038: Career Capital: Your Blueprint for Successful Equity Trading

The number one question that I get asked, how do I negotiate for more equity? Rare and valuable that you can position yourself, the more equity that you can negotiate for. It does come down to storytelling.

Can you describe your story and your career in results that you've delivered? Can you describe the lessons that you learned and experiences that you've had? Can you also bring to life how you did it with other people in a team and moved a company forward? That is going to swing your total annual compensation by thousands of dollars. Welcome to podcast for financially focused technology employees.

Are you working for equity? Do you have questions on how your career and money work together? Then welcome. Every week we discuss strategies and tactics for how to grow your career, build wealth and reach your financial and lifestyle goals. Hi, this is Christopher Nelson, your host.

Welcome to Tech Careers in Money Talk. Today, I am going to be breaking down the career capital playbook that's going to allow you to leverage all of your career experience to negotiate for more equity. Episode 35, I broke down expertise. Expertise is one of the pillars in my framework from equity to exit. Expertise allows you, when you develop expertise, it allows you to get more freedom and opportunities.

You have companies that are pursuing your services. When you develop expertise, you also can build a business and a brand around it. That's why I took episode 36 and 37 to interview Bart Finelli, who has done this very, very well. Bart Finelli grew his experience as a sales enablement, where he teaches salespeople how to sell complex SaaS services. He took that experience, developed it into expertise, And ultimately now he's building a business around it. He's building a application that is going to take his intellectual property and bring it to life for salespeople around the globe. And he's done everything that I'm going to break down and teach for you today. He has done that. He is able to, he understood and would inventory and assess where he was. He was able to invest and test his skillset And then ultimately, he can tell his story like no other. He's got amazing results, amazing statistics. This is what we're going to be breaking down today.

And I want to say that if you really enjoy the video, I would ask that you please subscribe right now. This is what we do here as we give more teaching and learning on how do you grow your career, build wealth, and live well. So why is this important to you? If you have a method that you can systematically take your skills and develop them to expertise, you can unlock wealth in a lot of different disciplines. You really, really can. T

his is essentially what I'm doing now as a content creator. I am taking the same practice And I am executing it as I am getting educated, getting experience, and delivering results as an educator. And many people fail at this. Many people struggle. One of the biggest questions that I get is, how do I negotiate for more equity? Well, you have to be able to have a systematic way to describe what it is you've done. And I say systematic because many people don't take the time to write down what they've done in the last year, in the last two years. They only do it when they're forced to under duress.

Usually don't remember a lot of key details. People also don't take the time to map what they've done and describe it in results. Describe it quantitatively and what they did and how they moved the needle for their team, their company, or their customers. It's so important that you're able to do this and also tell your story in a way that's engaging. When you can tell your story in a way that has people leaning in, they're going to be excited to work with you. They want to be a part of your story. What we'll break down today is this playbook. As I have analyzed others, as I have been executing my process from equity to exit, this playbook, the career capital playbook, is essential.

And if this is the one thing that you do, all the things that I teach, if this is the one thing that you do, this will allow you to make more money and get more opportunities than anything else. So hold on, this is gonna be fun. So we start with career capital. The concept of career capital is simple. It's your education, your experience, and your results. I got this word from Cal Newport. Cal Newport wrote an amazing book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. And in that book, he creates this thesis that he supports with a lot of data. He's a computer scientist, so it's science and data to prove his thesis, which is if you focus on developing skills, those skills will eventually get you on a mission and get you to a point where you are doing work that doesn't feel like work anymore.

It's so enjoyable because you are able to align the skill that you're deeply experienced that with your passion. And I've taken that and said, well, if I want to develop skills to expertise, how do I need to analyze my skills? How do I describe my skills in the way that I'm moving towards expertise? And so your education, I draw this out on a triangle and I have at the top, I have your education. And that's where you start. You start at the top with this little point that says, I am going to get some education that shows me how to do a skill. But that skill hasn't been practiced yet. Practice by going down to the right and getting experience. And experience has much more value when you're doing it in commerce, when winning or losing customers are at stake, winning or losing money is at stake, or there's risk, right?

You think about security where you're protecting real companies that are in the middle of commerce. Then it slides over and on the left-hand side, you have the dot for results. And this triangle is the way that I think about iterating around this triangle. And I go from education, I then go get experience, I deliver results, and then I go back up to education.

Education in this context isn't just formal education where I am going to go to school. Because in all honesty, once you leave school, you realize that the greatest thing that you learn upon leaving, whether it's high school, whether it's college, is the fact that you don't know anything. And so you have to create a practice of self-education and self-learning so you can continue to grow. And this education encompasses all of that. And when you think about it and you keep iterating around the circle, you can put any skill right that in the middle and say, okay, I want to get some education around that. I want to go get some experience.

I want to deliver results. And then I want to go take those results back to education. What do I need to know? Where do I need to fill in gaps to keep moving forward? That's the concept of career capital. And so as we go through this framework, it's really important that you understand those simple three steps, because that's going to be brought to life by this framework that I call the three I's before E. Three I's before E. I before E except after C. Yes, my mom taught fifth grade grammar. So the three I's are inventory and assess. You need to have an inventory and assess where you are with your skill set. Number two is invest and test. If you listen to the episodes that I have with Bart, he talks a lot about how he invested time, how he invested money, in his skill set, in this IP that he was creating. And he constantly tested it. He constantly put it to work in different roles that he took to understand, could he deliver results with it? The third one is illustrate and tell.

You want to illustrate with great examples, great stories, great lessons learned, impactful, things that are rich and add value to your story. And then you need to figure out, you need to learn, you need to learn how to tell your story. Telling it in a way that is engaging, fun, impactful, that people will get excited about. So I want to move into the process and let's start talking about inventory and assess. Inventory is going to be as simple as it sounds. where you want to create a list and list out your skills. And I would say do a dump first, you know, get a lot of them out there on the table.

And then assessment is where you want to get an objective assessment for where they are from an experience level in the market. So if I ask you right now, what are the skills that you're able to bring to a role that is going to make an impact for a company? Could you answer that? Could you list that concisely with confidence off the top of your head? that would be able to share with somebody the value that you bring to a company? Could you identify which ones are your strongest skills and where you believe that you excel in the marketplace and you can deliver more value than somebody else or you have a unique value proposition that you could deliver? What about the ones that you're investing and developing into? Can you describe those, where you are on that journey, and maybe what help you'd need along the way? Because you're talking to somebody that could ultimately become a mentor or somebody that could help you.

If you can't answer these questions right now off the top of your head and list those out in a very direct and convincing way, then this is ultimately the work that you need to do. This is the inventory and assess exercise. And so I know for myself, when I was in industry, one of the things that I could talk about right off the top of my head was the fact that I had deep experience with SaaS, software as a service, business applications, implementation and management. One of the unique things that set me apart is I had been doing it since 2004, and I had actually written with co-sponsors, co-authors, a lot of the framework of how implementations were done at Accenture and how they evolved. That was a unique skill that I could talk about in detail that would uniquely set me apart.

I could also talk about my team building skills and my experience at specific companies and how the leading indicator that my skills were at the top of this game was the fact that I had an incredibly low attrition rate. My attrition rate was usually around 1% annually. And I worked in an IT function in technology companies that generally had a very, very high turnover. I also attracted a very diverse population. I could go through and provide demographic metrics that showed that I hired and built diverse teams. Those are things that I could go through and in detail right off the top of my head. And I still could if I was interviewing for those positions. And ultimately, those are the things that set you apart. If you go back and you listen to the interviews that I had with Bart Finelli, and you go to episode 37, that was where he was really talking about what he did in breaking down his process. He could go through the statistics of the value that he delivered right off the top of his head. And those results are jaw-dropping of what he delivered to take Splunk from around $100 million revenue a year to $1.5 billion when he left.

That is something that people rarely do, but he can drop those statistics in a way that are incredibly compelling. So being able to do an inventory as you go. So one thing that you want to do right now is you want to go grab If you prefer a document, a document or a spreadsheet, and you want to list out what you've done over the last year, two years, five years, your career, you want to go list down some of those impactful projects. I encourage people to do this exercise twice a year. Sit down. I would encourage you to get out of your home, get somewhere else.

Slow down the pace and list down what are your accomplishments. Then you want to write down right next to it, what is the impact? Then what is the skill that you used? Then you want to make some notes. Where do you think the skills were? Where would you want to do better? So you can literally start coaching yourself in the direction that you want to go. This is an inventory. And I recently published in my newsletter a template for this. And I will put this in the show notes so that you can go grab that template if you want to do this exercise. And I would encourage everybody to do it. So once you inventory your skills and you list those out, then you need to perform an assessment. Now, an assessment, it's interesting. I have some data here from Skillable. It's a skill validation company. in tech that's found two key issues in hiring, two issues that people are struggling with. Mismatches in job posting and candidate skills. So open positions, not finding suitable candidates. There's a discrepancy between the employee's self-assessed skills and the employer's expectations. In this situation, I always ask, what can we take ownership of?

Well, we should know very clearly how to describe our skill set and where it is from a level of maturity, this level of assessment. The second thing was a self-assessment bias. Employees overestimate or underestimate their skills, making accurate data collection difficult. And this is where people are leaving money off the table, on the table. They're leaving money on the table. Because I have been in interviews where I've interviewed people that can't tell their story well. And I enjoy getting people's stories out of them. This is why I started a podcast, I enjoy interviewing people in hearing and telling their career story.

And so I would be in interviews and I would be teasing out details and I would understand, wow, this person is incredibly valuable. They have done a lot of things and delivered results that they didn't even know themselves. When you're negotiating for equity, knowing realistically, right, this is important because It can work in your favor if you are undervaluing yourself.

I think for many people that are mid-career, if you are a senior manager, if you're a director and you have not done this exercise, you need to go do it right now because I would bet that you're leaving money on the table. Because if you can articulate more of what you've done in a unique and valuable way, that is going to set you apart in interviews. This is going to allow you to negotiate for more equity when you get to the negotiation phase. The flip side is also true in that you don't want to lose money. You don't want to leave a role thinking that you're going to do a role that is higher, and then there's mismatched expectations, and then you're not able to execute the role well, and then you're no longer with that company.

That is a real risk. I have seen that happen where people want to leverage up, but they haven't done their own self-assessment in known what their skill level is. So how do you address this? What's the solution? The solution is you need to seek out a self-assessment where, if you have technical skills, there are a lot of third-party vendors that you can go to, and you can take different quizzes and exams, and you can understand what level your skill set is. There is also, for soft skills, for leadership, there are multiple different tools that you can go and evaluate yourself and understand where they are.

Now, in some of these other skills, you think about marketing, sales, finance, even some IT level skills. One of the exercises I think it's important is if you list out your skills, and I'd say do this exercise, you don't need to go through the laundry list here, because when you're in negotiations, when you're applying for a role, there's really going to be, I'd say, you know, five to seven skills that you're really going to highlight, depending on where you are in your career. If you are a director, you are going to need to talk through skills that help you operate as a business operator, as a leader, as a relationship builder, and as an innovator.

So you will need to have more skills to describe. If you're an individual contributor, it may just be three or four. But grab those and create some factors for yourselves that you can describe, like what would be a novice, what would be a beginner, intermediate, and advanced, and put some descriptors next to those and go seek feedback. This is why there have been books written that feedback is a gift because It will let us know it will burst our bubble can be hard from an ego perspective. And I know over my career, I've taken a lot of feedback that was hard at the time. But as you as you build the muscle of taking feedback and realizing that it lets you see through blind spots. And ultimately, if you navigate that, you will get stronger, you will build skills, and you will continue to grow your career, you embrace it, you love it. So creating a skills list, putting something down there, and you can put I put initiate, foundational practitioner leader, and think through yourself to, you know, self assess in a healthy way saying, could I stand up and teach this to a bunch of new people? Could I? Do I really know the book, the playbook?

And then go seek and put this in front of other people, put this in front of your peers, your mentors, and others that can give you feedback on this to really understand where you are. And if you do this step one of inventory and assess, and you get all of this documented, that is going to be a valuable asset that you will use in this process of developing your career capital.

You're going to understand what is the value of that presently, and then how you need to go into the rest of the process. So career capital, your education, your experience and results, you want to take that, and you want to, Do an inventory, you want to document it, and then you want to assess it. Step number two is you want to invest and you want to test. But before we go to invest and test, we're going to take a small break and we'll be right back. Okay, and we are back to the second half. And so what have we learned? We've learned career capital. That's how you describe your education, your experience, and your results.

You keep going around that triangle, and that is how you build your skills to develop expertise. And you use this framework that is so important to be able to catalog to be able to grow and to be able to describe what you have. And that is the three I's before E.

We covered off on the inventory and assess. Now we're going into invest and test. And so invest and test is how it sounds. You want to invest time and money in adding new skills or you want to build the skills that you already have. you know, continuing to invest in those. Test is where you take your skills from where you've learned them and you put them somewhere where they're going to be at risk and you're going to develop experience. You're going to deliver results. That is the invest in test cycle. So the question then is when you come out of the inventories, right? What are the skills that you want to invest in? Like that should give you some targets. Then there's a question of, How do you want to invest?

There's multiple ways to invest. There is going out and purchasing some type of training, whether that is coaching, online training, taking some certification course from an institution. There's so many different ways that you can invest. It could just be time. You have books, you have resources that are free, but you need to invest the time and study, or you need to volunteer some time so that you can get some new experience doing something else. I mean, the investment can be different from a lot of different angles. And so the outcome of investing is that you would develop a skill even further or that you would add on a new skill. So what would be some really tangible examples? I know for myself, I am investing time in testing speaking, not just podcasting, but actually giving talks, performing workshops.

So I am doing some of those for free. I'm investing some time here and around the Austin area so that I can develop that skill. I just need to get in some repetitions. My feedback is coming from the audience. My feedback is coming from watching the videos that my experience. It can also be yourself doing a course on generative AI. There's so many courses out there. You go get one that you believe is reputable, that can give you some initial skills and can move you forward. There's also getting certifications. You can get an AWS certification to multiple different levels. You can go get salesforce.com certifications. You can get snowflake certifications for data, multiple security certifications, but that is some type of education and investment of time and effort that will get you something that then you need to go test.

There could also be a leadership course. The example that comes to mind for me of an investment of time and in something different was when I worked for Splunk, they gave us executive coaching. That was part of the package. And this is one of the advantages when you work for larger established companies or you work for tech companies that are doing very well and growing and have money. There's education that comes with that versus when you are a solopreneur or an entrepreneur, you have to pay for that yourself. But with these larger companies, that comes with it. It's great. So for myself, when I first was going to see an executive coach, I was pretty skeptical. I was not clear on the value that they would add.

I was at a point in my career where I had been a director for a year or so, and I wanted to understand how do I start accelerating my career? How do I start getting skills to help me grow? What were the things outside of the business of business applications that I was running that would allow me to move forward? When I sat down with this coach, it was a very informative decision or experience because this gentleman came from industry and had been an executive, had multiple years of experience, and now was performing an executive coaching role. And he could come with all sorts of wisdom and experience while he was instructing me and giving me direct guidance, and then touching base with me and understanding how I was, you know, what were things that I was struggling with, removing barriers to allow me to move forward.

This ended up becoming a transformative experience in my career because it accelerated me very, very quickly through some a growth around management and around building teams that I was able to continue to use even to this day. Some of the foundational frameworks that Shinomi gave me, I continue to use. I think about Bart's example that he gave in the previous weeks that's as important to call out is he found a specialization, a skill that he was building in sales enablement, which was teaching people how to sell. He then invested time and this actually goes more into the testing phase as he tested it by going and actually working as a sales guy. So this is how these two work hand in hand as you invest the time to go learn the new skill and then you test it by seeking experience and measuring your results.

So this goes back to the triangle again. You get your education. You get your experience and your results. Inventory and assess gives you the targets of where do you want to get educated on. Then you go get the education. You invest the time. Then you move to the test. Testing is where you want to take whatever skills you had, apply those in your day-to-day world. For myself, I got the executive coaching around management. I could go walk out of a coaching session Hours later, walk into a one-on-one and start applying some of those lessons that I've learned and start testing those immediately. You could then go to a project or you could go to a specific role. This is what Bart did is to test.

He would then take the sales enablement skills that he was developing and he would then go to work as a sales leader and then understand how this intellectual property who is developing this framework, how did it actually play out? This is incredibly powerful because now he's able to go through this track record of how he built a process, executed the process, tested it, and bring those results and display that. That increases the value. This is a great example of skills built to the level of expertise.

And I reiterate it because it's so important. It's important for me. It's important for you to understand what are salient examples. What does good look like? What does success look like? This is why I spend time interviewing people, talking about their career, talking about their career journey, and this part of how they invest and how they test, this is the heart of it. If you go and do the inventory and assessment, and then you move on and you're able to illustrate and tell your story, but you don't continue to invest and test, you're not gonna add value. These three I's come before the E.

You need to inventory and assess, you need to invest and test, and then you need to illustrate and describe to truly continue growth and to be able to describe the true value of what you've built. So invest time, money, energy in building the skills. Then you go and test them in projects, in your day-to-day work, or even in new roles. Now let's move on to the third I before E, which is illustrate and describe. And this is where so many people stumble. They stumble for multiple reasons.

Number one, they haven't done the appropriate inventory and assessment. So when it's time to put something together, they don't have all of the detail to be able to tell their story holistically. They don't have all the pieces. Many people also don't understand that it's not the what that matters. It's the so what you have to tell it in a results oriented way. And then what I've also seen and heard in interviewing many, many people as a hiring manager is people become over-reliant on their resume and their LinkedIn to tell their story for them. So when it's their turn to describe it, they don't have a lot to say, or they don't really tell it in a way that is going to position it as super valuable. And that's the key to getting leverage and negotiation for your time and talent. And so you can do great work, you can deliver great results, and you can still not tell a good story. People become over-reliant on their LinkedIn and their resume, not understanding that the job of your resume is to get you the interview. The job of LinkedIn is to generate external interest, to have opportunities coming your way. But it's not supposed to tell the story.

There is still a lot of work to do. And solving this problem is going to accelerate your career and accelerate the opportunities that you have. So let's break it down. Illustrate. To illustrate, you need to add key elements to your story. You need to distill it out of your inventory and assessment, your invest and test, to make it jump off the page, to make it exciting to listen to, to make it an interesting story to tell. And everybody has it. Everybody has an interesting story to tell. And the key things you want to focus on are results delivered. And you want to tell this in a quantitative way. How did you impact Did you impact revenue? Did you impact customer retention, customer satisfaction?

Did you protect revenue? Did you defend against a risk? You want to make sure that you have something there. You want to also add lessons learned. Lessons learned is the way that you package up great successes, but you also package up failures. And if you're able to do this very well and articulate lessons through stories of struggles and challenges and success, struggles, challenges, failures, That creates this holistic picture of who you are and lets people really understand if this is the right role for you or not. And told in the right way, it's going to display a tremendous amount of value.

You also want to just be able to tell stories. What are fun stories that you can tell that keep people very engaged? and excited. You also want to be able to tell stories around people, right? Who are the people that you interacted with?

Who are the people that you worked with? Who are the people that you helped? Because this is a business that we're doing around people and we're around people a lot. And so if you're able to describe your results quantitatively, you can articulate your lessons learned, tell engaging stories and describe the people that you met, that you worked with, It's also a small world.

You'll be surprised how many hiring managers may know people that you know as well. The more you're telling those stories, it can connect dots and create opportunities for you. So data tells us right now that quantifying results is a problem. It's important for you to understand that a 2022 report by the Jobscan resume review platform found that only 57%, so a little over half, submitted contained quantifiable achievements. So a 2023 survey by Muse Career Platform found that 63% of hiring managers find that candidates who quantify their achievements more credible and trustworthy. So the data is speaking. People aren't doing this, but hiring managers want to see this. And I know myself in talking with other hiring managers as well, If you can understand something's quantifiable, we trust you because you're understanding the business value of what you do. It's so important that people understand, especially if you're mid-level in your career and you don't understand the business value, like how that translates up to a company goal. You need to make sure that you can do that. That is going to display your value more than anything.

These are fast moving, high paced companies that are looking to accomplish business goals very quickly. And if you can demonstrate and show how you've done that before, and you can continue to be a part of that, that's going to move you forward in the process. This is the illustration part.

This is where you capture all of those pieces and you fold those into your LinkedIn, you fold those into your resume, and then you fold that into the story that you are going to tell. Now, when I interviewed Blaine Wagao, that was one of my first interviews. It was a story, it was an interview on personal branding. You can go look up that. I can't remember the number off the top of my head.

I will actually link that in the show notes. She talked about you have to have an elevator pitch. How do you do this? To tell your career story, if you have your inventory And that can frame it up. And you put that in a chronological order of your inventory of accomplishments that you've done throughout your career, big projects, goals, personal achievements that you did. You can then tell your story. Let me frame this up, because this is also important from a results perspective, is you always, when you're telling your story and you're describing what you did in the way of business, you want to have this outside-in framework. Outside-in means for technology companies, the most important person is the customer.

Customers are important to the business. I'm not trying to say employees are not important, but I'm saying in the context of business goals and delivery, customers are incredibly important. So it goes customer, company, division, department, team, self. So you want to tell the story in that context, right?

The outside-in, the more you can describe the outside and how you did that, and then bring it back in and tell the story in that direction, that is going to generate more impact. And this is how your team is also impacting other teams that are driving the business forward. Product team and sales teams two main teams that drive business product forward. We create the product, we sell the product. How does the customer feel about it? All the other teams, and you can say sales and marketing, right?

But how can you then impact those teams when you're talking outside in? Do you have some impact in relation to those teams? Can you articulate and quantify something around there? How did your projects impact employee productivity, you know, optimization of processes, employee satisfaction. That's another great thing as well, that again, telling from an outside in, that's a company level metric that if you're helping make employees happy. So these are things to think about in framework as you are setting up to create your the story of your career. And you want to make sure that you can tease out some quantifiable results. I've talked about this before. Have you increased revenue?

Have you increased customer satisfaction, customer retention, employee satisfaction, employee retention? adoption, you've prevented a risk that could have cost the company X thousands, X millions of dollars. Those are the types of things you're thinking about. So to document your career story, you want to, I think the easiest thing to do is to go get otter.ai, which is a transcribing tool that you can put on your phone and you can get a free version of it that gives you enough capacity to be able to complete this exercise. But I would look over your assessment and I would just start telling your story.

You start talking it into there. You can have all the ums, you can have all the buts, and you just want to tell your story and get it out there documented. Then you can pull that in and you can start editing it down into a five minute version. You know, try and hit the highlights. You're not looking to go into all the crazy detail, but pull that out and hit the highlights of your career story.

Then how would you, and then you can look again online, you can find how many words can you say per minute that would help you understand what are the actual limits that you need to put there on how many words you want to get this down to. But you want to have a five minute version. You want to have a two minute version. You should have a 30-second version.

And the first time you do that exercise, it's going to be challenging. You want to make sure that you do write it out, that you can look at it. Then you want to practice saying it. You want to practice saying it with people, because this is a story that needs to be told. It's worthy to be told. It is your life's work, in many cases, or a big portion of your life's work. It may not be what your ultimate purpose is, but it is a big stepping stone on the way to get there and deserves to be told.

So as you write out, you know, and then you can also, you know, write out some of these illustrators, you can write out some of these stories, and you can integrate this all together and draft up a story, draft it up and tell it in five minute, two minute, 30 seconds. That's essentially what you do. And that was something that I glommed on to this concept coming out of college. And it was something that I would train to do when I was going to job fairs is I would stand in front of somebody and I would give them my 30 second update. what it was I wanted to do and what skills and experiences that I had.

Because at that point, I didn't have a lot of tangible results in business, but I had some experiences that I could talk to and what we did there on those internships. So that is it in its entirety. And I am thinking about creating some chat GPT prompts that could help you through that. If that's something that you would be interested in, just send me an email at ask at tech careers and money talk.com. I'm interested to know who would be open to looking and helping me test some chat GPT prompts that could take a raw story and refine it very quickly. But that's it. That is the framework. And so if I break it down again, you want to take your skills and move them to expertise. How do you do that? It seems very hard and challenging.

Well, no, it's not. What you want to focus on is your skills. You have education, you go get experience, you deliver results. Boom, boom, boom. This is the triangle you want to keep taking your skills through, iterating around, And the process that you utilize to go around the corner, to go around the triangle, is the three I's before E's. You have to do these three I's to get to expertise, which is inventory and assess. Go do your career inventory right now. If you're a mid-level careers executive, jump off this podcast, go pull over, do whatever you need to do, and get this done.

But you want inventory and assess. You then want to invest and test. And then you want to illustrate and test. Tell, illustrate and tell your story. If you can practice this and you can get into a practice where two times a year you take a day, a day and a half and you go through this exercise and you keep refining your career story and you keep investing in that. You will find that you are going to start attracting opportunities to yourselves and that you are going to become a very compelling person in an interview that is going to set yourself apart from others. Because many people are not doing this.

Many people get focused on the invest and test. they forget a lot of things and can't describe it in a way that's meaningful. And many people, and I have been in on interviews for execs that were applying for roles that were higher than myself. When I was a director, I interviewed some VPs because they were going to be a peer of my direct report, my manager at that point. So they wanted me to interview them. And many of them could not do this exercise. They could not tell their story in a way that was compelling.

It was really through interviewing and asking a lot of questions. If you make it easier for people to interview you, then you're going to be able to spend more of the time talking about the results you delivered, the interesting things that you did, and that's going to build the relationship. Hope you enjoyed that. My one ask is that if you did enjoy this, I would ask that you go leave us a review. We grow and expand our podcast based on reviews. So we would love for you to leave us a review and thank you so much. We'll see you on the next one.