allow other people to look at how others do their job and give suggestions. Fresh eyes spark innovation.”
(26:58) “I think defining success and being able to measure success is one of the most important things with funnels and with any project in general to be honest. And I think people just don’t take enough time up front to think about those types of things.”
Other Tidbits:
Nick helped Aetherium save nearly $1,000,000 from optimizing their Slack page.
Nick’s company, Leverage, specializes in outsourcing and has helped people with buying a house all the way to optimizing a funnel. This wide range of services though has allowed them to identify what niches require and thrive off more optimization.
Important Episode Links:
One Funnel Away Challenge
DotCom Secrets Book
Email Dave
Connect on Facebook
Follow On Instagram
Contact Episode Guest:
GetLeverage.com
Nick@GetLeverage.com
Episode Transcript:
00:00 Welcome to funnel hacker radio podcast where we go behind the scenes and uncover the tactics and strategies top entrepreneurs are using to make more sales, dominate their markets and how you can get those same results. Here is your host, Dave Woodward. Everybody welcome back to funnel hacking
00:18 radio. I am so excited. Day I'd be up to and bring it on. A dear friend of mine who has been a mentor of mine, actually guy I've loved getting to know better and the one introduce you guys to Nick Sonnenberg. Thanks for having me. I am so excited. Uh, for those of you guys, go ahead. I'm honored to be called a mentor. You are. No, honestly I, it's one of the things I've, I am so impressive. For those of you guys who don't know, nick, this is a guy who's been an x high frequency trader from Wall Street, does the CEO of leverage, which is a company. I've got a ton of admiration for. A, they're totally disrupted the agency model, but the part I love is his. The way in which you think nick is, blows my mind. You have this ability to look at super, super complex problems and be able to minimize it down to the very key factors and to communicate it in a way that so many other people can understand.
01:08 We, we're just talking about this whole idea that, uh, you've got a new book coming out come up for air where you've consulted one and two type of employee businesses, consulted Tony Robbins, consultant, large, huge companies as well. And I think the part I love, just as every time I talked to you, is just to see, I mean, your mind races at this crazy, crazy pace and yet you slow things down so well to be able to explain things to people there. It's like, oh, oh, I get it. And I'm just totally impressed with that. So I, I don't have that skillset. And so when I see someone like you who does, I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm so impressed.
01:42 Well, thank you very much. A, I'll give you a story to piggy back off of that. So, uh, my first day of Grad school I went to Berkeley for my masters. I did financial engineering. And the very first day they, they said, look, you're going to be learning rocket science here, but the real goal is that you should be able to explain these concepts to a five year old. And that's really how you know that you've mastered a subject as if you can explain it very clearly in an in a simple way. So it's a big honor for you to say that to me cause that's something that really has sat with me since Grad school.
02:14 Well I love it. I get it. It's one of the things I've always, every time I talked with Russell I loved, he spends so much time on trying to get down to even a little doodle in a drawing for that same principle as, I mean there's a lot of people who will talk over people's heads and think that this techno babble and everything else is going to flatter people. All it does is confuse them and actually pushes people further away. And when you talk with people like yourself, with Russell, it literally draws people to you. Every, we were at TNC and I saw you hordes of people just trying to get your attention just to talk with you because of that.
02:44 You were the one with the hordes. I had them anymore. Um, no, like when I speak to people and I can't understand what they're talking about, I usually, the first thing that starts going on in my head is I don't think this person's really a master of what they're talking about. If, if they're explaining it in such a complex way,
03:00 you know, I love that concept. I wanna kind of expound on that. So we're, one of the things we're going to get to here later in the podcast is what leverage is doing right now on fixed pricing of funnels. So hold tight to the end because you want to hear that for sure. But I want to talk to you about one of the things you and I were talking about, this whole idea as far as the power of pausing to go faster. And for those of you guys have been following our journey as far as click funnels. Um, I actually, I all announce it right now. We are going to be changed our podcast, uh, to where right now we're 78,000 customers and we're in change the kind of the idea behind the podcast to bring on more people like yourself who understand scale and really invite people on our journey to get to a hundred to build a culture of 100,000 customers or users here before the end of this year.
03:46 But to do it, and it's one of the things you and I were just discussing was when you build a company as an entrepreneur, it's, so a little backstory here. Last week we were at a jewelry store and who's our VP of marketing at all of our marketing team in and we spent a bunch of time, I, Russell was there kind of identifying what the, the forefront is going to be as far as all these other funnels we want to do. But the one thing I realized was for our team, one of the things that's hard is the speed at which we go and it's what you and I were talking about. I, I suffer from Pstd as an entrepreneur of having cycled a couple of times and understanding the fear of, oh my gosh, if I lose it, I just, and so I keep going at the gas going all the time. And yet, uh, as you and I were just talking about, you have this ability to really understand the power of pausing to go faster. If you don't mind. Can you expound on that?
04:37 Totally. And there was a good, a great book. Um, I'm going to look up the name, it's called weight, which is all about the power posing. But yeah, what we were talking about before is once you go live with a company and you have customers to support, I mean that's it. Like you have to put a huge amount of focus on maintaining the, the, the system, supporting your clients, making sure that they're well supported. So sometimes when you grow too quickly, um, things break. And then a lot of, a lot of time that, that you have to invest down the road is spent on kind of fixing issues that kind of arose from premature scaling. So in development software development, you have, um, you have a, a concept that is, um, what's it called? It's called a coat. Um, oh my God, I'm blanking right now that you have technical debt, just like, and what that basically means is, you know, you've hardcoded some product or some feature that you want to do, but not a super scalable way.
05:42 So in a year or in two years from now, since it wasn't done in such an abstract way, you're going to have to Redo it because inevitably whatever you'd thought you need now you're going to get feedback from people and things and needs are gonna change and you're going to to change it. And the more time that you kind of invest, it's always a trade off, right? Like if you were to try to make something as abstract as possible, now you move slower to get that feature at least, but then you have less technical debt. And just like there's technical debt and coding, you have operational debt and companies, right? The quicker you launch, um, launch or do whatever it is, that's it. Like you don't have the bandwidth or you have less bandwidth now to go back and document processes or think through is this the best process and could we automate things because at the end of the day you have these people to support and it's really hard to find the bandwidth to go back and revisit a process document it, um, automate various things.
06:43 So like what I did, we at leverage, we grew to seven figures the first year, fully bootstrapped. We had like a hundred people at the end of that year and we moved so fast that a lot of stuff broke and it was really hard to go back and find the bandwidth to fix it. Um, because we were just having to support the current clients. So what I ended up doing actually last year as I shut off marketing for a whole year. Just kidding. Yeah, it was, it was one of those, I got the team together and I'm like, and I said to them and they all freaked out. I'm like, we're shutting, therefore I'm free. Just listen to this. I'm like, I was like, yeah, you heard me. We're going to do a year of zero marketing and we're just going to focus on internal processes, procedures, quality of service. We don't. And, and what I said to them was, we don't need a single one, single more client.
07:39 We just need to retain what we have and engage what we have more and um, improve our internal efficiencies to drive profit margins up. And it was a really kind of contrarian type of way of thinking about it. People always say, you know, sales sells, but I dunno, sometimes sales doesn't solve everything because if you're a new startup, sometimes selling and getting more customers and you haven't really dialed into product market fit or internal efficiencies, sometimes sales could hurt you more than it helps you. That's fascinating. At least that's my experience though. It's honesty. It's, it was just so fascinating for me. As we sat down with the, again, we had probably 25 26 of our team members this last week, and Julie's kind of running the show and I'm hit and miss in and out of meetings and stuff. And I heard it was Friday and it was kind of a people bringing together kind of their ideas for the whole week.
08:36 And they were talking about, you know, what are the good things, what are the bad things, what are things you'd like to change? And one of the things that that kept coming up was this idea of speed. And I'm like, I know like one speed and that's fast forward as fast as I can go. And yet I also realized as, as you grow as an entrepreneur, as you grow as an executive in your team, you have to understand that not everybody goes at the same pace you do. And for some that speed really, it literally, it creates so much stress for them. I was shocked to see just the anxiety created and, and how, and so I love hearing you saying you literally shut down. I can't do that.
09:14 You guys are super impressive. Like what you guys, what you and Russell have belt over there. I am. I am really amazed by it. But you know, a lot of people move fast, but moving fast in the wrong direction, it doesn't really help you. You either, right? That's true. You have a bit slower, but make sure you're going in the right direction. So it's always a balance of speed, um, uh, speed versus kind of being a little bit more long longterm focus. But in a lot of cases, like when I've pushed the team, hey, this needs to get out by next week or something like that, stuff breaks or it wasn't thought out very in a very, uh, systematic way. And we find that we ended up moving fast in the wrong direction and the whole thing was a waste of money in some cases. Not In all, but so it's just something, there's sometimes a benefit to going slower.
10:05 So is that the premise of your next book come up for air? No. So what's coming prayer come up for air kind of is, it naturally came out of my experience with building leverage, which is a fully remote, you know, bootstrapped company. Um, as well as uh, from my consulting business where I go into companies and help them improve and optimize and automate their internal systems and processes from a process operational slash tech point of view. Um, so in my experience with consulting and it leverage, I found that there is this pattern and everyone kind of struggles with three main areas of their business. Um, so I wrapped a little framework around it called CPR, which stands for communicate, plan and resource. And I realized one day that all companies were struggling in these three areas. And it was something that I realized without realizing it at the time, was a framework that we were running leverage by without it being formal.
11:06 So the first thing is communication. And I realized most companies are not communicating efficiently. There's all these new tools out there like slack and a sauna and all these things that a lot of startups know about, but a lot of mainstream companies that have been around for 20 years, um, have never even heard of. Right. And then also, even if you're a startup, like I'm sure you guys, are you guys using slack at Click funnels? Right? So first of all it's, it's, it's one thing to know about certain tools, but it's another thing to know when you should use a certain tool, like when should you use email versus slack versus text message, right? Versus a project management software. So, um, that's like the first thing people have never, when you got hired at a company, you get an employee manual of vacation days or insurance, but it doesn't tell you, hey, we use this type of tool for this, this type of tool for that.
12:03 So I was consulting for a theory. I'm, they were a 1200 person company. They were using slack, but it was misconfigured and they didn't have naming conventions for channels. They weren't using third party APP integrations. They had the wrong notification preferences. And I calculated that because of these inefficiencies there were probably losing about a million dollars a month. Something is silly. No, but when you have a blog, I mean this was a really extreme case, but when you have like a thousand people in a slack channel and it's nonstop all day at channel, like what's the Wifi password or at channel who wants to do, everyone has the wrong notification preferences and they're just getting distracted. There's, there's all that research that if you're in a flow state, it takes you like 10 minutes to get back into it. So you know, if it takes you 10 seconds to read each of these messages and it happens a hundred times a day and then you take people's average rate and you take that a thousand eyeballs are getting distracted.
13:00 It was massive. So not to get off too far off topic. So, um, come up for errors is kind of a, that employee handbook that you never got where it is at a high level of teachers. You had to think about the different types of tools when to use a communication tool versus a project management tool versus documenting knowledge. So then it goes a bit deeper into each of those. So what's the difference between internal versus external communication? Right, so slack for internal email for external, then I go into best practices. Okay. How do you optimize slack? Then look at email. How do you optimize email? How do you actually get to inbox zero? Um, the best way to get to inbox zero is to get to email zero. So a lot of people have a lot of email because they're using it when they shouldn't be using it.
13:43 So then the next part on planning it's like, okay, well when do you use a project management software versus a communication tool? A lot of people are project managing via text or via slack when it really belongs in a project management tool, which is what it's used for. And you can capture state and a whole bunch of other stuff because in a communication tool, the problem is it gets lost and then you had to start having to scroll. And at a high, at a high level, the name of the game is be able to know what you have to work on as a manager and know what people are doing and be able to find information as quickly as possible. Like at the end of the day that's, that's it with all of these tools. So creating guidelines and best practices with when and how best to use these different types of tools is kind of what I'm trying to achieve with the book.
14:28 And then the the are for resource is the most overlooked thing, but most companies are not thinking about documenting knowledge. And I have a, I have a difference between static and dynamic knowledge in the book. So static knowledge would just be like an internal Wiki. Like what's the Wifi Password, what are the core values, what's the vision? It's just, you know, where can I find that document? But then you have what I call dynamic, which our processes, so doing payroll, like how do you, what is the process of doing payroll and can you generate a checklist to make sure that all the steps are, are done. And what when you document knowledge, a couple things happen. One, you de risk the company so that if someone leaves, you have the knowledge there so that de-risked that company makes it faster to get someone else on board. But the, uh, the second thing that it does is you save money because a lot of time is spent looking up information or wasting people's, so that all gets saved.
15:28 But probably the biggest impact that you get is it really sparks innovation because once you've documented something, now you can allow for other people to take a look at how other people do their job and give suggestions because fresh eyes spark innovation. Um, if you have new people looking at how payroll is done or how the onboarding process is done, all of a sudden you're going to start getting people looking at things in different ways. So when I was a high frequency trader, I used to have to take a two week block leave to make sure I wasn't hiding trades and before I left. Yeah, when you're a front office trader, you have to take a block leave. And so what I have to document, what's going on in the market and how my algorithms worked and how, what, you know, how to run my book.
16:15 And even though I was the expert at that market or that algorithm, there'd always be some improvement when I got back, when I got back. You know, even if it's small, but people would just start challenging like how everything was being run and they would find things that just because I'm looking at it day in and day out, I wouldn't find, so at leverage we do quarterly rotations where the person that does payroll does customer success and customer success. Um, just for like just for like a week out of the quarter. But that's to stress test the system so that if all of a sudden we get a bunch of people that quit or just to make sure that we don't get too relaxed and doing things because that's the way that they've always been done. So that is really commission have come up for air. No, I love it. I the quarterly rotation. I'll have to, I'll have to talk to her to you about that one. That'd be, yeah, I'd be terrible. Jake's job as a designer though. He did come back and no color whatsoever is everything we looked here. Yeah. Just everything's black and white.
17:19 Well I'm vastly again, you've done so many cool things and I know one of the things you guys are looking at right now, uh, you mentioned your work with Nora who I'll get a lot of our community knows as far as [inaudible] and created our certified partners program years ago and you're looking at the changing the way that agencies are run. So if you don't mind, give me some ideas probably with which you guys are looking at doing. So leverage, um, which is uh, the websites get leveraged.com if you want to check it out. Leverage is like a new type of agency. So rather than going to the traditional agency where you have put up like a 10 or 20 k retainer per month, we, we made it more cost, affordable, affordable. You pay for whatever you use. And we do things in three main buckets, admin, marketing and operations.
18:00 And you could do a small one off task or you could have us do a whole app for you. So we've, we've done, uh, we've helped people get renters for their home. That would be an admin task, book, travel, do research. But then on the marketing side of things, we do a lot of podcast production, podcast marketing. We've created books, funnels. Uh, we've designed people, whenever I give a talk, they designed the PowerPoint. I'm a writer for inc. I, um, I audio record all of my content and a cab when I have downtime and I send that, I send that to the writer and they write the article posted on ink and then they blast it on social media. We've helped people, you know, get a ton of followers on Instagram. And then on the operations side of things, we've, uh, we'll help people automate processes, document processes, set up CRMs, do customization with a CRM, set up Shopify sites, et cetera.
18:58 So what we're talking about nor about which I'm really excited. Um, one of the things historically if leverage is we would, uh, we would always do something as a custom, a custom project or task. But in the three and a half years we've seen they've, that a lot of people are requesting these funnel buildouts, you know, book launches, launches, et Cetera. So, and then also just, um, like conversion audits. We've been just getting people to come to us like, Hey, we would love a conversion. Like, will you take a look at our funnel and just tell me what, tell me what you think. So what we've been talking in Nora about is, is helping us to kind of create some fixed item menu menu projects and tasks and the funnel space, um, that are well defined that people can just like click a button and say, Oh, I want a conversion audit.
19:47 I'm going to get, I'm going to get the traffic strategy, the messaging, the offer, the delivery, this much money. Um, so we're starting off with a conversion audit because that's kind of the easiest intro to someone. But then what we're also in the background figuring out now is a full done for you funnel. So you leverage is unique in the sense we have people in all different skill sets. So it's not like we're just for copywriting or just for funnel strategy or just design. So we're uniquely positioned that we could do the full start to finish scope. So we, we are also figuring out some fixed price fixed price for doing a full build out of a funnel from start to finish. Nick. Super Cool. Super Cool. This isn't the, one of the things I'm super excited about this. It was fun when I saw the two guys talking at TNC cause I just knew some amazing brainchild was going to come out of your conversation. And so it was fun just to see you guys talking. Yeah we were just like, oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. This is awesome.
20:54 So what are things you've done as far as his whole idea as far as a conversion audit? Yeah, give people a little more cause for a lot of people everyone talks about traffic and everything else. But it seems to be like this nebulous thing that people don't understand. I want to run traffic and I want to get, make things work. But I don't know exactly what that means. How does your conversion audit, what are you looking at? How, what are the things that people should be paying attention to? What do they need to provide to you? Things of that sort. So for one thing, so we're going to have two different buckets. One, if they already have something that they want audited and then another thing if they want from scratch, like a new strategy built up. Well one thing though that most people aren't thinking about what these things and me being a data science scientist, I'm, it's kind of the first thing I think of is, well how do you define success?
21:37 You know, what are the, how are you analyzing the data? Because a lot of people use our clients included. They'll ask us to do Facebook ads or something and they don't have good systems or metrics to even know are they making money or losing money with these things. So everything else aside, I think that's something important. And if you're running traffic, you should know your numbers and um, whether it's leveraged or someone else, you should set up some type of dashboards and some so analytics to be capturing that because flying blind with that stuff is a super dangerous game to play. It's so crazy. You mentioned that I lived, I was just talking to Dan Martell, uh, about some SAS metrics and things that we were looking at. And that was one of his biggest things was, you know, people just don't understand the importance of tracking their numbers in business and they'd look at their numbers at the end of the year and think, oh, did I make money or did I not make money?
22:28 I think I made money. I think, and it's just fascinating to me how frequently people wait, even you can't even wait a quarter. I mean, I'm looking at, I look at churn numbers on a daily basis and other metrics on a weekly basis. But I think the biggest problem I find for a lot of people, especially when they first get started was like, oh, it doesn't matter. I'm like, that's when it matters the most. Because for a lot of you, that's what, they don't have the money. It's like every dollar counts. Totally, totally. I mean it's, and then one thing that we were, we take data super seriously at leverage. Um, we're, we're using some really interesting, uh, we use a tool called mode analytics, which you have to be, uh, a data scientist to really use. It's kind of like a low level of bi software, but one thing is to be looking at churn.
23:12 But another thing is just to go even deeper decomposer term, maybe there's different types of turn. Like for me, there's churn because of quality versus engagement versus failed payment. So then get decomposing your turn into those buckets and seeing over time when you make a change, how does it affect each of those three subsets of turn? But then also taking it even a step further and like what are the leading indicators of churn? So for me, um, for engagement turn churn, uh, leading indicators, looking at, you know, how much they're using the service. So if we can kind of identify that, hey, if someone doesn't use a service for more than 10 days, they're 50% more likely to, to cancel, you know, then we start looking at that, those kinds of metrics. And then we have account managers take a look at them. But another thing that metrics has done for us is rather than having our account managers call or try to do a marketing campaign to 300 or 500 people, um, to try to get them to go to a, uh, a higher level service, like an annual plan or the next year, you know, you can, with the data, you can figure out who's the most likely and then instead of a thousand people, you get it down to 10 and you make the account manager's job way easier.
24:27 Oh, sure. So those are all types of things. But I will, yeah, if you're not, if you don't know your numbers, I wouldn't be doing Facebook ads, but the type of stuff like I mentioned before, traffic strategy. So how are you getting people to the funnel in the first place? Giving you copywriters on our team to look at your messaging. Like what is the messaging on the website, the email, the ads, um, you know, what is the offer and giving some suggestions, you know, is it free plus shipping or whatever, whatever the, the, the type of funnel is giving some feedback on the offer. And then, you know, lastly, this is the delivery of it.
25:04 I love that. You know, we've uh, spouse has been a lot of time on soul concepts as hook storing offer. And I think for at least for, for me, I think for a lot of our team, we typically like to start with the offer first. Cause we can build a good enough offer the then understand what are the stories you need to tell to basically get that off or sold. And what are the hooks you need to get to people to get engaged, to even listen to the story. And I appreciate, uh, I know you guys are very systematic over there and, uh, tons of systems in place that help people get through that. And I think for people who aren't as creative, it's one of the things they struggle with the most is how do I get started? So what are some of the things on your side when you're looking at it's idea as far as building out these types of funnels or even on an, on the conversion audit? Um, when a person gets stuck middle, what are some of the things are the tools that you guys are using to help them think more creatively
25:54 and they get stuck on a funnel or when they get stuck on what to outsource? I'm actually both, well, getting stuck on what to outsource is an easy one because most people aren't thinking about outsourcing. Um, and, and the trigger that I recommend is what, what are you doing on a daily or weekly basis that you don't get joy from? Or it doesn't tap into your unique ability. So if you were the CEO of a company and you are not a Facebook ad specialist or a really great copywriter and you're doing the Facebook ads in copywriting, like that would be a trigger. Um, you know, maybe there's someone better qualified at a lower hourly rate on top of that to, to do it. So, um, you know, some people like to do low level work because they find it relaxing, you know, Mark Cuban's known for doing his own laundry cause if he finds it relaxing, so obviously his hourly rates more watery. Um, but on the other, the other part of your question, I think defining success and being able to measure success is, is, is one of the most important things with funnels and, and with almost any project in general, to be honest in a lot of people don't take the time up front to think about those types of things.
27:11 I love it. I, I know that's been one of the main things. It's been fascinating for me as I take a look at where we've come. It just literally lasts for almost a year now as we've started to go from, it was Steven and Russell just kind of working together to now having an agency and as you start to scale an agency and you have people who are focused in different areas, um, it's been just so intriguing for me to see that growth and how it kind of like what you mentioned earlier, just having someone else's eyes to look on it can then trigger some of the thoughts of like, Oh yeah, I didn't think about that. We again, referring back to this last week, uh, Julie started working on the onboarding. We had some of our product guys there and they're like, oh, I never thought about that. I never thought about the location of this on the page. Or, or logically it would make sense it would go this way, but artistically it doesn't. And so I think it's a, that kind of stuff is really helpful. So thank you.
28:02 Oh, and, and, and you can go fast and a couple of ways. One, you just go fast. But another way to go fast, as you derisk the company to minimize those, those roadblocks and bottlenecks that come up that slow you down. And if you can remove those things that slow you down, that's another way of going faster. And one of the biggest things that people get slowed down, I know myself included, is if someone quits and then all of a sudden all that knowledge just gets lost. And then you have to onboard someone, like you've just moved really fast and then you hit this like this fork in the road or this, this massive hurdle. And then you're like three months back now and someone else. So as opposed to, you know, if you would have moved a bit slower, but then you smooth out those, those spikes, that's another way to look at these things.
28:46 So back to kind of what we said with slack, you might use slack, but maybe you're not using it. And the best way, and one thing that I really recommend is using channels versus direct messages. So if, if you're having a lot of private conversations with someone versus maybe there's a, maybe you're having a discussion with someone for their comp and it's a one-to-one direct message. Well, if you're the head of HR finance and then you leave, well, how are we going to find like that history? So maybe there should be a channel that person's name or comp Dash, that person's name and that's where you should be discussing the comp. So then you can add and remove people to the channel and the whole history is there and you don't waste a week, you know, back and forth with this person. So just as an example, there's a lot of little things you can do with these softwares that everyone's using, um, and a bit smarter way to avoid some of those obstacles that will inevitably up.
29:42 You know, when we were at TNC, one of the things you made mention of was this whole idea of slack and naming channels and this whole nomenclature and the way in the system. I know we're running short on time here for you, but do you have just like a few months, you can kind of explain what are some of the things using slacks, typically from a naming standpoint. So what I said earlier was the name of the game is to find the information as quickly as possible. What right. Whether it's an email, like a lot of people misuse email and they have a ton of folders where whereas they could just, if they knew how to search properly they could find it. Um, same with slack. So one thing I recommend is having just one or two kind of system owners of slack so that you avoid everyone in the company just spinning up channels.
30:23 Um, so that way you can create some kind of, some type of consistency. Um, I suggest as much as possible having private channels cause a lot of people don't know what's good for them and they'll start joining channels that they don't necessarily need to be a part of and they in a, in a non, in a nontrivial way, they started to waste a lot of time. But then lastly, naming convention. So slack doesn't have a foldering system but it's ordered alphabetically. So you could force the order of the channels by putting a number in front. So you could once, one thing you could do is, um, each department could have a number, but even if you don't want to do the numbers, if you have a finance department, you could have financed dash payroll, finance, dash credit cards, finance dash receipts. If you have HR department, you could have HR dash onboarding, HR dash offboarding, HR dash payroll.
31:16 Um, so what we've done is we've mapped our org chart to slack channels and then as we need more channels, we know, oh, it's this department name Dash and then whatever the new topic is. And because of what you ended up, it's, it's, it's a bit of a balancing or a dance that you have to play. But if you have this too few channels and then you have a lot of mixed conversations, you end up having to add a lot of people and they're having to read a lot of things that they don't need to be reading. And then kind of back to principle number one, you want to find stuff as easily as possible. So if you have just a finance general channel, it's not going to be as easy to find a payroll question as if you had a finance dash payroll channel.
31:58 Makes Sense. Awesome. Well Nick, thank you so much for your time. I, I could talk to you for hours on end. I appreciate you're so organized and systematic and I, I, it's a skill set I admire immensely. So I admire you and everything that you guys built. It's really remarkable what you guys have done over there. Well thank you. Well, I know people are gonna want to reach out to you. What's the best way for them to get ahold of them so they could just go to get leveraged.com my email is nick, get leveraged.com you can, that's my personal email address so feel free to email me. I'm pretty good about responding and I have a good system for that and I'm sure you do. Well good seeing you my friend. We'll talk soon. Thanks a lot. Hey, well, thank you so much for taking the time to listen. I can tell you the things
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