Not All Headhunters Are Created Equal
A-Players Only Work With Other A-Players
Attracting A-Players for your startup’s GTM team, requires your recruiting partner also be an A-Player, who’s approach will resonate with the GTM leaders they’re recruiting for your search.
The top performers you need to hire have their heads down and are doing the best, most important work of their lives. These people are inundated daily by average recruiters doing generic outreach who they’ll simply ignore.
The intensity and creativity required to get these individuals to stop what they are doing, pull their head up, understand the relevance AND greater importance of what you’re doing, and holding their attention long enough to get them to come work at YOUR startup, is paramount to your success.
Yet, unless your recruiting partner has the skills to break-through and peel these people off the wall, you’re going to fail at bringing the best people onto your GTM team.
And believe it or not, there are over 100 reasons why it’s better to have a trusted 3rd party representing you out in the market vs. you or your team directly pitching candidates (more here).
My name is Kraig Ward
My Mission: To Bring the Right People Together To Build A Better Future Faster.
I started my first business at 19, and by age 22 I had my first exit where I sold my 2nd business (Executive Wellness Group) that promoted the services of a curated network of wellness service providers (Chiropractors, Massage Therapists, Yoga Teachers and Nutritionists) targeting busy, stressed out C-Suite executives.
At age 26, I began licensing my high-performance marketing systems to wellness entrepreneurs around the world. This led to diving deep into online publishing, digital marketing, software, and later into the world of Venture Capital and Executive Search.
I’ve sold over $10M of my own products, hosted over 1,200 live group training sessions, crafted dozens of webinars (viewed by over 1,000,000 attendees), and have built countless winning lead generation and recruitment marketing campaigns for our clients.
More recently, my team and I played a key role in helping 3 US based startups raise early-stage venture funding, build out their GTM teams, and fast track their revenue.
But, the story of Bearhug started way before all of this…
Bearhug’s Early Beginnings
Our GTM Roots Go Deep!
As luck would have it, I was born as the tenth child of 11 in a devoted Mormon family in Salt Lake City, UT.
Yes, I really do have 7 sisters and 3 brothers (from the same 2 parents) who are still madly in love to this day. But why should my background matter to your search?
If you know anything about Mormonism, it’ll be no surprise to learn that my childhood revolved around being trained on the importance of converting non-believers into the Mormon way of life.
Yet, things didn’t go quite the way my parents planned.
On the cusp of my 8th birthday, my family was piling into the family van on the way to my baptism. I was about to have all my ‘sins’ washed away. Yet, I stopped my Dad on the way out the door to ask him:
“Why do Mormons believe they are right and all the other religions are wrong?”
Evidently I came out of the womb a contrarian. As I grew older I found real joy in asking really deep, probing questions and challenging norms. I fell in love with gathering and synthesizing large quantities of information, pattern matching, and then packaging what I’d learn and that when I’d deliver it to people in various ways, people got excited and taking action in various ways.
This unique perspective has served me well seeing as prior to starting Bearhug Recruiting, I’d used these same skills to grow my online education company to a student base of over 120,000 people targeting very early-stage startup founders and teaching them sales and marketing best practices.
As I transitioned into my 40th year, it became increasingly important to live every day as if it could be my last. And because I have such a love of people, a deep passion for entrepreneurship, and an endless fascination with social psychology, venture capital, and technology, I made the very conscious decision to start Bearhug Recruiting.
Doing so has allowed me to aim all of my natural talents, interests, and skills toward helping as many early & growth-stage startup founders survive the scale-up journey from $1m to $50m+ through the strategic recruitment of the very best GTM leaders and C-suite executives.
And while I’ve flirted hundreds of times with the idea of scaling up Bearhug Recruiting into a much larger Executive Search Firm, for the time being, we will remain a small, yet mighty boutique GTM focused team in order to deliver a truly world-class experience for our clients, candidates, and investment partners.
I’ve learned that true fulfillment in life comes from having a clear vision and seeing daily progress towards the realization of that vision. Professionally, Bearhug Recruiting is the current manifestation of that vision. I leave work at the end of every day pushing myself and our team to absolute extremes to ensure we deliver the value we promise our clients.
If you’re reading this and see a clear overlap with how my vision overlaps with and can synergize with your vision, please get in touch. The highlight of my day is meeting new and interesting people and exploring ways I can be of service!