Leverage

Leverage takes the method in Come Up For Air and puts it into a specific company, with that company's tools, that company's constraints, and that company's politics. The book can describe where work should live. It cannot know that your engineering org has been running on one tracker for six years while your marketing team quietly moved to another, that the two do not talk, and that the person who could reconcile them left in March. Installation is where that detail gets handled.

In practice the work is closer to operations than to strategy. It looks like sitting with the actual teams, watching what actually happens to a request as it moves through them, finding the specific places where information stops, and then rebuilding those handoffs so they hold without anyone having to remember to make them hold. The output is not advice. It is a changed default.

Nick founded the firm, and the method is his, but the point of an engagement is that it does not depend on him afterwards. A system that only works while the consultant is in the building has not been installed.

Every engagement starts with a baseline, because a team that cannot measure its coordination tax cannot tell whether anything improved. Diagnosis precedes design, and design precedes any tool change. Changing tools first is the single most common way a company spends a quarter and ends up exactly where it started.

The firm describes four stages: AI-Augmented Triage, which turns the inbox into a throughput system rather than a source of dread; Structured Comms, which sets what Slack or Teams is allowed to carry; Algorithmic Routing, which moves task management onto a deliberate Asana architecture; and LLM Knowledge Retrieval, which builds the structured wiki that lets an answer outlive the person holding it.

Length depends on the company rather than on a standard package. The published case studies ran between 8 and 16 weeks, and the scope of the installation, not a calendar, is what sets it.

What is worth saying now is what the engagement is designed to avoid. It is not a report. It is not a workshop with a follow-up email. It does not end at the recommendation. The measure of success is that six months later the new way of working is simply how the team works, and nobody there describes it as a project.

It suits organisations that have already outgrown their informal habits. Usually that means enough people that nobody can hold the whole picture, enough tools that information is genuinely split across them, and enough pace that the cost of finding things has become visible in delivery rather than just in mood.

It suits leaders with the authority to make a change stick. The method depends on an agreement being made and then defended, and neither is possible from the middle of an organisation without cover from the top.

It is a poor fit for a team looking for validation of a decision already made, or for one that wants a supplier to take the problem away entirely. Installation requires the team to participate in it. A company that wants to outsource the change rather than absorb it will get a system it does not own and will not keep.

The work is not sector-specific. Past engagements span consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, higher education, real estate and coaching — Reckitt, PMI, Dr Pepper, NYU, Berkeley Haas, IQHQ, ClickFunnels and the Tony Robbins Co. What they share is scale rather than industry: the fit is usually a company above $100 million in revenue, where the coordination cost is large enough to be worth installing against.

Engagements start at $100,000. There are no geographic limits.

The Leverage site carries the current service description and the enquiry route. A useful first message says how large the team is, which tools it runs on today, what has already been tried, and what is actually hurting, in that order.

The front door is a 30-minute call — bottlenecks, whether AI actually fits, and a walk through the framework, with the decision made together at the end rather than sold at it.

That call is an assessment of fit in both directions. Where there is something real to work on, it is normally followed by a second conversation to scope it before anything is proposed. Where there is not, that is said on the first call.