Why making a career pivot can feel like a huge leap, how a person’s “value stack” extends beyond their resume, and how to avoid “logo harvesting” when making offers to candidates.
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Amanda: Hello, Nathan. How are you?
Nathan: Good. How are you, Amanda?
Amanda: I’m good. We just chatted a little bit before we started recording. And we’re excited about the conversation today because we’re going to talk about value stacking. It’s essentially a fancy way of saying that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Nathan: Now, I think people have heard that phrase and it’s a good summation, but I think you can apply it to people and their individual skills or roles within a company. You can apply it to a product or a solution or a service that you deliver to a customer.
Amanda: We’ve touched on this a little bit in previous conversations we’ve had when we were talking about agency work and being an agency that can do a bunch of different things and how that’s valuable to a customer who maybe has more than one project they’re trying to get done or more than one reason that they need to outsource work. And we’ve also touched on this a little bit when we talked about people and hiring people who have different work experience and can come at a problem from many different lenses or many different experiences.
I think those are very valuable employees and very valuable friends and people to have in your life. And I’d love to dig into that part of it with you: value stacking when it comes to individuals.
Nathan: Value stacking has gotten a lot of popularity lately from a marketing perspective. How can you stack the value of a product or service that you’re offering? And people are familiar with that. But I like to think of it from a personal level, for career development or for people on your team. Early in my career, I was a developer, a backend developer primarily, and I got pretty good at it and I continued to get better and better at it. I would say that was my main area of expertise, but I had a moment where I was deciding: am I really going to try to be the best backend developer in the world?
Which is really hard. I met several people that are orders of magnitude better than me. Maybe I’m in the top half or the top third, but I’m not in the top 1 percent or 5%, or maybe even 10%, of those developers and it was also challenging to figure out where my place was.
I think as I started exploring other areas, I found that there are a lot of really heavy developers, hardcore developers that know the code inside and out, but don’t know other parts of the business. Their knowledge and expertise is very deep, but very narrow. I can’t be the best backend developer, but if I can do back end and a little bit of front end and I can do sales and I can work with customers and I can do customer support and understand product and how to build a product user experience, right? If I know a bit of each of those things, that’s value stacking. And I can be competitive in that area. I can be in the top half or the top third of all of those categories. And then that puts you in like the top, you know, 5 percent of everybody, if you can do all of those things.
We try to employ that in our hiring or as we bring people into the company, we do try to give people more exposure to other departments and other things, other parts of the company where they wouldn’t normally get that experience. When we hire a developer, we actually require them to do user experience planning and design on at least one project or part of a product just so they can get that exposure and see, like, yes, the code that I’m building, how does that actually get used and how will the customer experience it and what will it take to support that thing that I’m building and how will it get documented and that whole thing. If you have somebody who can kind of blur over those lines that are typically siloed by a department, you can move much faster.
I think it’s a tremendous benefit, especially to a small business where you have lots of disadvantages in terms of resource and scale that some larger businesses do have. In a small business, if you have people who can kind of cross those lines where there would normally be departments and review meetings and approvals and all sorts of back and forth and bureaucracy. If you have somebody who can go and they can own a project across a few of those departmental lines, that can be tremendously effective.
Sometimes in your career, I think it’s a hard switch to make because as you go and deeper down one path, it feels like my progression should be in this way, and it feels like I’m taking a step down and I’m starting over as a beginner in some other area. So it kind of feels like you’re taking a huge leap, but I think it’s actually one of the stronger, safer, more predictable paths. If you can be pretty good or really good in two or three areas, that makes you incredibly unique and powerful in those areas where somebody can just hand over a whole project and they don’t have to build all these systems and processes and fail safes around you because you’re only really good at this one thing and they have to do all of this extra communication and and making sure that the rest of it is handled. If they have somebody who can handle that whole area, you can give somebody free reign to just go and set things up.
Amanda: Would you say that your personal value stack is the same as your work history?
Nathan: No. I mean, there’s a lot of alignment, but not purely that. We spent a lot of time at work, so a lot of a person’s work history is going to determine part of their value stack, but some of that may just be personality. Are you a really good listener? Are you somebody who is really good at networking at events? If you’re a highly technical person who’s also really good with people and really good at listening, that’s a value stack and that’s not necessarily something that you trained up for.
Maybe you speak five languages. And that’s a value stack, right? There’s some companies that would find that incredibly valuable because that might cross their entire customer base. And then if you also know customer support and could do sales, you could do customer interviews, you could build out somebody’s documentation. You could write all the documentation in all of those languages. You could write sales and marketing landing pages for those people in all those different languages. To some companies, that would be invaluable. And you would be in the top 1 percent of the candidates that apply for that job.
If they’re trying to have somebody apply for a marketing or sales job at that company, you’re like a dream for them. And so some of those you might’ve learned in childhood and they have nothing to do with your professional work history.
Amanda: Do you think that as a founder, you need to have a somewhat varied work history or somewhat varied value stack in order to be successful?
Nathan: I don’t know if you need to, but there’s probably a high correlation. Like, I’m pretty good at a lot of things. I’m very curious. I really like learning about lots of different areas. I like dabbling in all of them. Probably development and systems architecture is the deepest I went in the first 10 years of my career. Then I started in sales and I did my own sales. You have to do your own sales as you’re running an agency. But I would guess a lot of founders have a very broad value stack. And it’s kind of by necessity because you don’t have the money to afford to hire top talent in a specific category.
So, your first client project, your first 50 client projects, right? You’re probably not gonna go hire a top tier lawyer to write up all your contracts. You’ll probably operate with no contract at all, or you’re going to go dig in and get a book on contracts and you’re going to go Google and find some templates and you’re going to read through them and try to understand them and you read some blog posts, right? You watch a YouTube video. You’re learn enough to just get the tip of the iceberg and understand, but you know more than most people who are not in a legal department already, because you have to kind of dig in. And over a weekend or a week or something, you can get the most basic level of proficiency, which is great, as long as you’re aware that you are not an expert. You have that basic level of proficiency. So you build that value stack automatically out of necessity.
Amanda: Yeah. And that’s very true, I think, especially for bootstrapped founders, because a lot of companies don’t get funding until they’ve shown some success. But there are definitely companies that get funding before they’ve really figured anything out. And in that sense, there probably are founders who are just very narrow in terms of their view or experience. And then they have the money to hire top tier talent who also have very narrow views or experience.
I think I know what your answer would be, but what do you think is the preferred way of building a business or founding a business? To have a lot of people who are really, really deep in their area of expertise or everyone wearing many hats?
Nathan: Yeah, I think out of necessity at the beginning of the business, you can’t afford to hire 20 experts. You could afford to hire like two or three people. So the first few hires tend to be generalists who are kind of entrepreneurial on their own and don’t mind or even enjoy kind of jumping between things.
You as an example, right? I think you have experience in marketing and sales and doing in person events and doing partnerships. And you can even roll up your sleeves and put together a basic contract and as a small business, right? We can give Amanda a whole area, a project to work on and you can kind of jump around and do all those pieces, which is tremendously valuable because it means the project gets done as opposed to getting blocked 10 times because it needs to come back for approval or we need to wait for somebody to go figure out the first version of the contract or something.
Amanda: Yeah, that’s true. So when hiring new employees, what are some of the questions you ask, or some of the digging that you do during the interview process or vetting process that helps you answer: what is this person’s value stack for the company? Not just looking at their resume and their work history. To your point, value stack can include a lot of things that are outside of work history. How do you uncover that when you’re hiring new people?
Nathan: Yeah, I mean, hiring is challenging. That could be a whole, hiring could be a whole other episode on its own, of course. I think looking for people who are flexible, who’ve had varied roles or have had broad roles, or have been at a company with multiple roles over time. But you don’t even uncover all of it.
Like when we started talking about this podcast, I learned that you had done video editing in the past, which was hugely helpful in this case, because here’s an example of a project that probably would have died on the vine if it weren’t for your varied history and value stack, because if you and I met and recorded, and then we had to go find an editor who had to come through and edit these videos at the same time that we were trying to kind of figure out the topic and the format and how this thing worked, we wouldn’t be able to give them very clear instructions on what to edit. They wouldn’t know the subject matter. We would have had to research and find that vendor. There would be an additional step in delay. Every time that we produced a raw recording, it would take even longer to get a final version. I mean, there’s a place where your values stack is essential, right? Because you’re able to come up with topics and we can talk about them. We can do the recording, you can do the editing. It enables a whole project to happen that would otherwise just get completely blocked and stopped. And it would probably just disappear because it got stuck in that stage and then it would be weeks or months before we found somebody to move it along. You lose momentum. And a lot of projects like this that need momentum to continue carrying on.
Amanda: Just to be clear, I’ve never done video editing professionally. I was a film studies minor in college. And a couple of the classes that you had to take to get the minor were editing classes. Of course, we’re using different software, but a lot of the same concepts apply, I will say.
You know, sound quality, location of cuts and things when you’re trying to get a podcast out every week. None of these podcasts are my grand masterpiece. I’m sure there are people who can probably do three to five times better work in the same amount of time because it’s what they do all the time. But yeah, it’s helpful. And sometimes you don’t uncover it.
We’re getting into some interesting territory because I was going to ask: with hiring, I know that there are a lot of companies out there where they are almost harvesting logos. And what I mean by that is they’re looking at people’s resumes and saying, “Oh, you worked for X, Y, Z company. That’s a big one that I know of. You must be good at your job. You must be smart. You must have good experience.” And you have a lot of, I think, mediocre talent that just continues to be successful because they broke into this coveted logo category.
And then similar to that, people who have really long tenures at companies. People who’ve been with the company for five, 10, 15 plus years. And you assume that shows dedication. And that shows that you’re not trying to jump around and leave.
And then on the far other end of the spectrum, you have people like me where I don’t have big logos on my resume. I’ve been laid off from startups multiple times. I’ve bounced around, but not because I’m trying to. That’s just the way that my work history has gone. And I know that there are opportunities where people are looking at my resume and immediately saying no, because I don’t have these big logos. And some of my tenure has been pretty short, like under a year (to no fault of my own).
So I’d be curious to know, as someone who’s hiring, obviously you took a chance on me, but I’d love to know what your general thoughts are in that area.
Nathan: Yeah. Hiring is so difficult and resumes can mean so many different things, right? Somebody could be at a company for 15 years because they are dedicated and they’re learning and exploring more roles within the company. Or it could be that they’re doing very little and there’s a corporate culture that allows them to hide and that they’ve just been there.
So, you really have to kind of dig in and figure it out. There’s always a lot underneath that, and you’re only going to learn so much. So, for me personally, hiring as a small business, we’ve hired a lot of people who are talented and have gotten deep in their area, who might have big logos in their resume history. Those companies operate very, very differently than a small company and so even if they are really deep in their expertise in their field, their experience is narrow and so their value stack is not very broad and wide, and they’re used to having a lot of support within the organization for certain things like, I do graphic design and marketing and landing pages, but then somebody else has to build them and somebody else has to write the copy that goes in them. And somebody else needs to figure out how to hook it up to the CRM or whatever.
Large organizations have very distinct roles. They have 500 job titles across the organization and something very specific. It has nothing to do with talent, but sometimes I found that those people are just not a fit for a smaller company, because they kind of feel like, if they have an attitude about it, to be like, oh, that’s not my job, this is my role.
But sometimes people don’t have an attitude about it. They say, oh yeah, I’m open to doing whatever. I don’t mind getting my hands dirty and doing different things. They’re just not used to the fact that in a small company, there’s so many things that fall to you that just, it doesn’t even cross their mind as a possibility.
Because in a large company, there’s somebody to handle everything. You submit a ticket to this system in order to get something done. And it comes back three weeks later. Big companies operate very differently. So, if somebody has been at a company that’s many, many times larger than ours for a long time, there’s a lot of discussions we need to have before I feel like they would enjoy and thrive in our company and that’s okay, these are just different companies.
But I’ve made that mistake and hired some because I was dazzled by someone’s expertise or they’ve had a tremendous track record at well known companies, and it just doesn’t translate like to working in a small company.
Amanda: Regardless of their work history, if somebody were trying to apply to a company similar to NSquared or BlinkMetrics, what’s the advice that you would give them to showcase what their value stack is above and beyond what is visible on their resume?
Nathan: Typically, the way this plays out the most is like there’s a project and that project requires a bunch of things across departments. In a small company that may not even be a named department, but across disciplines and across roles. I think saying, Hey, this is my resume, this is where I worked, and these are my job titles. But this is the work that I did in these companies. These are the projects that I ran and then demonstrate, like, yeah, I was in charge of marketing, but we had this event. And then I set up an event registration system, and I set up a landing page, and I connected that landing page to a CRM and automatic email system, and then I taught myself email templates or something.
I went and found email templates that I could download and put into our marketing software and send. And I learned the language to customize it and put people’s names and things in it. If you can talk through that project and it’s clear that you actually did the work or that you were involved enough with other people who might’ve done different pieces of that, but you have to understand enough of it to like it all together and you’re the person owning the project. I think being able to speak to that is tremendously attractive to a small company.
Amanda: It sounds like a lot of it just comes down to ownership and responsibility and accountability. And a lot of those are traits necessary for moving up and being a manager and being able to manage your own workload. There are fewer positions at small businesses and each person needs to have maybe a heightened level of responsibility and accountability because you can’t just be someone who does a very small amount of things and hides when you’re on a team of 15 to 20 people.
Nathan: Right. And you might be amazing at that one thing, but it’s just generally not enough to get a project done or to get an outcome completed in a small business. And there isn’t the organizational support and there isn’t an army of employees and different titles to help you make that happen. So the life of a small business is we’re going to look back at the end and see whether that project was successful. Generally, it takes somebody being very flexible and all sorts of things that aren’t technically their job description to, to make it happen.
Amanda: Okay. We’ve got five minutes left. I have one final question for you. Which piece of your own value stack do you think is the most valuable?
Nathan: I don’t know. I think that’s part of the definition of the value stacks. I don’t think it’s any one thing.
I came to realize this when my previous startup, StagingPilot was acquired by Pantheon, and I was asked what department I would like to go into. It was a very weird question for me because I had never really had departments, right? I hadn’t really thought of it that explicitly. After some thought, I went into product because I really care about product and user experience.
At the time when we were acquired, I had taken myself out of the day to day development and engineering, but I was doing product and customer support and sales and partnerships and marketing. I was doing all of those things. And, I kind of thought, well, okay, I don’t want to lose control of the product. I don’t want it to get built differently. It was a pretty novel product and solution to something. So I thought that was kind of my area.
And then I learned that there’s people who care about product specifically way more than me, and there’s way more systems and rigor and structure around how product is handled.
And I didn’t really have as deep interest in that as I thought. And also, it became pretty clear to me that my main value is that stack. Like, I’m probably not the best product person. I’m not the best sales person. I’m not the best developer. I’m not the best customer support person. But I do care deeply about all of those things and I am very interested and I am competent and maybe at one point development, I would have been pretty competitive in development, but it’s been years since I’ve been doing that really actively day to day.
And it’s been almost 10 years since that’s the majority of what I spend my time doing. I’ve, I’ve been easing off and having to do all sorts of other parts of the business.
Amanda: So to the person listening, if that sounds like you, you’re probably pretty well suited for small business.
Nathan: Yeah, let’s hope I’m right about all this value stack stuff. Otherwise I’m in trouble.
Amanda: If you’re a curious person, if you like to try a lot of different things, if you like every single day to be different, if there’s not one thing in particular that like gets you really excited and passionate, but there are many things that get you excited and passionate, startups and small businesses are probably a pretty good place for you to apply to or give some of your energy to.
Nathan: Yeah. I mean, small companies are always looking for people like that because it’s not for everybody.
Amanda: All right. Well, we’re at the end of our time, Nathan,
Nathan: Okay.
Amanda: Thank you, Nathan.
Nathan: All right. Thank you.
