Hire 💩 shovelers

When your startup starts making your first hires, hire calloused hands. 

Or more specifically, hire hands that are comfortable gripping a shovel, not a scalpel. 

Startups are:

• Insane

• Unpredictable

• Frustrating

• Exhilarating

• Messy

Actually, double down on that last one.

If you’re a good founder, you’ll build out a revenue model. You’re going to predict growth, have plans on how to get there, and you’ll make a lot of assumptions. 

Many of those assumptions are going to be wrong. Not only that, some of them will create problems. No, they’ll create messes, and the only way to get through them is to grab a shovel. 

We lost a good 💩 shoveler at GoWild recently

Brayden Ware moved on to the next phase of his career recently, leaving GoWild after 4 years.

When Brayden started at GoWild, he had some marketing experience but he would be the first to tell you he was green. Not only that, we were working our way through a pivot into ecommerce as we waded through a pandemic.

He learned a ton while he was with us—I've always said we live in dog years at GoWild. His 4 years are worth 14 at a large company.

What I haven't told Brayden enough is how much I learned from him. He's taught me more about SEO, digital marketing, category creation & customer acquisition than nearly anyone in my career.

In our last meeting together—the handoff meeting for his responsibilities—I told the crew that while we have his listed responsibilities covered in the near term, the biggest loss of Brayden is we were losing our 💩 shoveler.

That may at first sound like an insult—it's not.

For 4 years, when it hit the fan, Brayden has been one of the first  to grab a shovel & sign up for whatever it takes to get it done. "Not my job" has never come out of his mouth and I'm not sure it's even crossed his mind.

One time we were onboarding tens of thousands of products for our ecomm feed. It was MESSY. The product data was rough, and the whole team had to stop what we were doing and start combing through tens of thousands of lines in spreadsheets to clean up the data.

Every week, we'd look at who was cranking out the most clean products, and it was Brayden (actually, shout out to our teammate Jackie on that specific task, too).

When we started doing ecomm ads and needed to beef up our product pages, it was Brayden who stepped in for "PDP cleanup."

When we decided to build our own tradeshow booth, Brayden showed up in flannel, ready to work in the cold and asked Dan Hood how he could help.

The guy is selfless.

And he can adapt to any situation to help find a solution.

Amid the random tasks he's helped with, he has managed to really sharpen his skills as a marketer and growth expert. And that expertise brought an opportunity to his door that was too good for him to pass up. 

Generalists build startups

OK, so the real term for these types of employees is not “💩shoveler.” It’s “Generalists.” 

Generalists are employees who are like Brayden—skilled at a wide range of tasks. I am a big advocate for founders hiring generalists in the early days of a startup, because generalists can have high impact across the board. 

If you need specialists early, I’d consider a contractor first. Specialists work with scalpels—moving with expertise and precision, and they’re more akin to how doctors are often specialists. A neurologist is not your first call when you’re having heart palpitations. In fact, your first move might be to call your general practitioner, who know when to call in a specialist. 

A big reason startups should avoid hiring specialists in the early days is you’re still figuring it out. You’re probably going to pivot some element of the business. That fancy model you spent days if not weeks perfecting? It’s wrong. I promise you—it’s absolutely wrong. 

The problem is you don’t know what’s wrong yet. The only way to figure it out is through experimentation. A generalist will adapt (or, ahem, grab a shovel) to help you dig out in these scenarios. Specialists? Not so much. 

Hiring generalists doesn’t mean lowering your expectation for roles. You don’t hire a junior developer—maybe you hire a talented full stack engineer who can do the backend and frontend. As your platform scales, you’ll hire that skilled backend developer to scale the platform and keep you out of tech debt. 

Every startup is different, and I’m speaking at a high level, but we have had more luck with hiring generalists who are scrappy team players, and contracting with specialists for niche needs. As we’ve scaled into new needs, we’ll then hire the expert. 

Well wishes to one of my best generalists hires

One of the greatest honors as a leader is helping someone build their skills so much that they have endless opportunities. I always told Brayden I thought he'd one day have a phase of his career that's much bigger than what we're doing today. He's taken a step towards that now.

Still, losing him hurt. We're going to miss Brayden in the office, from teasing him about pickles to Monday morning water cooler stories in hunting season, he's been a huge part of the office culture.

And I know we'll miss him when those random fires pop up, because he was always the first to grab a hose. Or a shovel—choose whichever analogy you like here. 

But I'm gonna do my best to not be sad for him in taking that next step in his career. 

I’m proud of you, Brayden. Stay wild.

Content idea

Have you had an experience working with generalists vs. specialists? Share your thoughts on why this approach works (or heck, why it doesn’t). If you give me a tag, I’d love to be a part of the conversation. I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Who I’m listening to: Jordan Lee King

What I’m reading: “The Bean Trees” by Barbara Kingsolver

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