How to get promoted (and how to create excellent place to work)

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Too many people are working to get promoted at a company where they have no chance.

The company is a bureaucracy and the person in the seat they want isn’t going anywhere. Read the room and make lateral moves when you’ve learned everything there is to learn.

Want to be overwhelmed with opportunity?

Work for a company in chaos.

A company that has less than 100 employees, is growing and has an aggressive leader who wants more.

Want to be bored out of your mind? Work for a company with a passive leader who is rich and lazy, a fortune 500 bureaucracy or a company with 1,000+ employees.

Want to be in hell?

Work for a small business with small minded owner who doesn’t know how to delegate and isn’t willing to invest in things to make the company grow.

Some small business owners have a scarcity mindset. They look at every expense as exactly that – an expense.

If they spend another dollar on payroll that is one less dollar going into their pocket. If they spend a dollar on marketing that is one less dollar going into their pocket.

At a great place to work the opposite is true.

The owner has an abundance mindset. Every dollar spent is actually an investment and another $1.30 in their pocket. Every dollar spent on talent grows the company. Every dollar spent on marketing is another $5 coming in the door in new business.

Work for a company with a management team who believes in abundance and looks at business as a series of investments vs a series of expenses.

This is the single most important piece of advice I could give anyone in the workforce.

If you’re working in a giant bureaucracy where change means nothing more than a pain in the ass for the management team it will be impossible for you to move and shake and make things happen.

Big companies like this is where incompetent people can hide out for years and years and get promoted based on their loyalty. It is hell for top performers.

And if you work for a rich, lazy, content owner who doesn’t want growth the same will be true. They don’t want innovation.

You’d be surprised how many companies don’t actually want growth. They don’t want new ideas. They have a good business that isn’t stressful and prints money. Why would they want change or innovation from their employees?

The best businesses are aggressive and trying to improve. The bosses want the best person for the job in the seat and are willing to take chances on talented employees.

The bosses reward employees based on competence and their work – not how many years they’ve been coming to work or how long they stay past when everyone else leaves.

Find one of these organizations and watch your career explode.

A note:

C players HATE these organizations. They have nowhere to hide. They can’t blend in and act like they’re adding value.

This makes it even better for top performers like you because you can’t stand working with C players anyway.

PSA:

If you love this newsletter, you’ll love Codie Sanchez’s newsletter too. Click right here for automatic subscription and start learning more about small business.

She tells stories just like this.

A few more thoughts:

If your rich and happy – you earned it. If you’re broke and unhappy – you earned that too.

Next time you take off from a major airport look down at the city.

Billions of dollars worth of real estate just in your view. Millions of buildings all around us. Tens of millions of people who own it. Real estate will never be fully institutionalized.

It will always be dominated by the relative mom-and-pop. There will always be good deals because people fail to maintain it or manage it properly.

Being “small” is its own advantage in this game.

You don’t need a big team or a big fund. You can be scrappy and do a multimillion dollar deal with just you.

And just one deal can change your life.

Onward and upward,

Nick

P.S. Is it time to sell your business?

I launched a business brokerage.

We now have 800+ buyers on our distribution list.

When we get a listing we’ll do a podcast episode with the owner, a breakdown of the business to my 140,000 newsletter subscribers, and several tweets promoting the listing (I get 50 million impressions a month on Twitter).

Wanna sell your small biz? I can get you a great deal. Click here.

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About Me

I started the Sweaty Startup in December of 2018 because I believe the Shark Tank and Tech Crunch culture is ruining the real spirit of low-risk entrepreneurship.