How you can succeed
1. We’re a team — in the baseball sense.
When you get a job here, you’ve got a chance to show us what you can do and earn your place in the starting lineup. You’re on our minor league team for your first few months, until you show us you’re a star player. You earn that with great performance, dedication, and practice. When you make it, the benefits and security kick in — and you’re expected to continue to play well and improve.
Not everyone is going to make it. Some people don’t fit in, sometimes they just aren’t great players, sometimes they’re in the wrong position. But we manage like a major league baseball team — the starting lineup has to be A+ players. It’s not fair to the team to have a player who isn’t ready, or just can’t catch the ball. We have to cut them, for the good of the team.
This is hard. Those that don’t make the team aren’t bad people, and they are usually putting in as much effort as everyone else. But we only get one player for each position in a company this size, and we have to pick the best one.
No one has a long-term contract here. You’ll never have to deal with dead weight and entrenched politics. But you’ll also need to keep playing well. (This is a big-picture thing. We look at your season and careers, not a few bad games. We’ll help you through a slump. But we won’t carry you if you’ve decided to be a bench-warmer.)
2. Start hard and fast.
We expect you to come in and start working immediately. There’s no warm-up period, getting settled, or listening phase. We’ll train you as you go, you’ll learn on the job, and we’ll make sure you have what you need. We want you to start piling up the wins in your first two weeks.
If you’re still sitting around, getting “warmed up” in 30 days, you’ve probably blown it.
3. Be responsible for making us better
The staffers we love — the ones we will never let go — are the ones who always are looking to make us better. They’re always looking for ways to improve: as an individual, as a team, as a company. They assume an ownership of GasPedal in the best sense of the word, by feeling responsible to correct even the slightest wrong and help ensure we’re always at our best.
4. You need to be great at personal planning and time management.
No one teaches time and task management in school. But it’s the one thing that separates high-performing executives from everyone else. Managers need to manage themselves first. So many talented people find their careers lagging behind people with less skill, specifically because they don’t know how to get things done.
We expect you to have a proven time and task management system in place when you start. You should also have experience exploring and trying new systems, and a genuine interest in the topic. You’ll drown without it — we move too fast.
Not doing this is like a baseball player who works on their throwing arm, but doesn’t care about health and nutrition — they’ll fall apart in the end. “I write everything down in a big notebook” or “I make lists” isn’t a system, and we’ve never seen anyone succeed who thinks that’s sufficient.
5. We like “process” people.
You love to document what you do, create a system, and then improve those systems.
If we asked you how to ship out books to buyers, you’d come back with a spreadsheet of packaging options, weights, and shipping methods. And a checklist to show other people how to do it.
