Newsletter #27: how can you make yourself more valuable to your company?
14 minutes reading time. Thoughts on startups, growth, and technology 🚀
Welcome to another edition of the Struggle.
The Struggle is a weekly newsletter where I share my thoughts and learnings from running a fast-growing startup in Southeast Asia.
If you are interested in joining a startup at some point in your life, today's post is for you.
A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay where I talked about the benefits of "T-Shaped people" in a startup. Today, I would like to discuss a similar topic but from a soft-skills point of view and answer the question of "how can you make yourself more valuable to your company?"
To answer that question, I will provide three essential pieces of advice that have helped me in my career.
Grow Revenues
Growing revenues is challenging, but precisely because of that, it's a great option. As the startup eco-system is gradually maturing, the focus of most companies has shifted from growth to revenue sustainability. We see more and more public demand for profitable success cases rather than startups with significant but questionable valuations due to a long history of lack of profitability.
As a result, most CEOs address the topic of revenue to their leadership teams frequently. Finding a way to contribute to revenues will draw the attention of executives, and over time those who drive revenue tend to lead companies.
Yet, identifying opportunities to increase revenues is hard. In some roles, it's easier than in others, but I do believe that all functions can contribute and, in the process, build an excellent reputation for themselves.
Here you go a few examples of how you can contribute, no matter what your role is:
Work on monetization strategies - assess the current model and come up with suggestions of how it could be improved. Search for inspiration in other successful startups, study similar and different companies to understand what worked for them and how it can be adapted to your company.
Introductions to potential clients - investing in your professional network is important, and if you have done a good job in that, most probably you know some people who can be potential clients. Reach out, assess their needs, and pass them to your sales team.
Testing new marketing channels - launching experiments or campaigns to prove assumptions around unexplored marketing channels can bring a lot of value. For example, this publication itself, while I did not design it as a sales channel for Greenhouse, we are already getting inquiries from some of you guys. Meaning, I just introduced a potentially new channel for the business under content marketing.
Building a community around your product - kickstarting a community on Facebook / Slack / other platforms, for people who are ideal customers for your product and, in the process, engaging them consistently with valuable and relevant content may result in a lot of opportunities for your sales team.
Outbound sales - especially now, in a post-pandemic world, many sales teams are struggling to generate the same level of revenues as before the pandemic. Reach out to the sales team and ask how you can help them with outbound activities during your spare time. I guarantee you that it will be highly appreciated.
*This is mainly relevant to B2B startups.
Here you may ask, aren't there whole teams dedicated to such activities?
Most probably there will be teams focused on such revenue generation activities (sales, marketing, and product), if you identify ways to give them a hand, just go for it, they will be grateful and word will spread out quickly.
“User growth is crucial, but it's also not enough. You can grow your product and expand usage, but you still have to make money off of it. Revenue is the ultimate success measure of any company. In order for you to truly own the outcome of your company, you need to own monetization strategy." - Elena Verna, Head of Marketing at Miro
Communicate Clearly
Typically entrepreneurs start a company to solve a significant problem. In most cases, that problem has not been solved adequately for many years due to the underlying complexity. Hence, the startup needs to solve problems in a novel, 10x better way than existing solutions. As a result, there are hundreds of actions the company can take at any given moment, and only the best communicators can push their ideas, thus, prioritize what the company will do next.
As the startups begin to grow, your communication needs to improve considerably as you will have to talk to more diverse people and gradually move from one-on-one conversations to group discussions. Always have in mind that great communication needs to be simple, but communicating simpler requires a ton of effort and preparation.
There is an example from President Woodrow Wilson, who was once asked how long it would take him to prepare for a speech:
"Well, it depends how long you guys want me to talk. If it's a 10 minute speech, then I'm going to need two weeks to prepare for it. If I can talk for half an hour, I only need a week. But, if I can talk as long as I want to, then I don't need any preparation at all. I can speak right now."
It is true that concise communication comes more naturally to some people than others. But as everything else in life, the more you practice, the better you will get. As long as you work in a company with more than two people, you need to work on communicating clearly. And clear communication starts with clarity of thought, invest time in reflections, trying to jot down your thoughts to understand better how to express your ideas in more precise ways.
There's no reason not to start now to try to work on this. It's such a fundamental skill.
Integrity and commitment
In my experience, people who have strong personal integrity and commitment do well in their careers. That means being motivated by things outside of their own narrow interests and avoiding behavior that diminishes trust and credibility. Commitment in this context stands for taking pride in your work, completing everything you have started, or agreed on so that it inspires other people. Simply you need to give it your all.
The outcome of such an attitude is that people around you will respect you, valuing all of your inputs and recommending you for promotions.
As with everything mentioned in this post, it's easier said than done, but holding yourself accountable to the transparency test is a significant first step. The transparency test is the process of asking yourself if all of your private communications towards others were to be transparent to everyone at your company, and if everyone saw everything you ever said and did, would you be embarrassed by any of it?
As you evaluate one course of action versus another, ask yourself which path is going to lead to more integrity and will comply with high commitment standards, then always choose that path.
So those are, I think, excellent characteristics of valuable employees in a startup 1) always look for ways to support revenue-generating activities, 2) work on the clarity of your communication, 3) always manage yourself with the highest level of integrity and commitment.
Resources worth checking out:
📝Making Monetization Your Superpower | Elena Verna - Growth, in the form of acquisition and retention projects, has been the focus for Silicon Valley for the past 15 years as VC funding has enabled deficit spending to play winner-take-all games in massive markets. But over the last couple of years the primary focus for many companies has shifted toward revenue sustainability. As we've written before, the choice between Revenue and Growth is a false one because they are parts of an interlocking system. And since fewer professionals are focused on monetization, that presents you with an opportunity to accelerate past your peers.
📝16 Questions for Selling in COVID-19 | Martin Casado, Ben Horowitz, Peter Levine, Kristina Shen, and David Ulevitch - Over the past three months, we have met with enterprise executives and startup founders to understand what is happening on both sides of the market. In this post, we round up 16 key questions to help you sell and survive. We start with the different stages of the sales funnel, then look at adjusting sales quota and compensation, and finish with a go-to-market strategy around channel, geographies, and verticals.
In short, for B2B startups, a downturn can be a boon – the trick is to survive.
A quote worth remembering:
💬 Serial entrepreneur Noah Kagan on tips for ambitious people in their twenties:
1. Work in different verticals throughout your career.
2. Geography pushes you. Pick the city you work in wisely. Examples: Bay Area is harder. Austin is softer.
3. Learn OUTSIDE your skillset. That’s how creativity is born. It will help you rethink how you do your core thing.
4. Keep documenting your learnings. Start a blog, newsletter, or YouTube channel. Build your brand.
5. Go after the failures. Those are the biggest learning experiences.
6. Find someone who’s living your ideal life and do whatever it takes to work for them.
7. Figure out what you are an expert in. Hire / surround yourself with people who complement your weaknesses.
8. Chase opportunities, slow down for success
9. Start learning for the next step today. Keep leveling up.
10. Always be connecting and helping others! Become the hub.
A book recommendation:
📖 Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
A book written by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs! One of the few books out there that actually provides concrete suggestions based on the success of many startups in relation to how to get traction. Especially valuable for early-stage startups but not only.
”Traction” lists 19 potential channels for acquiring new users/customers, each one is presented in detail followed by several examples of how to run small inexpensive experiments. The idea being, test as many channels as your resources allow you, in order to determine what would be the most appropriate acquisition channel in different stages of your development.
Positive news worth sharing:
Slightly different topic than the regular “positive news” format, but I could not help myself as I find it very interesting.
According to data from The World Bank and International Monetary Fund, a major shift is underway in the race to be the world's biggest economy.
China is set to pass the US by 2024, with 4 of the top 5 spots being held by Asian countries by then as well.
Indonesia is expected to be the 5th largest.
Check out the source here.
The Road to 500
One of my resolutions this year is to grow this publication to 500 subscribers 🚀
The best way to spread the word is to hit the share button and say nice things about why you enjoy reading this every week and what you learn.
Thanks for reading,
Viktor