Process Street Helped Leverage Retain Knowledge & Increase Efficiency

Leverage is an operations consulting firm that helps teams optimize their processes by introducing them to top workflow management tools. One of these tools is Process Street, which Leverage uses for its own daily recurring tasks.

The company’s CEO and founder, Nick Sonnenberg, even features Process Street in his book Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work. He also made an entire YouTube video talking about Process Street’s benefits.

But why is Nick such a strong advocate of Process Street? What has the software done to help him and his team at Leverage? In this article, we will answer these questions by looking at:

• The challenge
• The solution 
• The result 

The challenge

Leverage’s authority and knowledge in operational consulting come from past experience. The company didn’t start out as a consultancy; that came later through circumstance. At the beginning, they were a freelancer marketplace. They had 150 freelancers doing a variety of work for clientele. 

One day, out of nowhere, the co-founder left, and that sent Leverage into a tailspin. The thing that saved the company from failure was Nick’s solutions for improving the way he and all his freelancers worked. He developed what’s called CPR Business Efficiency Framework, and that saved them all from the wasted hours they were spending on inefficiencies. 

In the context of the framework, CPR stands for:

• Communication
• Planning 
• Resources

Optimization is all about making sure the CPR of a business is running as efficiently as possible, and each of the pain points need to be addressed. 

The system was so successful that his clients began to ask for help improving their processes as well. Nick realized that his framework could be applied to just about every industry, and, over time, operational consulting became the company’s primary offering. 

But like any company, Leverage needed to overhaul their own processes before they could tell others how to do the same. Nick noticed several inefficiencies Leverage was struggling with, including:

• Consistency: some processes were done by memory, which resulted in many little steps being forgotten. This caused many missed deadlines and ended up creating more work for the freelancers who had to go back and fix mistakes.
• Knowledge retention: Leverage had a common issue where a new employee would start and create a brilliant new process that solved a lot of problems. But then that employee would leave and take that knowledge with them, forcing the employee who took their place to start from scratch.

Both of these major pain points were solved when Nick came across Process Street.

The solution

When Nick came across Process Street, he immediately saw its potential to solve the two major problems Leverage had been facing. 

With Process Street, Leverage was able to document all of their processes into step-by-step checklists. It was really a two-birds-one-stone solution. By putting all of their processes into the checklists, they were also retaining knowledge much better than before, and far fewer things fell through the cracks.

Process Street had the additional benefit of automation and integration. Leverage loves automating processes, and with every new checklist they built, they looked for new ways to automate the steps and integrate with third-party apps.

Over time, Process Street became part of a lot of the work done at Leverage and it has remained steadfast in its ability to keep Leverage organized and efficient.

The result

The use of Process Street has done a lot for the day-to-day processes at Leverage.

Firstly, having such well-organized checklists means that their employees save tons of time by simply not having to remember all the steps in a process. Or having to go back if they accidentally miss one. 

That organization made their delivery way more consistent in terms of deadlines and overall outcomes. 

Process Street has made such a big difference in the way Leverage works that Nick created a whole YouTube video walking through the benefits and features. Not only that, but he included it in his book Come Up for Air. 

Nick is a major advocate for making businesses as efficient as possible without causing employees to burn out. It’s not always easy, but he found an excellent solution with Process Street and it’s a product he stands by.