Today we’d like to introduce you to Shane Shown.
Hi Shane, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
Honestly, my very first entrepreneurial venture was in First Grade. My first taste of creating nothing and turning it into something was drawing Pokémon bookmark cards and selling them to fellow students for 99cents.
My first time learning how to sell and transfer skills over to others was in Fourth Grade where I learned that I could go to the dollar store, buy a box of candy canes, and sell them for $1 each. Every $1 now turned into 11 additional opportunities because each box came with 12 candy canes.
Fast forward a decade, I joined an internship program called College Works Painting where I learned how to run my own residential house painting business by knocking on doors. I went from nothing but my heads to a full-blown production team in under 4 months. This taught me that I could simply knock in random neighborhoods with zero dollars to my name, no branding, no knowledge of the industry and build a successful six-figure business by pure effort.
By doing this program, I learned that I could never fail. The world was now full of opportunity. I was nothing but filled with potential.
After 5 years of CWP, I was able to help yearly growth from my own hands to over 300+ employees at the peak of my venture. I went from being in Western Washington to expanding the business in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I moved to Canada for about a year and remotely build the arm of the business for 3 years. Let me just say, it was lonely, it was difficult, and it was unsuccessful once I lived their full time. I put my money in the Canadian economy with tanked and I lost half of everything overnight. So, within 24 hours of the economy tanking, I packed up my downtown apartment, and it either fit in my Nissan Maxima or it was put on the side of the road with a “For Free” sign on it.
I drove back down to the states, bought a plane with Hawaii with my credit card, and lived in an Airbnb while trying to figure out what I wanted to do next in my life. This period in my life is when my family jokes that I was a homeless bum living on a beach. During this time, I was able to soul search and think about my raw skills. At first, I made the mistake that I could learn how to write code and become a software engineer. My ADHD shut that down really fast.
So, what was I good at in life?
1. I loved building relationships with people.
2. I was a fantastic listener. I remember most things.
3. I enjoyed building and scaling teams. Recruiting folks to join my team never felt like work.
4. I had a passion for technology, but no skills in it.
5. I was very good at sales.
So, I mixed these all together and watched that movie “Friends with benefits” with Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake. She recruited him out of running his own independent marketing agency to join a giant NYC-based company as the Creative Director. SHE GOT PAID FOR THIS! Honestly, it blew my mind. I instantly picked up the phone and started calling recruiting agencies to get my name out there. Eventually, while on the beach, I got a job offer from a recruiting agency needing help building out their Seattle branch of their business. My job was going to be door-knocking and finding business that wanted recruiting support.
At this point, I found my calling. I’m a recruiter. I am good at this.
Eventually, this led me to take a few corporate positions. I worked at Zillow Group. I became a recruiting in the Machine Learning department at Facebook. I also helped scale The Climate Corporations engineering group for a few years.
While doing all of this, I also Co-Founded a recruiting product called Talentful that was an ML-based identity resolution product for recruiting. This was a fairly unsuccessful started that got sold for patents and APIs, but an unbelievable learning experience.
Where am I now?
I am now the CEO of Nxt Level which is a Technology, Product, and Gaming Staffing Agency Head Quartered in Brentwood, TN. We have grown from 0 employees to 15 employees in the Greater Nashville Area in less than a year. We got our first office that we’ve already maxed out. We are looking to double the growth of our office in 2022. We have a rock star team that makes me proud every single day.
We went from being an unknown entity in 2020 to a driving force in the recruiting world.
We have helped start Founders Live, which is a local community event to showcase other local entrepreneurs in Tennessee via a 99-second pitch where the crowd votes on a winning pitch while they mingle.
I’m a local member of EO in Nashville.
We are constantly looking at helping build the community, grow the business, and help people figure out how to get to the next level of their career.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
The road has not been smooth. The road was built. The road was destroyed. And, the road eventually turned into a freaking speedway. When I left the first agency I was employed at, I made the funny mistake of creating a competing business. I was sued. I lost six figures in lawsuits. But, hey, every business has an entry cost. My was money, time, and a delayed start date.
Because of this lawsuit, it allowed me to work at Facebook, Climate Corporation, and build Talentful. It allowed me to experience a ton very early in my life. I was born Oct. 28th, 1992. I like to think I had a ton of learning lessons along the way that will allow me to be a better leader as I look to scale Nxt Level.
I had successful business and I’ve had multiple failed businesses. That’s okay. That is how we all grow.
We’ve been impressed with Nxt Level LLC, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Nxt Level is a staffing agency focused on our candidate-first approach. We are helping change lives every day. Making the decision to make a career move is a difficult one. It changes everything. My team is an elite group of recruiting professionals that are helping companies in software, product, and gaming find talent that fill their needs.
Some of our clients include big-name brands like DoubleVerify, Belkin, Axon, and Wayfair. We also have small studios and startups like Hairbrained Schemes, Supernatural, ProbablyMonsters, Rapid Robotics, and more.
We are a small team that packs a big punch and our clients love us for that. We like to feel like a partnership of our clients rather than a service.
The things we want folks to know about us:
1. We’re hiring.
2. We have an awesome and fun culture. People love coming into the office.
3. Our clients can trust us and know that we might push back to set expectations.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
If you ask my family, I’ve always been a little loud. I have 6 brothers and 3 sisters. I went to 17 schools growing up and was constantly the new kid in school. I think that helped me become a recruiter. It was sink or swim time. I was always into sports. I was a 12-letter athlete in High School. I did football, soccer, basketball, skateboarding, track, wrestling, judo, marching band, honor society, and a bunch of other activity. If I could get involved, I probably tried it at least once.
Originally, I was supposed to go to school on a full-ride scholarship for wrestling. I got ran over by a car my senior year and broke my legs. That changed things.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: nxtlevel.io
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nxtlevel.io/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nxtlevel.io
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/_NxTLevel_
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0w88U4xn8ZTUFMREektJwA
