Entrepreneur Duo’s Unfiltered Look at What It Takes to Succeed

Shoveling $h!t by Kass and Mike Lazerow

A compelling, fluid and authentic read.

Let’s be clear. I am not an entrepreneur and never will be. Yet I have worked with many with that label throughout my career (you know who you are — no worries, your secrets are safe). This makes me imminently more qualified than the average bear to review a book with a stated target audience of entrepreneurs, would-be business dreamers and their risk-taking investors.

I would argue that Shoveling $h!t: A Love Story by serial entrepreneurs Kass and Mike Lazerow has a wider net. It is as much for anyone who has ever worked in an entrepreneurial company or anyone who some day might.

That’s because in this very readable husband-and-wife narrative, not only do the authors tackle all the key components of starting and running companies from a business and emotional sense, but they go under their bedsheets and spreadsheets to describe their experiences of crammed offices, crying children, financiers gone dark, building teams, driving sales, and picking themselves up from crisis after crisis to stay the course — or pivot from it.

The Realities of Entrepreneurship

While entrepreneurs will hungrily gobble up the Xs and Os of running a business, others will appreciate the insights from these people at the top, understanding the modus operandi of life in the fast — and precarious — business lane. It’s not all fancy houses and flashy cars. There is a lot, of, ahem, shit to shovel to reach the promised land.

Are entrepreneurs measured in their approaches? Or compulsive? Cautious? Organized? Discombobulated? Driven? Calm? Nervous? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.

The title Shoveling $h!t is not so much a message that there is a lot of dirty work that needs to be done for a business to succeed but just that there is a lot of work, period. And anyone who has ever run a company or worked in a company knows that things don’t always play out the way they were drawn up in the war room. Markets crash. Customers cancel. You know the drill.

Shoveling $h!t will help business leaders avoid mistakes and minimize the crap and messes they have to manage out of.

It’s about identifying the right opportunities, studying the competitive landscape, lining up the necessary financing, hiring and managing the right people, turning culture into a cult, setting in place marketing and sales, and living and breathing the business every waking moment. There is no off switch.

The first call in the morning is to your business partner. The last call before you pack it in is to your business partner.

Compelling and Authentic Read

Kass and Mike Lazerow are as credentialed as anyone to write about the entrepreneurial life. They have been involved in many entrepreneurial projects, most notably GOLF.com and Buddy Media, the latter of which was a social media marketing software venture that they sold to Salesforce for $745 million.

Theirs has been an imbalanced life, one of sacrifices made to propel the business. They somehow managed to raise three children even after the realization that being entrepreneurs would compromise some of the typical joys and experiences of parenthood.

The five key traits for anyone starting a business are vision, values, communication, mindset and workload. Oh, and a unique, differentiating product that fills a void and serves a need and has an identifiable customer base doesn’t hurt.

If there’s an overriding message in Shoveling $h!t, it’s to heed the warnings before you jump in — because entrepreneurship is not all flowers and sunny days. In fact, research from Pitchbook indicates that 3,200 private venture-backed companies in the U.S. went out of business in 2023, taking about $27 billion with them.

Shoveling $h!t is a compelling, fluid and authentic read detailing the life of an entrepreneur and an analysis of the components to consider and needed to succeed.

“Never Stop Shoveling”

“Starting a company,” the authors write, “is an exercise in creativity and ingenuity. It is the process of going from nothing to something and is unique to the human experience.”

What makes entrepreneurs different, they say, is that “they shovel like crazy when there’s nothing to their business but a vision and a plan written on a napkin — and they love doing it.” Sounds just like the stories I’ve heard over the years.

Thanks to Kass and Mike Lazerow for taking us behind the curtains of what it means to be an entrepreneur and for helping readers better understand the inner workings of these unique people that devote their lives to making their business dreams come true and in so doing provide opportunities and avenues for growth and prosperity for people like me.

As they wrote to me in their note along with the book, “Never stop shoveling.”

Shoveling $h!t can be purchased at www.shovelingshit.com.