Ben Lakoff, CFA’s Post

GoOAT 's First Hire! Love health & wellness? Sales superstar? Join our startup & make a real impact! ● Be our first hire ● Grow with us ● Passion for health & wellness a must DM us to chat! #Hiring #Sales #HealthAndWellness #Startup P.S. Share this & get a free GoOAT box!

For the salespeople in my network. Agricultural supply chain experience required...

Join the Pikndel rocketship! 🚀 Write to teja@pikndel.com

So, here’s the deal: I build distribution networks for startups. Simple, right? At first, I thought this job had no value. But every time I meet a startup founder, they’re always chasing shortcuts, hoping to find a magic distributor who will solve all their offline sales problems, pay for inventory upfront, and send a steady stream of revenue every month. But here’s the reality: having a company warehouse and an inventory warehouse with your Super Stockist (SS) or Distributor (DB) doesn’t mean you’re making sales. Just moving stock from one warehouse to another and creating invoices isn’t sales. The real game is in retailer placement and ensuring off-take from the customer end. That’s where the magic happens, and that’s when the payments start rolling in. For the past 10 years, I’ve been: - Creating distribution networks. - Hiring top-notch teams. - Setting up KPIs for sales teams. - Creating tracking processes. We understand the value of communicating with distributors and speaking their language. Let’s brew some amazing distributor networks together! Cheers! 🍻🍻

Know a top-tier BDR looking for their next challenge as BDR #1 at a startup (Draftboard) revolutionizing hiring? If they're passionate; dedicated; a hustler; eager; and smart - Send them my way. $2,000 referral bonus if I hire them. Link in the first comment

Hiring the right people is the most important task in a business. Product development, sales, and customer success are all crucial ofc👌 But what's more important is choosing the right people to do those things😉 #hiring #startup #rightpeople #culture

Job hopping is bad. You shouldn’t hire job hoppers. Every hiring manager in 2016. But…. This is actually 2024. Just hire the best person for the role. That is all! #hiring #recruiterlife #recruiting #saassales #gsd #agsd #sales #startup #founder #ceo

Eventually you have to "Go all in" At one of my startups, we got to a point where we were looking to hire a full time sales person and we talked with someone who wanted to sell part time, while keeping their current job. They wanted to hedge. We liked the person, but we were at a point where we were all full time and the thought of someone not in the trenches with us, not all in, was not appealing. We needed a lot done and it was hard to see how a PT person was going to be able to do what we needed. But they had the rolodexes... There was a fair bit of discussion about it and I said something like "we need people who are all in." By that, I meant that we need a full commitment. That argument carried the day. We were offering a very good comp plan (for performance) and equity, so we tried to make the reward worth the risk. And we decided to not settle. If you are hiring for a Full Time role, don't settle. Insist that folks for FT roles push their chips all in. It is attractive to think that you can get what you need from someone, part time, and hedge both your risk and theirs. But if it is a FT role, I would encourage you to resist the temptation. You got to James Hightower the MF and go all in. Oh, and I live this. If I am working in a FT role, all the other stuff has to wind down. #startup

Last year, we launched a stream for Seed, Series A & B startups looking to hire (exceptional) junior sales hires. Here are the top 5x things we learned: Everything, Everywhere All At Once 🍩 >> We tried to launch a new stream AND change how our cohorts worked AND the cadence of cohorts AND lots of other things… This was way too much. We should have changed one or two variables at a time. The Fast and the Furious 🚗 >> We tried to improve & automate our processes before confirming that the processes were generating the right outcomes. We then had to unwind all of that. The Help 🆘 >> People are great. I was reminded (once again) of just how willing people are to share advice and lessons. The Longest Yard 🏈 >> It takes time to build a reputation when doing something new. We had built an excellent word of mouth network with our generalist candidates and thought that this would be immediately transferrable to sales. But, it took time. Mission Impossible 🔫 >> Launching something new needs a hell of a lot of common sense decisions, rather than genius breakthrough ideas. Jumpstart Torron Iveson Caitlin Buckley Sinead Smith Rachel Howe Emilie Lauga Tom Doyle Kabir Bali Nikki Mehta

I've been an entrepreneur for almost five years, and I’ve seen the highs and (huge) lows of working in a startup. I've also worked with many other start-ups and hired and mentored many people who wanted to join our startup (Jem). Let me tell you this: Startups are not the glamorous, easy, or fun places some people make them out to be on social media. As much as I want to tell you that Jem is any different, it isn’t. Startups, by their very nature, are chaotic, unpredictable, and constantly changing. They are VERY hard places to work: → You must learn to accept that to move forward, sometimes you must go backwards. → You have to be ready to pivot, adapt, and learn new skills on the fly. → You have to realise it won’t be easy, and there will be times when you get it wrong. → You also have to accept that success is never guaranteed and that you may have to start over from scratch. This is hard. Sometimes, it’s an idea; sometimes, it’s your entire business (this happened to me multiple times). BUT, and there is a big BUT. For the right people, this can be the best job in the world. If you're ambitious, want to work hard, are willing to learn a ton and are keen to make the world a better place, you should think about it. → If you want a 9-5 job, don’t join a start-up. → If you want somewhere where work is always easy and everything always works, don’t join a start-up. But if you’re looking for a challenge, want to take on big projects and have deep responsibility for something, and importantly, are open to being wrong (a lot), maybe it’s for you. But before joining one, make sure it’s what you want. Do your due diligence. And please, please, don’t think it’s like the movies. It’s not. PS; We’re hiring. For many roles. Stay tuned as we look for people across Engineering, Product & Sales. Caroline van der Merwe, Christopher Hellmann, Thamsanqa Moyo, Danielle Lifschitz.