Business Online, a digital advertising firm with a mostly millennial workforce, saw employee tenure jump from two years to three to five years after launching weekend development sessions. The company invests in staff ideas and creativity while the online ad market grows $35 billion annually as spending shifts from print.
Business Online is like the most amazing company. The digital space is changing every day. As you know, newspapers and magazines are beginning to go out of business. Yep. So all those ad dollars are coming to the digital space, and we're growing about $35 billion a year. We can't just sit back. We're not building widgets. We can't just sit back and say we're going to build this widget for 10 years. What we're doing today is not what we were doing even a year ago. Who would have thought that the little thing called Pinterest, big brands like Coca-Cola would have to have a brand position there now? Because we never used to have a position there before. And that was just in a year. Who would have thought that MySpace was the biggest thing ever? And then this little company called Facebook came along and gobbled them up. And now MySpace is just a music aggregator. Our industry is changing every single day. Our clients come to us that want their problems solved and they give us big business problems. So we are the type of company that will go through and continue to figure out what that is and fix that problem and never say no. So the majority of our employees are, I would say, in the 21 to 26-year-old. Sure. So the whole millennial generation is here. So I would say 75% of those are millennials. And a lot of them, because the digital space is fairly new, it's beginning to mature, but it's fairly new, you know, we'll bring somebody on with 2 or 3 years of experience, sometimes 4. If you get into the 5 years of experience, they're considered an expert. So, and when you get to that kind of thing, you're not talking to a CPA who's been around for 30 years or a lawyer who's been around for 40 years considered an expert. Amazingly smart people. The majority of them come in with a bachelor's degree. Some of them come in with a lot of experience, and we won't shy away from somebody if they don't have a degree, but the majority of people have a degree here. So we sent almost everybody to the LaunchBox weekend sessions. There used to be two of them, a Friday and a Saturday. Yeah. Our people came back from that, the majority of them loved it. What I found with our people is what they put into it is what they get out of it. So if they were closed-minded and weren't open to it, they would come back and say, "Ah, it wasn't the greatest thing." But if they were open-minded to, you know, the things that LaunchBox teaches, they would come back and they would just be super jazzed and super excited and all pumped up again. It's like you come back from retreat and you're all ready to go. They've worked very hard. If they're passionate about something, they will go to, you know, 150% to do what they wanted to do. Or it's just an amazing group of people that you wouldn't normally— people say, "Oh, they're just lazy, they're tired, it's the me, me, me, me, me," and they've been brought up. And I've— through Dan and LaunchBox, they've kind of broken down those barriers. So I see a whole different side of them than what we saw before. Instead of saying, "Ah, I don't think that could work," I will hear them out and try and do my best to incorporate what they're saying, remembering that we have the fiduciary, you know, and the management has this fiduciary responsibility to protect the company. So, but not so much that you're going to shut somebody down. So learning that other people have great ideas And being open to those ideas I think is really important. The flip side of it is for them, not just hearing no, but continuing to go back and say, "Hey, I heard you last time, you said no because X." But coming back and saying, "Well, what if we thought about this?" or "What if we tweaked it this way?" So on my part, it's keeping an open mind. On their part, it's to keep coming at me and figuring out a different way to make their opinion work. Employer morale is amazing because when people are considered valuable and have an opinion and their opinion counts and you're open to listening to them versus shutting them down, makes people feel like they're a value to the company. And without that, their morale goes down. With that, the morale goes up. We're all about keeping people for the long term, right? We know that about 2, about 2 years is the lifespan. If we can keep people 3, 4, 5 years, it's amazing. So if we're helping them through using LaunchBox to keep them 1, 2, or 3 extra years, to keep them growing and their career growing, then it's a win-win for us.
