🔥 Value: In Community #148

Your weekly spark at the intersection of community, culture, and commerce

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A long video plus clips won't cut it anymore

A longform video plus some captioned clips used to be enough to stay relevant. Those days are over.

Today, the creators and brands who achieve mindshare post like media companies: full episodes, 60-90 second highlights, low-fi yapper videos, fancy thought leadership shorts. Every week, everywhere their audience is.

Media companies do that with a room full of editors. You probably have a phone and a packed calendar.

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We're so confident you'll love the new OpusClip that we're making it cheaper to find out. For a limited time, get 40% off your first month of Pro Plan.

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💥 Today’s Highlights

  • Your weekly spark

  • Bridging the value gap

  • Roundup of open jobs across the community

🔥 And now, for your weekly spark.

Value.

Emma Grede stopped by Scott Evans' House Guest, and she called out something we don’t hear often in a world that glamorizes being a founder: There was no inherent draw to entrepreneurship for her.

Emma is no stranger to controversy, and her perspectives can sometimes be seen as polarizing. The entrepreneurship factor, though, is echoing a truth we continue to see at a broader level.

Part of what pushed her to build her own business was recognizing that she wasn't being paid what she believed she was worth in her existing environment.

👉🏽 How many of us have been there? I've been there more times than I'd like to count.

At my first job after college, I waited what felt like forever for a promotion. By the time it came, I was already deep into the interview process with another company. I accepted the promotion, then resigned weeks later for the better opportunity, which also came with better compensation.

At my next company, I stayed for years, earned promotions, and eventually discovered I was making significantly less than peers at my level. At another company, I took a job that came with a big pay bump, but I still accepted less than what I'd originally been told during the interview process.

And something else kept happening consistently throughout these experiences: when I left a job, my work would get divided among multiple people or handed to a mix of someone with a higher title and someone at the same title or level.

The work hadn't changed. The value hadn't changed. The compensation and recognition I was getting just never reflected my real value.

Here's what I've learned: You can be trusted with more responsibility without being given the recognition, authority, or resources that should come with it.

Being good at what you do doesn't automatically mean you're being valued for it. And being valued isn't something you should leave entirely in someone else's hands.

That means getting intentional about understanding what you bring to the table, how you communicate it, and whether the opportunities in front of you reflect it.

📌 The Value Gap

Make sure you’re keeping these four Knows in mind.

👉🏽 Know Your Contribution.
What have you built, improved, influenced, delivered, or made possible?What’s gone beyond your job description? Can you point to the impact of your work?

👉🏽 Know Your Market.
Do you know what people doing comparable work are earning? What are your skills and experience worth outside your current company or industry? Don't let your current paycheck become your only point of reference.

👉🏽 Know Your Leverage.
Are the people making decisions about your career clear on your contributions? Does your compensation, title, authority, and access to opportunity reflect the level at which you're operating?

👉🏽 Know Your Next Move.
If the gap between what you're contributing and what you're receiving doesn't close, what are you willing to do about it? Negotiate? Find another opportunity? Build something of your own?

This isn't just about individual careers. Organizations have a stake in this. When high performers and ambitious people consistently contribute more than they're recognized or rewarded for, eventually they take that value somewhere else. Replacing it can cost far more than recognizing it in the first place.

It's also part of why I built Hue. I saw value in bringing people, perspectives, and opportunities together in a way that wasn't happening elsewhere. I didn't wait for someone else to decide that opportunity was worth pursuing.

Whether you're building a career, a business, or something entirely your own, don't just focus on proving your value.

Make sure you're building a life and working in environments where that value can be realized.

🔥 Because knowing what you bring to the table is one thing. Making sure your seat is where it should be is another.

👉🏽 👉🏽 👉🏽 One more thing: Reminder to use the GET PAID: Salary Guide to help understand what different roles and levels actually pay.

If you've ever wondered whether you're leaving money on the table, take a look and get the guide here.

And make sure to share it with someone who needs it.

✅ Now Hiring

Is someone you know considering what’s next for them? Here are a few roles with people hiring across the network. I list roles here every week, so stay tuned and make sure to spread the word.

ICYMI: The Last Jobs Roundup

And before you go, consider who else might value this newsletter and what’s coming up on YouTube. Make sure to fwd this newsletter onward to them too. They can subscribe here for more directly in their inbox.. 🔁 

In community,

Fahad