Nick Sonnenberg - Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work

2023 Nick Sonnenberg

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ISBN 978-1-4002-3675-6 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-3672-5 (HC)

Epub Edition JANUARY 2023 9781400236756

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948312

Printed in the United States of America

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To all the employees, managers, leaders,

and entrepreneurs who are drowning in work.

Let this serve as the employee handbook you

never received, empowering you to create an easier,

less stressful, more productive workplace where

your time is spent on what truly matters.

Together, lets reinvent how work gets done.

Its not often that a book comes around at the exact right time, from the exact right person, with the exact right content. Im happy to say that you are currently holding that book in your hands.

As I write this in 2022, organizations around the globe are still struggling to adapt to the new world of work. I tell you this from firsthand experience coaching Fortune 500 executive teams and the extensive research my team and I have done over the past decade around what it takes to build a high-performing hybrid team.

When I first met Nick, there was an immediate connection. Our shared passion for the future of work and optimizing both team performance and output was inspiring. We wanted to avoid what we were constantly seeingthe inefficiency of applying old work rules to the new work world. In short, we were both obsessed with finding a better way to run a business.

Nicks experience and innovative perspective as a high-frequency trader gives him a unique advantage in helping business leaders. He takes his high-speed, data-driven mindset and applies it to the business world to shake up more traditional thinkingor more candidly, a lack of thinkingabout the most efficient use of time, our most valuable asset.

I have spent my career coaching high-performing teams as they redefine their business models. Nicks unique approach was a powerful complement.

Throughout all my research, the results are clear: Individuals who coelevate will succeed. When this happens across teams, organizations become significantly more resilient.

But there is a hurdle. There is a significant gap between ideology and implementation that is confusing and difficult to navigate. This gap is preventing teams who would otherwise be high performers from reaching their full potential and maximizing output.

Come Up for Air is a critical missing puzzle piece. What Nicks done here is entirely different. This is not an individual productivity book, nor is it purely a business leadership book.

This is a hybrid of strategic thinking and best practice principles that form the definitive playbook for optimizing team output, alignment, and performance. A playbook focused on the impact of the collective, not just the individual.

Teams need more than just short-term tactics. They need methodologies, structure, and guidelines. They need to understand how to implement the systems, tools, and processes readily available to them to executive effectively and collaboratively.

The world is changing faster than we can keep up, and Nick and I are in agreementwe can make a difference in peoples lives in the way that we work.

I am confident Come Up for Air will become required reading for high-performing teams in any organization. At the moment, the framework covered in this book provides a competitive advantage. In the coming years and decades, it will become table stakes for doing business.

The revolution has already begun. Welcome aboard.

Keith Ferrazzi

I started writing this book four years ago. So why did it take mea self-proclaimed efficiency nutso long to complete it? Well, because I, too, was drowning in work. Naturally, I didnt feel right publishing a book on how to come up for air when I myself was still underwater, so I paused the book entirely and went back to the drawing board. Plus, technology was changing so fast that my team and I were rapidly discovering new, groundbreaking strategies and redefining the best practices of how to work efficiently.

To explain why I was underwater, we need to go back to Tuesday, October 3, 2017. That was the day my exbusiness partner gave me five minutes notice he was leaving our company, Leverageback then, a freelancer marketplace with more than 150 contractors and five hundred clients. I knew I had a big problem on my hands, but as the coming days unfolded, I started to realize the true magnitude of the situation I was in.

You see, my exbusiness partner and I had very separate roles in the business leading up to this. He was front stage, focusing on marketing, customer success, and employee management while I was backstage, focused on strategy, systems, and processes. I was doing what I do best, spending nearly all of my time on operations and technology. I built dashboards, automations, and processes to make sure the back end of the business was running as smoothly as possible. I stayed in my own lane, and I barely ever spoke with our team or our clients so I could focus all of my time on what I was best at.

On that fateful day, there were five major problems that all came to a head virtually overnight.

Problem 1: No one knew me

Within five minutes, I went from being the silent guy behind the scenes to the face of the entire company. I had a 150-person team and five hundred clients who literally didnt know I existed.

Problem 2: Company financials

The unfortunate reality was that we were $750,000 in debt and losing more than $450,000 per year even though we were pulling in seven figures in revenue. On top of that, our bank accounts were frozen. I had to cash out my 401(k) and take out a loan from my dad (who had to take out a second mortgage on his house)just to get my team paid. I had gone from being a millionaire in my twenties to being in debt in my thirties.

Problem 3: Subpar quality

Upon further investigation, it was clear that our quality of service was one of the main reasons why we were in such terrible financial shape. Despite a new customer growth rate of 20 percent, 12 percent of our clients were canceling each month. We had been celebrating the constant influx of new clients and revenue growth, but that growth was actually hiding some core problems in our business. People were canceling left and right because we werent providing the level of service they expected. Good marketing was masking a subpar serviceit was a ticking time bomb.

Problem 4: False rumors

All of this was going on while I had team members and clientsmany of whom Id never spoken to in my lifetelling me that I was running the company into the ground and that I should just give up. And yes, those were team members whom I was paying out of my own pocket.