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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
1234. Exit. Exit. Exit. All right, we're back with a little inside exit five podcast episode that we're doing. The guests are just me and Matt. Hey, Matt.
Matt Carnevale [00:00:23]:
Hey.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:24]:
If you don't know, Matt is on our team here at exit five. Matt does a lot of the marketing and a lot of the stuff you see inside the community every day, every week. He said no days off, which is amazing. We're doing a little inside exit five podcast, so different than bringing on a guest. We want to talk about what's going on, what we're seeing, and also want to hear from you. So I want you to listen. We're going to dive into a bunch of things today. Matt's got a great little agenda planned, and we can.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:54]:
I'll give you, I'll give it to you in a second. Talk about the context of where you pulled this from. But I also want to just do a quick plug. I want you to email. We want to take your questions as part of this episode. So send us an email. Hi, exit five.com. You can write in or this is going to.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:12]:
We're going to see if our team at Hatch can handle this one. This is a curveball. I know they're going to be able to do it, but send us a voice note if you want to be featured on this podcast. Send us a voice note with your question to hi exit five.com and we'll try to answer your question on a future episode. Okay. All right, Matt, talk about first context on what we want to talk about this week. And then let's go.
Matt Carnevale [00:01:33]:
So I pulled some interesting stuff together from our community, some of our LinkedIn posts that popped off and some newsletters that got really good responses. So first, from the community, somebody had posted asking whether they should focus their time on the CEO's personal LinkedIn page or the company LinkedIn page. I'll stop there and I'll let you kind of riff on what your thoughts are there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:00]:
Sure. So this is a great question. I think we're seeing this a lot, and both people are, you people are using both. And you can actually talk about what we're seeing because we have a similar experiment that we're doing. I think overall the consensus is that the personal page is going to perform better. However, I don't think that means that you should abandon the company page. I think you need to have both. And here's why.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:25]:
And we can talk about how the strategies are different. So first of all, you need to have the company page because most of the people like their primary use for LinkedIn is going to be related to job searching and work related tasks. And for me, and I know many others, right, like LinkedIn is, you go to a, you go to LinkedIn and you look up a company, and I want to see, okay, this is this company. They have this many employees. Here's where they're based. Here's who works at the company. Here's company information. It's like a banner.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:52]:
It has to be there. It's like the phone book, a directory. It has to be there. Now, since you have to be there anyway, I would also prefer to see that page maintained with regular updates. And so I don't like when I go to visit a company page and I don't see any posts. They may have built out a page, but there's no posts there. So you got to be posting regularly. So I think you got to actually be there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:11]:
And so I like to think of the company page as a news ticker for your brand. And so that means you're posting a couple times a week, maybe it's only once or twice a week, and you're sharing open roles that you're hiring for. You're sharing company news, company announcements. I like to think of it as that you can also write content there for your ideal audience and your ideal customers. That could be a video, that could be a meme. We can talk about what we're doing, Matt, in a second. But that's how I would tend. That's how I would use that one.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:39]:
And then I would use personal pages, CEO, founder, key person at the company, or just whoever those pages are going to do better. And what, what I would focus on there is leading with the expertise of that person. And so typically, I like the CEO or founder because they started this company for a reason. They had a previous pain or an example, or they did something in this industry. They're the ones in conversations all day with people that they're recruiting, with partners, with investors in product roadmap meetings and strategy sessions. And so it's about turning your brain on to thinking about, oh, what, what interesting. What interesting things am I already in and seeing? And how can I write about those lessons on LinkedIn? So that's roughly how I think about it. Matt, what's your response? That, and also talk about what we've learned in, since you've taken over the exit five page and what you're seeing with your page personally.
Matt Carnevale [00:04:28]:
Yeah, yeah. No, I totally agree with everything you said. I wanted to bring up an example, a test that I recently ran. So what I did was I took our best performing, one of our best performing posts, which was a carousel. It was like the 1313 best books that b, two b marketers should read. And I literally took the exact same carousel, exact same copy. I posted it on my personal page, and on my personal page, the engagement was 39% higher, which it's not like crazy, it's not saying it's like 1000% higher, but the real nugget here is that the company page has, what, 67,000 followers, and my page doesn't even have 4000 followers. So it was like way higher engagement with way less followers.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:12]:
So that's a perfect, that whole thing, like, we have, there's 67,000 followers of the exit five page. That's huge. Most people would be thrilled to have that many followers for an account, but we've consistently posted there and it does not do anything for us. That's not to say that company pages can't work. I think they can. I'm sure if we wanted to go all in and try to find a way to make that work, that could be the strategy. But I found that, like, typically with a company page, the thing that's going to make it work is it needs to be more of like, you know, only memes or you kind of have to only play to this one angle of like, certain type of content on LinkedIn, and that just might not work for you. I like the idea of leading with expertise through your personal pages, treating the company page like a news ticker, and building out that strategy.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:59]:
Also, to your point, how many followers do you have on your personal page?
Matt Carnevale [00:06:03]:
Not, looks like 3800 right now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:05]:
3800. So 3800 followers drove a better. Drove more engagement than a page with 65,000. So I would focus there. And I think there's a lot to unpack there. I think the key becomes the founder typically says they don't have time, they don't want to do this. And so you need to make it clear to them why this is the place that they should be writing. And then I think if you're, especially if you're in b two B, which everyone is, that's going to be listening to this, LinkedIn is the place to be.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:33]:
And so I would be treating this like our front door, like our blog. It's the number one channel from a megaphone standpoint, and everybody wants the results, but they don't ever want to start at zero. And so I would just start at zero and say, hey, we're going to try to write three posts a week, you're just going to start a Google Doc or a backlog. And every time you have thoughts or ideas coming out of a meeting, you're going to jot down some notes in there, and then once a week, you're going to sit down for 30 minutes to an hour and you're going to batch write four or five LinkedIn posts. They don't have to be perfect. Don't have to be perfect grammar, because the thing that's going to help you win is going to be facts, expertise and education about your industry. Things you're doing, things you're learning. That's what's going to make this work.
Matt Carnevale [00:07:14]:
Yep. That actually segues really nice into our next point, which was if you're a CEO or founder that wants to grow on LinkedIn, what should you do? I feel like you just laid that out. But was there anything else, like, in more detail?
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:28]:
I do, yes. First of all, what are some of you. Let me, I want to pull up this post that I wrote because I want to hit on some of those. What's your response to that?
Matt Carnevale [00:07:34]:
Yeah, my response, I think there's like, you know, one thing I was thinking of when you were talking to is like, the company paid, like, you can do both. So I find people tend to view it in, like, you know, one or the other, or am I going to do personal or company? You can do both. The nice thing about keeping the company page somewhat up to date is even if you run ads on it, which a lot of people in B two B are going to do, it's going to look up to date. Right. So I think that's another benefit of keeping the company page up to date.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:01]:
Yeah. What about tips for the founder CEO who wants to grow on LinkedIn? I'm going to tell you mine in a second, but what's your, what have you observed as you put your toes in this water?
Matt Carnevale [00:08:10]:
So, you know, obviously coming here was like a lot easier because you were already doing that in past companies where that wasn't the case. So from the perspective of, like, I'm a marketer who's trying to help the CEO, you post more on LinkedIn. What I found really helped was to interview the CEO. So at my past company, I would interview the CEO once a week, do a 30 minutes interview, and I would just pick their brain on, you know, hot industry topics. And then I would record, I record the call and I'd write down everything they were talking about, and then I would turn that into like two, three LinkedIn posts, I would send it to them. They would maybe clean it up a bit just for tone, and then they would post it and, you know, it helped them grow pretty quickly. So that's like an easy way. If your CEO or founder wants to get on LinkedIn, but doesn't want to, or doesn't think they have the time to sit down every week and write the post, that's a good, happy medium.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:00]:
I like that idea. I also think it's the perfect happy medium, because I do think that you can have somebody ghost right for you. But unless they're going to fully manage, like all of your comments and replies and commenting on other people's stuff, because a huge part to growing on LinkedIn or just getting feedback and understanding what's working is you can't just write a post. You can't just have somebody post it for you. It's like the immediate response of being in the comments. You have to reply to people. And this is not just because you want to make them feel good. It's because I'm pretty sure the algorithm, at least from what I've seen, if I'm active on LinkedIn, like commenting on other people's posts, and then I post, and then I'm active in my comment section, the engagement on that post seems to go, go way up.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:45]:
And so I think that really matters. It also matters because that's where I get so many content ideas right now. How often are you commenting on somebody else's post or something? And like Eric, who runs hatch, they produced this podcast for us. He's been writing a lot more on LinkedIn, and I've been commenting on his post because I want to help him increase his reach. And I just like to comment on people's stuff like that. And I wrote a comment about podcasts, and that comment kind of took off and I was like, oh, okay, I stole this. I have that. I literally, I copied and paste that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:15]:
I'm just telling people what my process is. I copied and paste my comment. I don't know what I'm going to write about yet, but like, clearly what I wrote in that two or three sentences in the comment hit on a topic. So I have a notion. It could be a notion, it could be apple notes, it could be a piece of paper, whatever. I copied, ideally digital, so you can screenshot it. I screenshotted that comment and I put it in my notion file. The notion file is called social backlog.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:38]:
And then what do I do, Matt? Once a week I sit down for about an hour I go into my social. I go into social backlog and I write. I'm giving myself prompts. Right. And so you have to do. You have to be able to do this yourself. Ultimately, that's where I would be pushing somebody to go. And you have to want to do it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:57]:
And if you're working with a founder and you're on the marketing side, I think it's your job to help show them why this is worth spending time on, why this is worth doing it. Also, it should help them in so many ways. It's not just about sales. It's about investors advisors, recruiting partnerships. There's so many benefits that you can get from doing this. And you don't have to take this. Years ago, it used to be like, build in public. You got to build in public.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:24]:
I don't think this means you have to share what you had for breakfast or your morning routine or your flaws or all these insecurities and stuff about you. Just talk about your industry, talk about what you're doing, building your business, whether you're a freelance, if you're a freelance copywriter, start writing every day about what it's like working with clients, what's working, what's not. It's very simple. I just think that nobody wants to dig in, and not nobody, but a lot of people, they, you know, we don't want to do it. But if you want to take advantage of a channel like this, guess what? It's going to be. It's going to be work. Okay. So I pulled up my posts.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:57]:
I wrote this a couple days ago. Oh. And then sometimes I will just have a flow moment where I'll have an idea and I'll just write it. But my post just went out, and so I will put it in my backlog for later. I use this scheduling tool called Taplio. I use it. It's so dumb. This is so dumb.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:13]:
Here's a great business for you, Matt. I pay $500 a year for using this tool, taplio. The only reason I use that instead of the LinkedIn native scheduler is because you know what drives me nuts about the LinkedIn native schedule? You can't move things around. If I write a post for Tuesday, and then I want to move that one to Thursday, I have to edit it, copy all the text, delete that post, go to create a new one, and everyone listening that's done, this is going to be nodding along, be like, this is insane. So at Taplio, just because I can drag and drag and drop, and so then I just schedule it out. And so right now, I just, if I go and look, I have content scheduled for the next three weeks on LinkedIn. I post twice a day. I post at 07:00 a.m.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:53]:
Eastern and 03:00 p.m.. Eastern. I pick those times. I want to write twice a day. It's been working. So I do that. I look at my schedule. If I look at it two weeks from now and it looks empty, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to write.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:04]:
It's not like every week I'm writing, I'm just always contributing to this swipe file doc. So then when I do need to write, when I do need to fill that queue up, I have some stuff there. So that's my process. So here's what I do. If I was a founder, number one, shrink down. The focus of what you write about. This is huge. You got to focus in on one or two topics.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:24]:
Like, I used to kind of write about everything on LinkedIn. You know, friends, family, funny stories, my favorite rappers, whatever. I've shrinked into only focus on b, two b, marketing and building my business, because that is what you need to pick one or two core topics. Somebody commented like, oh, that's not true. You're supposed to show your personality. I think you show your personality through the type, through your writing. And so I throw, I show my personality through my writing, but I think you got to pick one or two topics to focus on. Number two is develop a clear point of view in your industry.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:53]:
This is going to trump everything else that you do. Having a clear, strong story. Like, when I was at drift, we had a clear, strong differentiator, strong narrative, and that translated well into social for content. Number three is win with depth. I think a lot of people when founders, they're like, social media. Does this mean I got to be posting memes? Like, you know, how much does Dan hate memes? We get it. Us funny guys, we get memes. Matt, you and me.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:16]:
Dan doesn't get memes, but, like, they think, you know, founders often think, like, this has to be your posting, silly kind of social media stuff that can work. But I wouldn't focus on that. I would try to win with depth. Right? Don't worry about being witty or posting memes. If that's not natural to you, then don't do it. Win. With your knowledge of the industry and expertise and what you're learning, building this company. I said write three posts a week.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:39]:
Why three? Because I think telling you to write every day is better, but not reasonable for most people. I think telling you to write once a week is not enough. So three is a nice little middle ground. Five, I said, treat LinkedIn as your industry blog. Treat this as the place where you write about work and you're going to do it a couple times a week. Then I talked about setting time to write posts and keeping a backlog, and we talked about commenting and replying. So, Matt, what we've talked about in the last ten minutes is a masterclass in LinkedIn. We go 20 layers deep on this, but I think this is a good place to give some people to start with and maybe we'll get a bunch of questions on this topic for next week or something.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:16]:
Agreed.
Matt Carnevale [00:15:17]:
Yeah, I think you nailed it. Cool. Next topic I have is marketing generalism versus specialism, which this one hits near and dear to my heart. I mean, for my entire career, which isn't long, the first five years I was, I am. I still am a generalist, but I always felt guilty, like I should specialize, I should niche down, and it's like, I don't know what to talk about on LinkedIn. Like, do I just talk about all this marketing stuff? Like, how do I pitch myself in interviews? So, yeah, let's dive into that. I'm actually curious to hear from you. Like, do you, you're good at certain things, but do you consider yourself a generalist? And, like, how do you, how do you view the whole thing?
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:55]:
Yeah, I think I'm definitely a generalist, but I think I have specialist skills, if that makes sense. And I learned this at drift, actually, where David, who's the CEO, was like, he pushed me. I was the first marketer there, and I was the marketing person at a startup. And so I tried to go all in and be like, growth marketing was hot at the time, and I tried to be like, growth marketing guy. And he was like, don't be that guy. You don't have to be that guy. He's like, that guy can work for us, but don't. You should be you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:29]:
What you're really good at is storytelling, copywriting, communication. Lean on those. And he gave me this book called managing oneself by Peter Drucker. And Peter Drucker talks about how it's much easier for you to, if you have a skill that you're like a b in, you should double down on that b to try to become an a in that skill versus, like, take some skill that you might be an f in. I don't know how. They have grades in Canada, so I apologize, but if you have an f, if you're like an f level, like, try to try to get that up. However much work you do on that topic, you're only going to ever become a c. And so his point was like, look, man, you're not naturally geared towards, like, SaaS metrics and analytics and growth testing, and that's more of, like, the engineering type of marketer.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:17]:
I'm much more on the copy storytelling side. He's like, you could try to become this growth marketing guy and maybe you'll become a b and that will be like, your ceiling here, but you're already good in this area. Like, go hard in this area and become great. And so that was a lesson that, like, that was very liberating for me to, like, not have to feel like I had to pick one and specialize. But also the way that I got around the specialization piece was I took a job that allowed me to scratch those itches as a generalist. And I see a lot of similarities to, like, why this is an interesting job for you with us at exit five, right? Like, maybe if you went to a team with 100 marketers, then, like, you might have to pick one thing and, like, become a product marketing person. But I think it's important that the company stage is going to match what you want to do career wise. And so I think that's an important piece of this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:07]:
Now, you might have to specialize, you might have to pick a specialization to be successful in a company, right? But that could just be a point in time in your career, and you're using that as a stepping stone to get somewhere else. Right? Like a well versed CMO today probably was a specialist coming up in pr or product marketing at some point. So I think it's being able to look at that as a moment in time in your career. Now, you can also make a heck of a career as a specialist, right? SEO is your thing, and you go all in on SEO, and you can make a lot of money working inside of a company, being great at SEO and help a company or start an agency. Right. I think you can't just look, it's just a very nuanced discussion for something like LinkedIn where it's like, generous or specialist. I don't know. What do you want to do? I'm a generalist now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:54]:
You could keep growing as a generalist, too. I think you have that option. Totally. What's your opinion on that? Don't just give me the love it and move on. What's your opinion on that.
Matt Carnevale [00:19:05]:
I think, and this is something that I think you commented on my post. A lot of people commented. It really depends the type of company you're going into. It's so easy to look at. Let's say you want to work for one of the big companies, like Meta, Google, or even just a really big SaaS company, and look at their listings and you'll see that they want someone that has deep expertise in Google Ads or LinkedIn ads or SEO. And you may think, oh, I need to become a specialist because then I'll never get jobs in companies like this. But maybe you're just looking in the wrong places. I didn't necessarily seek out exit five, but I knew when seeing it that it's like, okay, this is the right opportunity for me to grow right now.
Matt Carnevale [00:19:45]:
And sometimes it just takes more time to find those opportunities. So I would say that just look in the right places and then you can use those opportunities to get the next opportunity right. If I'm a generalist for like one to two years and I realize, okay, I really love content marketing, maybe I can double down on that here. And then if I wanted to go work for a company like a Google or meta or a really big established company, then I could get that job as the content marketer in that company. So use your generalist years to get that specialization.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:16]:
I think it also comes from a little, there's also an ang, there's also like a slice of like imposter syndrome that comes with this also, which is like, I'm the generalist marketer. I'm kind of doing everything in my role. I know I'm like a little, whatever the saying is inch deep or whatever, you're like a little bit in each of these areas. And so you kind of feel like, I don't know, should I, like, I know a little bit about SEO, I know a little bit about content. I know a little bit about product marketing. I do a little bit about demand gen and I have felt that as a solo marketer where then I would like spend like two weeks going deep on SEO and I'm like, wait, why am I doing this? Like, you can't do everything. You have to. You have to be able to hire or delegate.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:58]:
And if you're a solo marketer also, this means you have to look at the things on your plate really hard and be like, well, I can't do all of these. We're going to have to say no to some things that we could do. And so as you grow in your career, you're going to have to hire specialists in each of those areas. But I think it really all depends, like you said, on what you want, because if you're the solo marketer at a company, then you can make the case that a generalist is exactly what you need. However, that generalist still needs to have a course skillset. Right? Like a particular area. You can't be 25% good at all these things. You gotta be like, in my example, it wasn't a particular role, but it was like, my skills as a writer and communicator, that was the strength that I brought into whatever role I had.
Matt Carnevale [00:21:43]:
Yep, exactly. Exactly. Next, the last topic we have here is a newsletter that went out a couple weeks ago. The headline was money. Sometimes it is about the money, and you had a really cool story there. So why don't you share that story now and then we'll riff on that topic.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:59]:
Yeah, so I wrote this. This is basically just about how I think sometimes we get. We over index on the team, rah Rahs and the high fives and the, you know, you get a t shirt and we're gonna shout you out at the company meeting. That stuff is important. And some people, you know, it is important to feel seen that way in a public setting and get the recognition in front of others. Right? That is an important thing to us as humans. But I do think so often, man, and it's pretty cool. The emails that we get, I got an email and we get them to exit five.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:32]:
By the way, the replies, that email, right? Like, I got apply from someone I know who's been an exit five member for a while. This person felt like they were underpaid. They felt like they've done a great job. They went to their boss and they asked for a raise. And the boss said, let me talk to the team and think about it. They came back with a 4% raise. Right? What do you think that person's reaction to that is going to be? Not very good. Now, who knows the factors there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:58]:
There could be a lot of things misaligned. Maybe this person isn't a top performer. Maybe the company doesn't have budget. Maybe there's lots of factors that we don't know. I'm just using this as an example, right? But sometimes it is about the money. And I can think of once or twice, I can think of at least two times in my career where I was feeling, like, burnt out and underappreciated and I was going to leave and I got a big bonus or a big raise, and that made a huge difference. And so one time for me in particular, I just helped the company grow really fast. The company was doing really well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:32]:
I'm watching all of the sales team, which I felt like we were helping feed just print money, more money than I had, and I was feeling underpaid, and I was like, all right, you know what? I'm just going to take my medicine. It is what it is. I'm going to keep building. I'm going to keep building. And then it. Right before New Year's, I got a surprise bonus that was, like, more than I made in my first year working in. Hey, thanks for all your hard work. And it was unbelievable.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:56]:
I'll never forget that moment, because it was unbelievable how that erased all of the things that were bugging me. It's no different than, like, winning cures. You know, winning cures, all right, when things are going well at the company, a lot of the stuff are on a sports team. Right. A lot of the stuff that happens on a losing team or a bad company doesn't make its way to the surface. That erased a lot of things. And we're in a position now where we talk to lots of marketers. I've hired people.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:22]:
I've advised companies. I talked to lots of marketers through this job and others. Right? People want to get paid. People want money. Money is a very important piece of the career equation. And to act like it's not important is, look, could there be a different way that society runs without money? Maybe. Maybe in a different life. But on this planet right now, the way that the world works is like, people.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:45]:
People need to make money. And you want to make money, and you want to feel like money is how people feel, like they get recognized at work. And so I just think that so often, we don't. We don't give that raise. We don't give that bonus. And it is hard. As a manager, sometimes you don't have the keys, right, to see if the budget is set. But that's why people leave.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:03]:
And the easiest way to go get a 20 or 30% raise is to leave. But if you have that top performer on your team, pay them more, give them a raise, give them a bonus. And don't be afraid to ask for it if you feel like you have the receipts. I have a family friend recently that changed jobs. This is not even in marketing. This is just shows you how this whole thing works. It's insane. And I've always been bad at negotiating, right? But he took a new job, and was like, great, and accepted the offer.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:32]:
And then a couple of days later, he was like, actually, you know what? I should have asked for more money. And he went back and he said, I would actually like 20% more than this offer was or else I'm not going to sign. And they were like, great, here's 20% more than this offer was. And like, isn't that insane? Like, what if he never asked? Was that just there? And so I think you got to be looking out for yourself. The lesson from this is don't make it always about the money. But I'm saying that as an employee, as a person with a job, it's okay to feel it's okay to want to get a raise, it's okay to want to get paid more money. And if you're listening to this and you're a manager, go back and think about that. One or two top people on your team and like, are they compensated in the right way? And it's oftentimes much easier to pay someone much more to keep them and keep them happy than it is to bring somebody else from the inside, from outside.
Matt Carnevale [00:26:24]:
Yep, love it. I always read this thing online. Alex Hermosi talks about it a lot. It's like, are you in earning season or learning season? You kind of have to choose which one you're in. And I think there's an element of that that's true. But also, like, you can earn pretty good money and learn at the same time. So if you're not getting paid well, you can find another company where you are getting paid better and still learning the same.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:46]:
Right.
Matt Carnevale [00:26:46]:
You don't want to not learn anything, but we work in a field where you can do both at the same time up to a certain extent. So, yeah, that's my two cent anyways.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:54]:
Yeah, that's a good frame. That's something that I was coached on early. I think Gary Vee has talked about this in a good way. My twenties were more earning, and then as I got into my thirties, it was more about earning. But to your point, you can do them both. You definitely can. And there's pros and cons to starting your own business, self employment, working at a company, each one of those things, I think we all write very definitively online. Working at a company is the only way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:21]:
Solopreneurship is the only way, starting your own business is the only way. There's like, you could put, you could, you could write pros and cons to each of them. And so it is about your personal context, but on the money piece, though, I do feel like you can't just ask for money and expect to get it. And you can't just give a list of all the things you've done to your boss and been like, pay me. And been like, pay me. The only way youre going to actually get a raise at a company is if you have a clear plan with your boss and with your manager. And typically this doesnt always come right away, but you should have clear expectations about what youre doing. I talked to somebody the other day and theyre like, I went to my boss and I told him all of the 20 things ive done this year and im not getting a raise.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:03]:
Im like, well, just because theres planning and budgeting processes that happen inside of the company, you cant just show up one day and ask for that. You got to manage your own career a little bit and you got to work on your, come up with your path and have quarterly and year annual goals. Right. And let's have a conversation at x date about here are the expectations of this job that, that stuff, that stuff that I was not very good at as I was trying to, like grow in my career because I'd never done it before and like a fairly new first time manager, that stuff really matters. And if I went back and was a CMO or like team manager again, that's the stuff that I would place a lot more time and effort on because it makes things easier. And I got myself into a position where like someone got a raise because I thought they were doing a good job. And then everyone's like, well, why did they get that raise and why did they get that title? And I was like, because they did great. And that works at a certain, that works at a smaller stage as the company grows, like, job titles matter, role levels matter.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:04]:
Like having Stan, I thought it was nuts when I worked at HubSpot that they had like a, you know, this person is an l three marketing manager or whatever. I'm like, how dumb is that? And now I'm like, no, that was so immature of me. That matters so much because you need to be able to know where you're at. And as a company, you need to set like salary bands and expectations around what that person should be making. You can't just be like, yeah, I don't know. We're going to randomly give this person a $15,000 bonus. It's like, no, as a level three, you can make x. And then if you do X, Y and Z things, if you show proficiency in these areas, you get promoted to this next level and the salary bands for that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:38]:
All that stuff matters so much. I'm really good at the marketing piece. That's not the stuff. This is not the stuff that I love, and it doesn't drive me. And so it's why I'm fortunate enough now to, like, have my own business and go about it this way. But anyway, that's, that's more than anybody wanted. But we're riffing on this topic and that, that's, there's a lot in there, and I think this, this is all the stuff. Do you want to be a manager? This, this is all the stuff that you're going to, you're going to, if you, if you want to do this, this is what you got to understand and got to be able to do.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:07]:
And this is what drives the inner workings of a company. This is so often why I saw Dimitri Seamus, who I work with at HubSpot, he wrote this on LinkedIn today. He's like, uh. And I've said this a couple times in different ways, but the marketing part is easy. It's the internal people part that is challenging and that comes with setting goals and strategy and budgets and all that stuff. And that's where this fits in.
Matt Carnevale [00:30:26]:
Yeah, exactly. That's why it's so easy to read stuff on LinkedIn and big, oh, I'm going to go do this. And then you bring it to your manager, you bring it to your company, and it's like, ah, this is where it all falls apart, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:34]:
Yeah, but like, you gotta. I think it's. I wanted to say some of that on, on here because I think it's important to understand the other side. It's very easy to be like, what the heck? My company sucks. I should have got a raise, and I didn't get it. It's like, well, kinda, but, like, there's all these things behind the scenes that, like, have to work. And so, like, maybe if your company doesn't have those, that's a bigger sign of like, okay, maybe this company might not have the right process. You know, for my, like, the four years that I worked at drift, really there? Or like the first two and a half, maybe there was no process like that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:04]:
It was like you just would walk into work and one day be like, congratulations, you got a raise. But for two years, there was nothing. And you're like, what the, what the heck? But if I was working at a bigger company that has more formal structure, you know, then I would expect that, like, how do you think things are going to go at exit five? Are we going to have you as, like, a level two? You know, it's like, no, we're going to have a conversation at some point. And so I think all of those things should factor into, like what, which type of company do you want? Which job do you want? Where do you want to work?
Matt Carnevale [00:31:31]:
Exactly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:32]:
But anyway, to put a bow on it, I just want to put that message out there for you at work. It's okay. It's okay to make it about the money. Don't let anybody feel like you shouldn't. And you got to manage your own career. Awesome. All right, all of my animals are home now. I got to go.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:48]:
Thanks for doing this, Matt. Send us questions. Send us hi, exit five.com dot. Subscribe to the podcast. I know a lot of people that listen to this podcast. I need to do this more, Matt, on these episodes. Subscribe to the podcast, and a lot of people listen, but don't actually go and subscribe. Do that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:03]:
Send us questions. Hi, exit five.com dot. If you send us a voice note, we will prioritize that. We will make your voice note the first question. So whoever sends us the first voice note, as long as it's good and appropriate, we'll answer it on this podcast next time. Matt, always good to see you. I'll see you back in the slacks.
Matt Carnevale [00:32:19]:
All right, Coco, pleasure, Dave. Talk soon.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:22]:
Good job. Exit.