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Leverage Podcast featuring Nick Sonnenberg, Co-founder and CEO, Tanya Fraser, Head of Tasks and Florence Bout, Head of Operations at Leverage.

Like any new business, Leverage was not immune to the challenges and adversities that most start-ups face.

As many of you may know, Leverage was founded in 2015 by Ari Meisel and Nick Sonnenberg. Leverage soon created a name for itself in the world of outsourcing as a premier service. With a team of 150+ virtual assistants, the company was growing at a rate of about 5–10% each month…

But things quickly changed in October of 2017, when Ari unexpectedly decided to leave the company. Nick had virtually no notice — a mere 5 minutes to prepare for what was about to happen.

The biggest initial challenge was dealing with the division of roles and responsibilities between the two founders. Ari was the face of Leverage, working closely with clients, managing the team and company marketing. Nick, on the other hand, was the driver behind operations and technology.

He had, historically, been completely behind-the-scenes. Many clients and team members didn’t even know who Nick was, and this was a big problem.

Very quickly, as Nick took over the daily operations of the company, he uncovered some core issues that had been largely swept under the rug. Ironically, Leverage — a so-called “productivity company” — was actually running extremely inefficiently. Premature scaling is a big issue for new start-ups, and Leverage had unfortunately fallen into this familiar trap, which masked the core, fundamental issues the company had.

This extreme event was almost a blessing in disguise for the company. It forced the internal Leverage team to ask themselves the question:

Who are we and what direction do we want to go?

Over the course of the next several months, the team completely re-evaluated and re-structured how the company operated, working towards fixing those core issues. It allowed Leverage to “grow-up” as a company and become stronger than ever.

Nick was keen to on restructuring Leverage to be a non-hierarchical, self-managing organization. He took bits and pieces from the books Traction by Gino Wickman, The 12-Week Year by Brian Moran and Michael Lennington, Tony Robbins’ RPM Method, and Scrum Methodology for software development.

Through this process, there were 5 key lessons learned for creating a more united and productive organization:

Creating a Company Vision
Clear Roles & Responsibilities
Process Documentation
Establishing Quarterly Goals
Implementing Structured Meetings

Listen in to dig deeper into these 5 keys lessons, or read the full blog post at: https://goo.gl/2FdppA