Part 1 - Sully Sullivan interviews Dan Negroni on the Big Biz Show

Jared, do you have the picture of me when I was a taco shy of 400 pounds? Do we have that in the archives? Because that picture was taken the day I met this man to my right here, Dan Negroni, who is the— he's an attorney, uh, he is a keynote speaker, he is an author of the book Chasing Relevance, which you see right there on the desk, and of course the CEO of LaunchBox 365. But I remember the first time I met you, uh, I was in a spin class in San Diego, California. You may be watching us on the couch in Dallas, Texas, or listening to us on the radio in New York City, or even Bahrain, if you're on a military base. But I was on this spin bike, and when you are this big around, when you get on a bike, your legs go like this, not like this. Your legs go out. So Dan was sitting in the front row looking in the mirror at me sitting in the back row, and then walked back. I was looking in the mirror. Yeah, of course. But you were not, you weren't looking at yourself. But you walked back and you helped me. I never forgot that. We became very close friends.

I know what these guys are doing back there right now.

Instead of showing your website, they're searching for that picture, aren't you guys? I guarantee it'll show up at some point. Great to have you along today. Before we get to Chasing Relevance, talk about your journey from being an attorney, a corporate transactional attorney, corporate counsel, into getting into the world of millennials.

Like everybody, a complicated journey that had lots of steps along the way, from attorney to representing my clients as attorney to business guy to owning my own businesses to selling a couple of them and realizing that I wanted to make impact in the world, and I could do it by helping young people figure out who the heck they were and how to articulate that and create some great results in companies. And that's what it's about.

Why millennials? Because you tackled something that none of us really understood. And continue not to understand over on this, or at least on our side of the equation.

You're not kidding. Everywhere I go, I hear that. Millennials, because they're our future. And it's not just millennials, it's youths, right? Yeah, right. Where youth and experience meet is where magic happens. It's the future of our company, our country, our companies. They're our kids. It's where we're going, and we need to understand them.

So what do you say to those people And look, you were named as Inc. Magazine's top 100 leadership speaker, best-selling author, you've been coaching these companies. What do you tell the CEO of a publicly traded company or even a small company that's got 100 employees or something, you really start needing to hire millennials and they say back to you, well, millennials feel entitled, they don't want to work, and every other stereotype.

Talk about it. Yeah, I mean, millennials suck. I mean, and everything in between. They don't know what, they don't have a work ethic. They're entitled. It's just not my experience. And I provoked them with questions. I was like, really? I've met— how many have you trained this year? Because I've trained 10,000 of them, and that's not my experience.

What is your experience with millennials? Like, what is the single most misnomer about a millennial, in your opinion? The fact that we all think that they're entitled?

I look—

yes, I think that's number one.

I think the single most important thing that stands in the way is our mindset that they suck.

I mean, and we really think, and they're young, like they're lazy or they're lazy.

They're, they're, they're not going to come to work. They're not going to give it their all. They don't have great ideas. They're not contributory. They don't think, they don't care. It's all nonsense. It's just not true. Our job as older, more seasoned, more senior people is to lean in and guide them.

I mean, age and treachery beats youth and inexperience every time, I think is what he's saying without saying it. Well, or, or, but, but, but with, with respect to, and look at, I own a couple millennials. You own a couple millennials.

Well, I, I, one's off the payroll. All right.

Yeah. And I got one off the payroll and one's still I'm not an expert on this, but the point is, is that it's not necessarily even how you raise these kids at this point. It's their environment around them. And I think you train not only the corporate side, but you also train the kids too.

Yeah, well, you gotta train both. It's from the inside out. You gotta train the people. Look, when people have an attitude where millennials stink and they're entitled, they don't lean in. And a millennial do something, immediately they lean out. And just as a parent, when your kid leans out, you lean in twice as hard. And that's the friggin' way you do it. And businesses don't get it. And we're not teaching these kids the skills they need to survive and connect in high school, in college, in graduate school, and in our businesses. We just suck at it.

Dan Negroni, CEO of LaunchBox 365. LaunchBox365.com is their website. And of course his book Chasing Relevance. Here's a question I've never asked you. You've been on the program a number of times. What is the difference between when you and I we're in our 20s going into the workforce and what's happening with our kids who are in our 20s going to the workforce now.

Well, what do you think the biggest difference is? It's a rhetorical question. You're playing with everything with every finger. It's technology. The answer is technology and the pace and the rapidity at the way the world changes. You know from this business to every single business you touch, they change in nanoseconds. These kids have to understand that. They have to integrate it. They have to be able to Play it and the world is different and there are different rules.

You know, Simon, I was with Delaney, many of you know my youngest daughter, who's graduated from college heading into physical therapy school to become a doctor of physical therapy, still on the payroll. We're sitting in a restaurant the other day. There is literally a 2-year-old with a smartphone in her hand and of course the smartphone looks like she's holding a laptop because she's so small. But she is not only looking at video, she's hitting the button to get to the next video. It's not just a function of hitting the red button. It is— now she understands that this video's over. I want to see another video. She's hitting the button. How does that change the way you teach? 'Cause right now we're dealing with a subset of people here in this country, millennials specifically, that were weaned on technology. Most of them never saw a record player. Most of them don't really read magazines physically. That's even gonna change even further. How do we keep up with that? Because I think 10 years from now, I think your message might be even a little bit different.

I think it'll be more of the same, but it will be different based on technology for sure. And the more of the same is this: we got to teach them, they got to put down the phones. But more importantly, we have to understand where they're coming from. The Platinum Rule— you treat others the way they need to be treated. And we need to understand the way they need to be treated, which is defined by some of the technology that they grew up with. However, we're humans.

Sure.

We got to treat them as humans.

On the corporate side. Yeah. What is the challenge in getting the message to the corporations that, look, it's worth taking a chance on one of these exceptional kids?

I got to take a big sigh when I do it. Only 22.9% of corporations have a plan to deal with millennial customers and millennial employees. So if you don't think that they're a big issue, understand that they're 83 million strong in the US, 2.4 billion of the world's population. 30% of the world's population is under the age— I'm sorry, 60% of the world's The population's under the age of 30, and they control $660 billion worth of spend. If they are not your employee, they're your customer. The most important person in the business, most people think is the customer. But if you listen to Branson and Buffett, they'll tell you the most important person is the employee. And they're right, because that takes care of your customer. So if you don't figure out a plan on how to deal with them, you're going to have no business. It's going to die.

So there's an intersection that you just talked about. And there's a piece of it that we have to bring up. You've got your customer, and you've got your employees. You've got the people that are going to be running the corporations, working for the corporations, buying goods and services.

Oh yeah.

What about where the government comes in here too? Because at some point, as much as we like to avoid being political on this program, look at— you've got to cater to the fact that you and I are going to be retiring under an administration of folks that you're training right now.

And look at the IRS. I think they have 90,000 employees and they have like 4% millennials. What are they going to do when everyone retires? 60% of boomers going to retire in the next 5 years. We have a problem not only with the government being able to serve us, but the government being able to serve us.

Well, and of course, it also— and of course, talk about chasing relevance. The government is not relevant to its population right now, and I think that's a big piece of it. His name is Dan Negroni. Dan, stay right there. We're gonna talk about the book. We're gonna talk about a couple of things outside of the stereotypical stuff we talk about, like results for the upcoming generations. And are millennials really that different from you and I? We're gonna pick that up in a minute. And the one thing— that you need to know to get through to your millennial employee. Danny's gonna tell you that. It's gonna come with a fee, but he's gonna tell you that.

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