Call meJeffrey

Today is my 30th birthday, and unlike most people who turn 30, I couldn’t be more excited about it. This is a day whose arrival I’ve been anxiously awaiting for about the last 9 years. When you’re young and you’re hustling to get ahead you find a lot of roadblocks. Usually those roadblocks tend to be people who want to automatically discount you for your age. I can’ tell you how many new business meetings I walked into in my early 20s, and just by the look on the potential clients’ faces, I knew it would be an uphill battle just to be taken seriously.

Skills and experience aside, the old(er) tend to be ageist towards the young(er), especially when there’s an element of surprise as to how far someone has come in so short of an amount of time. While age can certainly create a amount of doubt just based upon practical mathematics, I always fought the “why don’t you let my work speak for itself” battle. Luckily, I usually won because in general, I could sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves – a skill I’ve learned from my Dad. Much like it being bittersweet seeing how accepted skateboarding has become based upon battles we’ve faced with parents, teachers and police just for the right to skate freely – the business world has begun to accept the fact that young people are holding the reins. It’s early still, and acceptance and happiness are entirely two different things. I’m proud to say that I came up when a good amount of struggle was needed to be taken seriously. That experience is the fire in my desire to succeed, and it likely will never burn out.

All of that said, I spent my early and mid-twenties being really excited to be thirty. To lose the stigma of “young”. To finally not have my age be something to add to the credibility equation.

But then something funny happened. At the end of my mid-twenties, our business really started to hit its stride, and age became a part of the story people loved to tell. Unfortunately, it was usually used as the surprise factor – along with school status. Things like “These guys have built a really great business, but get this… they’re twentysomethings* AND they’re college dropouts!” Oh, press. Ain’t it grand?
*please note that anyone who uses the word “twentysomething” should expect to be punched in the throat.

But I digress. I am excited about being thirty. It’s a good number. It sits comfortably between two prime numbers. According to wikipedia, it’s a primorial number, as well as the smallest Giuga and Sphenic number. I was going to say that it’s both an odd and an even number, but apparently that’s just not true at all. Having a girlfriend who’s a teacher comes in handy sometimes, but I’d never not share a story – even if it makes the whole “college dropout” thing pretty obvious.

There I go digressing again.

Ultimately, I’m excited for my thirties to be about more effort than luck. Not to say that what has happened with me/us professionally in the last ten years has been a fluke, but it’d be bad for my karma to not recognize and appreciate all the lucky breaks I’ve had to coincide with my efforts. Part of being young is having the energy to recognize the lucky breaks when they happen, as well as the energy to respond to them with whatever it needs to take full advantage. On all of our parts, the collective knowledge base gained mixed with luck and our earn-while-you-learn attitude has created quite the juggernaut. I simply cannot wait to see where it takes us over the next decade. Hopefully we won’t stop getting lucky breaks, but I’d like our experience, knowledge and drive to embody a Harvey Dent attitude as well. “I make my own luck.”

The last ten years has been really eventful. I’ve had many successes and failures, both personally and professionally. I’ve had extremely happy times as well as extremely sad ones. I’ve had sickness (though, more than I’d like to have had) and health. It’s been fun.

Goodbye twenties, and hello dirty thirties.

I’m likely not the best chief creative officer there is. In truth, I’m a little unclear as to what a chief creative officer really does in a normal company, though I have a pretty good idea. When I worked at an ad agency, pretty much everyone from creative director on up shuffled paper for a living. I assure you, I’m no paper-shuffler.

I’m fully aware of the fact that I’m one of the people at the front of an enormously successful company who got the opportunity to be there by simply being in the right place at the right time. Not to discount the work I’ve done, what I’ve been able to achieve or who I’ve become professionally, but the reality is that the only reason that I have the title I have is because it’s the title I took.

In reality, I’m not sure you could really give me a title. This goes for a lot of the people at our company. If we tried, our business cards would have to come with an index. Beyond the fact that a lof of us wear many hats, I also feel that some of the original employees of Threadless that have large titles also deal with the reality that if we left Threadless, our title would not be indicative of our skill-set and experience level.

The good news for many companies is that as you grow, the aforementioned situation becomes less the norm, as people are hired to fill specific roles – people who are qualified to fill these roles, regardless of where. For Threadless, as our company gets older, the need to hire specific people to handle specific tasks, rather than every task being a group effort increases. While I love the period of time that we were scrappy as hell, I think this is an important step in the growth of any company – to bring in highly skilled people for specific areas of your company where expertise is needed. This creates a mixture of your core culture with the ability to maintain the growth of your business. I’ve said it before, good businesses are run by people who are aware of their own shortcomings.

So what does this all mean? While the question of “could I actually go fill the role my title represents at another company?” is certainly a bit frightening, there’s comfort in the fact that (1) the business landscape is changing and people are more and more being measured by the results they deliver, not the title on their business card; and (2) clearly I’m not alone in these thoughts.

The type of companies that are grabbing headlines and having their founders and executives smiling on the covers of magazines these days are the type of companies that likely started out as hobby businesses (like Threadless). When you have a project that goes from taking up a desk’s worth of space in your dorm room to being a full-on company generating the type of income that could pay the tuition of every kid at your college, you’re likely going to find yourself catapulted into a position that is realistically a giant mismatch with your current level of experience.

That isn’t to say that someone couldn’t rise to the challenge of the position they’ve landed in (as we have), but what it realistically means is that they’ll fill the position in a manor that’s hyper-tailored to their specific company creating a highly specialized skill-set. In other words, the more that companies like these become the example of modern businesses, the less important a title will become.

Therein lies the double-edged sword. The less important a title becomes, and the more it merely becomes an identifier – specific to a company – of “the right person to talk to” in an organization, the harder it will be for people who have practiced old-school business and are able to hold down jobs simply by hiding behind the highest title they’ve achieved in their career.

I’d love for this change to happen, and completely overhaul the way people think about roles and responsibilities. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I approach my 30th birthday at the end of the month. In my early 20s I couldn’t wait to be 30. This was driven mostly by the fact that when I began my own company when I was 21, people were more interested in judging me by (1) how long I’d been in business, (2) what positions I had held previous to starting my own company, and (3) my age. No one seemed to be concerned with the results that I could deliver, at least not right off the bat. I found this to be frustrating, and very telling that a changing of the tides would be on it’s way as more people like myself were starting small businesses and could easily compete with “the big boys”.

It makes me excited to see that we’re heading into a newer business climate where the only thing that really matters is results, and it’s less important who is behind those results. As I roll into my dirty thirties, I’m happy to be part of a new business generation that will rarely judge someone by their age or experience level, and base their evaluating solely on skill and the ability to produce results.

These are great times for the young, smart and driven to make noise and create a serious impact on the burgeoning new business world.