?? Choosing the Best Company to Work With

This week, I want to address a topic that loads of people are wrestling with right now: how to pick the best company to work with.

In the past week alone, I've had text exchanges, WhatsApp audio chats, emails, and more from at least a dozen colleagues and friends who are:

• unemployed and looking for their next gig

• employed but debating where they should go next
• employed but wondering whether they should leave
• settling into a new company

Everyone seems to be in "transition mode" lately.

Either making or considering a change.

If you're in that boat, this special edition of Making Global Work is for you.

And I'll summarize the main takeaway here.

There is no "best" company. There are only jobs at companies you can make the best of.

A Quick Reflection on the Macro Side

Friends, we've all been through a lot in recent years.

For many years, we saw steady growth at our companies. Growth mode was the de facto way of operating in many businesses. Funding was easier to come by. The business climate felt relatively easy and unfettered.

Then, boom! A global pandemic violently shook up our lives, even causing many of our nearest and dearest to be lost.

These realities triggered a massive push to remote work, a surge of unprecedented growth in many tech companies, coinciding with a "great resignation." This meant... tons of job opportunities everywhere we looked. Lots of career mobility. With so much growth, jobs in Big Tech needed filling. Laws of supply and demand.

The balance of power between workers and employers quickly shifted. Employees had more choices and could suddenly swing their weight around more than ever before, it seemed.

But just as quickly, growth dipped, followed by equally unprecedented lay-offs. Hundreds of thousands of people, in the United States alone.

Blame over-hiring. Blame short-sightedness. Blame an unhealthy hunger for revenue growth at the expense of profitability. Blame humans who, well, aren't perfect and make mistakes, and are ultimately all doing what they think is best at any given point in time.

The fact is, people simply did not know when, or how abruptly, the growth would slow down.

In the stage that followed, and that we're still in now, we have been navigating a post-pandemic economic recovery that feels tense and precarious.

The current stage feels like the spreadsheet equivalent of an untrained member of a circus audience being asked to walk a tightrope. One step at a time. Trying to balance on a tense thin line. Arms waving wildly, just hoping not to fall.

None of us have ever walked a tightrope like this before. And now we have to do it in front of a crowd of investors and business peers. They are watching from the audience, in terrified yet hopeful silence, afraid to cheer us on lest they distract us, willing us to just keep moving along, one foot in front of the other, one step at a time.

The end of the tightrope is not totally visible yet.

It feels like we can see it.

But we won't fully exhale until we get to the other side of it.

In fact, maybe we'll never feel as free and easy as we once did, now that this experience has been burned into our brains.

Probably a good thing, really.

That's how the macro picture feels.

And I paint it because I think the macro is what ultimately impacts the micro.

So now let's discuss the micro.

YOU.

Choose an Employer Based on These Two Things

I'm going to give you the simplest advice ever about picking your next place to work. I think you should boil it down to just two simple things:

Choose your next company based on how much you can learn and how much you can earn.

As your life changes, one might be more important to you than the other.

I think both are equally important, but the balance of which matters most to you might change depending on your personal circumstances, and your financial picture, and where you are in your career.

Let's talk about the first one first.

Choosing Based On How Much You Can Learn

Learning is how you grow in your career, and in your life.

Whether you learn by changing jobs, by expanding your role, by doing side hustles while doing the same job, or by changing companies, industries, geographies, or anything else, I believe that most people in this world want to grow and evolve.

The important thing I want to flag here is that you have choices.

Not all of them require moving to a new company.

If you're mildly bored in your job, you can distract yourself with a side hustle if your company allows it. If you're beyond unchallenged, you might need to apply for a new role internally, or perhaps relocate to another country.

(That's my own personal fave way to learn, and one that I highly recommend if you have the stomach for it, but it's also way harder than many other options you might choose instead!)

And of course, you can move to a new company.

Sometimes, that is the best path, because it opens your eyes in ways that staying with a current employer simply cannot. And sometimes, it happens without you having any choice in it. But this can be a blessing in disguise, leading you to a job where you'll be much happier and learn a lot more.

But don't underestimate how much you can learn with a role change, or an expansion of your role that your manager might be delighted to support, or even a side project you can help another team with. Sometimes, those are the opportunities where you learn the most, and they don't require a job change!

Choosing Based On How Much You Can Earn

If there is one thing people have learned about career decisions thanks to mass lay-offs, it's that a relationship between an employee and an employer is, at the end of the day, merely an exchange of value.

You do a job for a company and they pay you a salary.

While we all know this at some level, this basic fact can get lost!

Especially for those of us who lean in hard, with intense passion, and give a lot to our jobs.

For many of us, work is a major part of our identity.

If that's you, be aware that you could run the risk of giving a bit too much of your heart and soul to a company.

We get so tied into the relationships, the mission, the culture, and so many other things that we forget that actually, companies needs change as they evolve.

The role that they needed a few years ago might simply no longer be required.

That's not a reflection on you.

That's just a reflection of a faceless business and its changing needs.

As humans, we are creatures of emotion. The line between a legal entity we call a business, and the people we associate with it, can get blurry.

It's natural that when a relationship with a company changes dramatically, or even is severed, we go through pain and loss, anger and grief as part of it.

But have a look at your employment contract. It says all you need to know. You're being paid to do a job, and the need for that job can change anytime. It's not personal. It's just how business works.

For that reason, I suggest that you do research on what you can and should earn. Don't do this by asking around at your own company what peers make. That is never going to give you an accurate picture.

Figure out the local / national benchmarks for what compensation is typical for the roles that you have or want to do, at similarly sized companies, for similar job responsibilities (not necessarily titles, which can be highly variable from one company to another) and start from there.

And importantly, recognize that you are worthy of fair compensation.

The reason I emphasize this is because, especially with people I mentor who are people of color, women, immigrants, or in some cases, all three - many still fail to advocate for themselves when it comes to salary negotiations.

Why You Can't Choose a Company Based on Culture Alone

I have heard so many people say that they are looking for a certain type of culture for their next gig, and that this is a major factor in their decision-making.

Here's why I think that is flawed:

1. You can't actually understand a culture until you're immersed in it. Even the reviews you see on Glassdoor are just a mix of different people's assessments, often the most and least enthusiastic people, as with any review site. And those people might care about very different things than you do. Usually, the top thing people complain about is benefits and bosses. That doesn't actually help you get a great sense of the culture. A culture is so much more than this. And you can't actually understand it until you begin to navigate it.
2. Your view of a "good" culture might not match with someone else's. Even if you believe a company has a great culture, some of the things you personally love might be extremely annoying to someone else. I have seen this so many times, where precisely something I most treasure about a company has a different effect for another person and rubs them the wrong way. That's because people are different! Culture consists of a set of beliefs, practices, ways of working. It's complicated. Do I love "American" culture because I'm an American? Well, there are things I love and things that really bother me about my culture. Same tends to be true in any work culture.
3. Culture can at times be over-marketed. Let's face it, culture is important, but it can get to a point where it's over-hyped and marketed internally to the point that employees begin to take it a bit too far. I remember once when selling to Disney that a "cast member" took me on a tour of the park, told me proudly that all his kids had their birthdays there, that he even came with his wife on weekends for dates, and so on. I remember feeling intrigued by this but also a little worried for him in case he ever lost that job. But you can see the same effect at many companies, where employees begin to tie their identity so closely to an employer brand that it can become unhealthy. It's a brand, after all. Fine to love any brand, but not to the point that it defines you.
4. Culture will keep changing, indefinitely. Oh, how quickly culture can change. When a company gets acquired, or takes a new funding round, or there are executive changes, or the people you used to work with leave, or there are new performance management guidelines put in place, and so on... everything can change. Quickly. What I keep reminding people I mentor is that "culture is a point in time thing."
5. You can't compare one culture to another. Because of the point above. Culture keeps changing. But also, certain macro conditions gave rise to the conditions you might have experienced in another culture. Those won't happen again at any other company, because the companies, the people, and the macro conditions are simply different.

On this latter point, so many people I know were enamored with a specific phase of growth and conditions that they felt were idyllic... at a specific company. I've heard this from people who worked at HubSpot, Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and many other places. They would love to find a company where they could re-live "the golden years" they experienced at a given employer, where they were enchanted with the company up until a certain point, but then things changed.

The sobering truth is that yes, companies change, because of the macro point above. Everything has changed. Companies have. And so have you!

Instead of trying to replicate conditions that just can't be cloned, I think it's best to look back and appreciate a given experience for what it was. But, be practical and hopeful about finding something different and new, and perhaps even better, elsewhere.

You might think a new employer can never be better than your last company. But you're basing that on limited experiences, at a finite number of companies.

This is the hard part about staying at just one company for a very long time. While there is great comfort in that, you also miss opportunities to gain experiences in diverse types of companies along the way, that you'd otherwise be gaining and learning from.

What Diverse Types of Companies Will Teach You

You can't work at every type of company unless you work for a very long time. Even then, you only get a slice of all the experiences that exist out there!

Maybe I can help.

I've been working full-time since 1996. I'll soon have 30 years of work experience. During nearly 3 decades, I have experienced many different companies, of varying types.

I'll summarize some things i've learned from these experiences that might help you:

• Founding your own company teaches you about survival. There is nothing that will teach you the basics of business and how important it is to get your financials right than creating your own company, having to worry about making payroll, knowing your viability as a company hinges on winning your next contract, and so on. I have been there, having founded my own company. It's fun and exciting but in the early days, the mere financial management aspect of it can be grueling. You constantly feel a tension between the work you want to do to grow the business, and the work you must do so that it can even survive.
• Freelancing teaches you how to navigate ups and downs. When I used to do consulting and freelancing, I learned a lot about peaks and valleys, boom times and droughts. When you depend on yourself to both sell every deal and deliver it, you learn about navigating volatility, as well as how important customer relationships can be. The freedom of being independent as a consultant or freelancer is quite hard to compete with. It's addictive!
• Lifestyle businesses teach you about repeatability. When you work in a lifestyle business or a privately owned company where the owners want to slowly grow the value to eventually sell it, you learn how to do a lot of the same things over with slight tweaks but without making any truly risky changes. You might want to innovate, but can't easily do much there without finding more capital. I have worked in a couple such businesses, and have advised many of these types of companies. The degree of change is relatively small in such a business. These are often highly relationship-driven businesses. They can be great fun to work in but can also be a nightmare; it all depends on the people, and the work itself.
• Start-ups teach you how to quickly pivot and adapt. Nothing helps your adaptability muscle so much as working in a start-up. Especially a well-funded one where you have investors pushing you to grow quickly. A start-up will instill in you a certain hunger for growth, but they also require constant adaptation, pivoting, reconfiguring, and being comfortable with making decisions and running hard in a direction even if you fail along the way, pick yourself up, and start over again. Before I had my first child, someone warned me about how much my life would dramatically change. I assured them, "I've worked in venture-funded start-ups. It's good practice." I was right. I actually had my first child while working at one. When I say I was answering emails while in labor, it's not a joke. That was not uncommon back then, and I know many people with similar stories. There is simply no intensity like venture-funded start-up intensity. It is definitely not for everyone.
• Scale-ups teach you about growing pains. Things can feel really hard in scale-ups, because they are going through a major transformation, but one that requires them to build completely new muscles for their next phase of growth. People can't run as fast at problems as they did before, because things are more complex and more people are involved. It can feel for people like they are banging their head against the wall, trying things that used to work and no longer do, or even trying things they tried before that didn't work but now suddenly do. It's generally super hard because it requires developing new skills or bringing in people who have them, and getting the mix or people and process right along the way. It's painful, but also, so much fun when you start to fire on all cylinders and hear the engine revving again.
• Large companies teach you about process and scale. What big companies do well is that they tend to be much more process-oriented, simply because they have to be when so many people are involved, and so much revenue is on the line. You cannot scale to a certain size without getting the basics right on process, as mundane as that may be. Large companies, while they might seem alluring, can actually be quite boring to many people because they require slowing down, spending more time thinking and writing memos, having a lot more recurring meetings, planning those, and diligently managing toward goals and outcomes. When you are used to running fast and hard, this does not always seem all that exciting. Again, this is not for everyone. It can feel way too slow for people who are used to a different pace.

I hope these reflections help you if you're evaluating different types of companies. What I can say is, looking back at all the companies I've worked in, I took away important lessons from every single one. Some were more difficult lessons than others. Some I enjoyed more than others for different reasons.

Here is what I want you to know.

You can't make a "wrong" choice. You'll make a choice and you'll adapt to the new situation. Then, you'll keep moving onward.

Rest assured you will learn along the way.

You will grow and evolve, and you'll move on.

And so will whatever company you choose to work in.

Sometimes, there is peace in just being reminded of that.

So, I hope it helps!

Best of luck to all of you navigating career transitions lately.

I am rooting for you.

Grace Notes

One of the best things about all of the changes we've all been through together over the last several years is how much they have unlocked new possibilities. Many people changed jobs. Others started their own businesses (go founders and entrepreneurs!) Some people relocated, either to be near family or to pursue new lives. And many people did more than one of these things at once.

We have to give the pandemic some credit. It forced us to reevaluate what mattered in our lives and careers, pushing us to change.

In my case, I uprooted my family during the pandemic, sold our family home and most of our belongings, and moved to Donegal, a remote part of Ireland, where we were immediately in lockdown and could not go more than 5 kilometers from our home, for many months.

We faced so many challenges along the way. Job changes, home changes, school changes, deaths in the family, and so much more.

Then, more change! Change hit us from every direction it seemed.

So, we did it all over again, and moved back to the United States.

More challenges, more adaptation.

A huge amount of change, more than I thought I could bear sometimes really, but that is simply how we grow.

As life unfolds, you can really only go with the flow of change and make the best of it.

So for now, I'll sign off with another view of beautiful Donegal, which I once thought would be my "forever home," but where I now work remotely in the summers instead, so my kids can be near family, and we can leverage some of the hard work we put into carving out a life we love in this part of the world.

Other Ways to Connect with Me

Thank you for reading this newsletter! I hope you found it helpful.

Here are 3 other ways we can connect:

1. Get my latest book.

Don't forget to get your own copy of my latest book, Take Your Company Global .

It was kindly endorsed by my longtime CEO at HubSpot , Brian Halligan.

“Take Your Company Global is the definitive guide to building a global business in the digital age.” —Brian Halligan, Co-Founder and Executive Chairperson, HubSpot and Co-Author,?Inbound Marketing

Already have it? Liked it?

Help others find it, and leave a review on Amazon .

2. Find me online.

Looking for my books , blog , and other writing ?

Get all this and more at my (recently relaunched) website, Born to Be Global .

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Have a great week ahead, and thanks again for reading!

Nataly