Episode Transcript
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The thing that I get asked more than anything else is how do I get ahead in my career?
And I'm going to tell you the absolute secret and the truth to getting ahead.
And that is that the role you're in right now, focus on that.
The role you're in can be the thing that defines your entire career.
If you just think a little differently and treat it a little differently,
it can open countless doors for you and lead you to new opportunities and experiences
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and ultimately the money and the respect that you want and probably deserve.
But you do have to think about it a little differently. Now,
if you're new here, my name is Art. I'm a former founder and yeah,
I've hired and promoted countless people, but I've also lived this.
In my early career, I went from a software developer to a VP of marketing.
And I didn't do it because I was the best developer or the smartest person in
the room because I wasn't. And I definitely didn't do it because I was the best
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marketer because I knew nothing about marketing.
But I was given opportunity after opportunity because I did things kind of naturally.
I did five particular things.
And as I grew in my career and I started hiring and promoting people,
I noticed that they were doing the same things.
Some of them do it naturally, and some of them were doing it in a really calculated
way because they had learned these tools and these tips.
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It didn't matter. The results were the same. It doesn't matter what your motivation
is. If you do these things, you'll get ahead. You'll have new opportunity.
You'll make a name for yourself.
So I'm going to share them with you today. And I'm going to tell you some stories
along the way about how I went from a software developer to a VP of marketing,
because the stories help illustrate just how easy it is to make some changes
and to differentiate yourself from the people around you.
So let's get into it. Let's talk about the five things. And I apologize if I
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get a little excited because I've been telling this for so many years and the
few people that listen do so much, but not everybody listens.
So hopefully you're the one that does.
So the first thing you can do is to actually learn about your business.
And I know that sounds kind of cliche and trivial, but it's so rare.
So few people actually take the time to learn about the business.
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If they're a software developer, they don't want to talk to customers.
They don't really use the products. They don't really understand what it does.
If they're in marketing, they say, well, I'm not technical.
So I'm not gonna learn about that side. But I'm telling you,
if you just learn what makes you successful as a company, what are customers
like? What don't they like?
Do the competitors do what do they do well what do they do poorly learn about
it go to trade shows talk to customers do whatever you can i'm not telling
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you to kill yourself but just learn little bits every day from other
people other teams from the customers and it will improve everything you do
i saw this firsthand when i was a software developer it was only a few weeks
in and i asked the people around me how do people actually use this and not
a single one of the developers in the room could tell me some of them had been
there for five or six years but they really had no idea
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what a day in the life of a user of our
product was like and they just said well we're not the typical user so
I don't really understand and I couldn't believe that you know you think
about that how do you know what feature to make how do you know
what to do next or what's important if you don't actually understand the business
or the customer and so I set out to learn more and by doing so I absolutely
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set myself apart and the way I learned more is part of the second tip and that
is to not care about your future titles.
People get really, really hung up on this. They want to be a director or a level
two or a manager, whatever it is.
But again, focus on what you're doing right now and don't care about the title.
I always treated a title as something that's given to me, not something that I asked for.
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I knew and I recognized that if I had value, the organization,
the manager, the team, they're going to want to keep me around.
And to keep me around, they're going to have to give me a new title or give
me a promotion, a raise, whatever it was.
And they did. I didn't ask for a single new title or promotion at all in my career.
Through all of the evolution of my career, it was given to me because I just
did something or they wanted to keep me.
And the few times they didn't and I outgrew the organization,
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I went and I found another job and there I got the title that I wanted.
That happens sometimes and that's okay.
But the experiences I had in the role that I was doing, that I was focused on,
allowed me to go get a better title or get more money because I was already
doing the things that those titles demanded I'd do.
And so for me in that same company, after realizing that nobody could tell me
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what the product did, I saw an opportunity.
There was a woman who hated her job. She didn't like the job title.
It was basically a sales engineer, but I think it had a different title.
She was the one that was doing the demos and supporting the sales team.
And there was no real authority or respect.
And it was a little monotonous and she wanted out. So she asked me if I knew anybody.
She said, well, Art, you talk a lot. You probably know a lot of people.
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So do you know someone that would want this job?
And when I looked at it, I realized I could do that. So I went to the manager
and I said, you know what? I'd like to do that job.
I'd like to be a sales engineer, but I don't want to give up being a software developer.
I don't really care what the title is and I don't need any more money.
I just want to do it because I think it'll make me better. I think it'll be a good experience.
I'll get to learn from the customers. I'll see what's good and bad about it.
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Maybe I can make it a little bit better.
So I didn't care about my title. I just wanted the opportunity to do something
new, to learn something. And I wasn't doing it just for the company.
I was doing it for myself. I thought that I would be better if I actually did
it. So I did it. It's that easy.
And it was a huge success for me. The thing that she wanted out of that role
became the launchpad for my entire career.
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It led me to becoming a product owner and manager and ultimately the VP of marketing,
all from a role that someone thought was beneath them.
And that's the next thing is whatever role you're in, regardless of the title,
learn about the company, but then find a way to add value.
If you can find gaps, areas where people
just aren't noticing that something isn't working or that there's something
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missing and solve that it doesn't have to be hard it
doesn't have to be something massive but if you fill gaps create value where
value didn't exist before you'll be noticed people will want you to look at
other problems because they know that you'll find another way to solve something
and you'll want to repeat that over and over again it's a rush for you it's
exciting for the organization and
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it will help you rapidly advance your career.
So in this continuing story, when I was a sales engineer, I started noticing some gaps.
It was the same thing over and over again. They had to wait and postpone meetings
if I was busy. And then when I eventually got on the call, I just did the same thing.
Wasn't hard, it was a script. I was saying and doing the same steps every single
day. Yeah, it was a little boring.
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So I decided to just make a video. I said, what if I just make a video?
I'll send it out before we get on the call, maybe the day before.
Some people will watch it, some won't. But for those that do,
we'll probably have a better conversation.
We'll do a better demo because they'll have seen the basic stuff and we can
talk about something a little more custom to them.
So I saw a gap. I didn't do anything major. I just did the same job I was already
doing, but this time I did it in front of a camera.
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And it was a huge success. It led to better conversations, better sales outcomes,
and I didn't have to do anything hard.
I actually just did my job, but I did it in a way that added value.
And one of the things that I learned at that point, and this isn't one of the
points for our lesson today,
one of the five points, but it is an important lesson for everybody that's out
there, is I learned that you're more valuable by eliminating your job than by
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just convincing people that you're invaluable.
And what I mean by that is if someone comes to me and they say,
I am the most important person here.
No one can do what I'm doing. I have to press this button every hour or this
whole place will collapse.
That's the person I want to get rid of first. And it's not that there's something
wrong with that person or I dislike that person, but it's a risk.
If I'm a business owner, I think about risks.
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And a risk to my business is that if that person is the only person that can
do that thing, what happens if they leave or they're hit by a bus or they just
decide that they don't want to press that button anymore? Will the whole business going to collapse?
I can't have that. So I'm going to look to automate that, get rid of it.
I'm going to look to distribute the responsibilities to other people so the risk goes away. way.
But then think about another person, someone who looks at their role and says,
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well, I know that it's 40 hours, but I can actually do it in 10,
or I can write a script or make a video that makes me have to do only a fraction of it.
Yeah, they made their job less important, but am I going to try and get rid
of that person? Absolutely not. I'm going to put that person on something new.
I now know that that person is going to do what's right, even if it means limiting
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their current role scope.
And that's the type of person you want around you. If you're an owner,
if you're a founder. They're the type of person that's going to add value to
everything, which is massive.
Music.
You look at every problem differently. You think about problems from a risk
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perspective, from an efficiency perspective.
You don't think about it from job security. You think about it from what's right from the business.
Is this the best thing that we could be doing? Or is there something simpler, smaller, easier?
That's what an owner does. And if you can start doing that in everything you
do, treat it like you're an owner.
You're an owner of your department, of your domain, of your team, whatever it is.
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You start making different decisions. You start thinking about how much money
it's costing you for this meeting or how much money you're going to spend on
this event. Is there an easier way?
Could this just be a phone call? Could this just be an email?
You know, the cliche, but you start doing that and you start embodying that.
And people will recognize that that person always just get things done in the best possible way.
They treat it like it's theirs. They care about it. They actually genuinely
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care if our customers are happy.
If we succeed, if that sale closes, whatever it is, those qualities shine through.
And again, when those executives are meeting and thinking about the people they
want to keep around, that are indispensable to them.
The qualities like thinking like an owner are the type of things that are remembered.
And the final thing, the final tip for today, and I kind of touched it already,
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is find simple solutions.
Not everything has to be hard, particularly in big organizations.
People blow things out of proportion.
They find the hardest possible way to solve a problem. They wait for weeks to
reschedule something till everybody's available.
They do things that could have been a phone call or an email over the course of a month.
When you're looking to add value, when you're looking to find ways to be like
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an owner, it's about finding the simplest thing.
It's not the hardest things that make you successful. It's the simplest.
So find ways to do simple, valuable things. The final story that I have from
my time going from software developer to VP of marketing still relates to video.
I had seen the success of those videos I made at demos, and I was really interested in making videos.
I really liked it. It was a personal passion project of mine.
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It had nothing to do with the business, but I went away one holiday where I
was working from home and I thought, how could I use videos?
How could I learn more about making animated videos, which is what I wanted
to do at the time in a way that I could do to support my current role or this job.
And so I made the simplest, most crude animated video that you could ever imagine.
Now, this is a number of years ago that just did a better job of explaining
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the industry, the problem we were solving, the acronyms.
And I made it for the people back in the development room so that they would
have more information about what they were building and what they were doing
and the problems they were solving.
And I made it because I wanted to make animated videos. And I also thought that
customers might benefit from it.
And it was a simple solution. It was something I cared about.
But the value that it brought, I couldn't have even imagined.
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I had people from our customers emailing me and saying, I can finally explain
to my family or my parents what I do because of this video.
I had the team in the development room saying, oh my gosh, that's what we do?
Why are we working on this feature? We should do this instead.
This simple solution, a simple, crude, animated video that I just wanted to
make and that I saw a gap or a need for became a thing that added immeasurable value. you.
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And again, led me to the next milestone in my career where they said,
well, you're so great at communicating things, at sharing information,
at taking these complex ideas and making them simple for people to understand.
Maybe you should lead up our marketing team. You don't know anything about marketing.
We've got talented people there, but you'll find solutions. You'll find ways
to communicate things. And I did that.
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And that's it. That's how I went from a software developer to VP of marketing.
That's what I saw in the people that I promoted from QA to heads of development
teams, from product management to salespeople, whatever it was,
they embodied these qualities.
They just couldn't help but bring value to think about the business in the right
way and to make decisions that were good for them and good for the business.
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And that's the final thing that I would say to people is that think about the
Googles and the Amazons of the world.
If you hear someone that works for one of those organizations,
you're impressed, right?
Well, having that prestige doesn't require you to work for those organizations.
Someone worked for them before they were prestigious. is.
So if you treat the role you're in, like it's the most important thing and the
organization you're in, like the organization that you want to be the badge
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of honor in five years to be able to say, Oh, I worked there.
I helped establish that company or that team.
Then you'll embody these qualities that I talked about. You'll find ways to
be successful, to make the business successful.
Because if you do, it'll translate to you. People will want you. They'll recruit you.
Your company will want to keep you because you're the person that made everybody
around you a little bit more successful.
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That's it. That's all it takes to get ahead in your career. I know it sounds
a little trivial, or maybe it sounds hard or easy. I don't know.
Tell me, tell me if you believe this is easy to do.
Tell me if you're already doing it. Tell me the things that you've done that
have added so much value with so little effort and what the outcome was for you.
I can't wait to hear it. I'm so excited about this topic because it's so easy to make a change.
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You just got to get out of your head and you just got to think about adding
value every day and change will come your way. The titles will come,
the money will come, the success will come.
Music.