Cracking The Millenial Code | Christian Cotichini

A 2017 Price WaterhouseCooper survey of CEOs found that their top concern was innovation. The second top concern was millennials, how to understand them and manage them. Millennials, just in case you don't know, are ages 18 to 33 years old. How many of you work with millennials? I don't. Well, I do. I work with quite a few based on research. Millennials face an epidemic of criticism and negativity, and many business owners struggle with how to manage them. But one person has cracked the code and I've asked him to share that today. His name is Christian Cattuccini. Christian is the Co founder and CEO of HeroX, the world's problem solving platform. Herox has amassed a crowd of over 1 million millennials.

And.

And he has cracked the code of creating a self managing company full of millennials, where his biggest problems managing is how they is how they work too hard. Christian also has two millennial boys who he's raised and lives with. Christian's talk is cracking the millennial code. Please welcome Christian Cattagini. Tear it up.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, how's everybody doing? Good. Well, I decided to take Joel's advice and warn you in advance that most of you are going to get offended at some point with my stereotyping of your generations. I have a talk about demographics. Pretty exciting, huh? Oh, yeah, yeah. 50 slides. I'm going to do 50 slides in 10 minutes about demographics, so get ready. So to kick things off, I'd like to find out who here is a boomer. Is that patronizing enough for you guys? Boomers. Okay. All right, the boomers. So that's born before 65. Great. And after World War II. So, Joel, I think you squeeze in. Right. Are you 46 or 45? Born. Thank you. Yeah, there you go. Now, how about Xers, who's a Gen Xer? So that's up to up to about 80. So just in the 70s, late 60s. Okay, hands up again. Okay, great, thanks. And how many millennials do we have? All right, great. Aley, you can put your hand up. You're an honorary millennial. Right. So my story starts with starting Herox. So Herox has been an awesome journey for me. It's a crowdsourcing platform. We engage with millennials and we've gotten really good at figuring that out. But it actually started with this. So this is what boomers like to give you when you sell your company. It's called the tombstone. Anybody know what a tombstone is? Right, right. And then it gives you what boomers would call independent wealth or financial independence. Right. That's not what the Xers call it. The Xers call it fuck you, money because X, I'm a card carrying Gen Xer. Right? So we've been hiding, fighting in the shadows of the boomers. Kind of like how the rodents during the dinosaur era were kind of fighting and clawing for survival. The mammals, I guess you could say. So after I sold my company and had my money and I started Herox and I decided I was going to grab lunch with. I'm going to call him Mr. Happy. He's a boomer friend of mine, one of the most positive guys I know. Always love having lunch with him. He runs an 80 outlet retail store and he's been doing really well. So we talked about his business and how it was doing. We talked about his family, talked about his cholesterol levels. Boomers, by the way, they like to talk about their cholesterol levels. So extras, if you want to engage with the boomers. And then his face got all kind of wrinkly and angry and I don't know if. So millennials. Have you noticed that old people do angry much better than young people? It's because they got all that extra character they can channel on their face. Yeah. So his face kind of wrinkled up and he got all angry. And I was like. And then he was like, fuck, you know, these millennials, how do I manage them? Right? And he talked to me about how they were entitled and how they were lazy. In fact, they were too lazy to eat cereal. And that was hurting his business. Okay. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, they're obsessed with fashion, they're rude, they disrespect authority. And he was like, I don't want to hire them anymore. I'm done. I'm done with millennials, okay? And he was trying to figure out how to handle them. And he told me, here's what he told me. He goes, here's what they don't get. Here's what the millennials don't get. That opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed like overalls and looked like looks like work. It's exactly what he told me. And, you know, I can kind of agree, but I was really surprised. So how did Mr. Happy become Mr. Angry? Really surprised me. So I said, okay, I'm going to go figure it out. So I go to where you go to figure things out nowadays, right? Typed in what he said and sure enough, you know, started seeing all this stuff, you know, that millennials don't Buy they're hurting the economy, the recession's happening because of them. By the way, there's lists of the worst millennials out there year by year. Okay, yeah, they're there. They're even responsible for the election. Right. So I was like, shocked at all this negativity because I'd never really noticed. And I thought about it a bit more and I went, yeah, yeah, people have their hate on for millennials. I couldn't figure it out. And then I ran into this quote, and this changed my way of thinking a lot. This quote right here. So my question for you guys is, who said this? Any guesses? Somebody from 100 years ago.

Plato.

Plato said it. Close. Abraham Lincoln, Socrates. And I read this quote and I went, wow, it really describes the millennials. Right, right. And then I kind of realized, I think there's a pattern here. I think it's not just about the millennials being a really, really bad generation that was raised poorly by the Gen Xers because everything's always our fault. At least until the millennials came along to be the new scapegoats. And so I thought about it and I said, okay, well, let me think about these millennials a bit more. And I started noticing, looking at the data and the research, that they're actually like a big thing and they're actually doing really well in many ways that as business owners, we need to understand. Right. So first off, they've just become the largest element of the job market. Okay. Really important. And it's not looking so well for the boomers. Sorry, guys. So if you're planning on running a business for more than five or 10 years, you probably want to learn how to rock the millennials. And by the way, the Silicon Valley guys, millennials are the secret weapons. In fact, so much so that there's the big movement in Silicon Valley is, you know, ageism, where these employers are hiring too many young people and pissing off some of the older people because they don't feel like they're getting the opportunities. Millennials are the most educated generation. It's probably not a surprise for you guys. They're the worst. Paid by almost every metric. And here's an interesting fact, and this is a fact, this has come out of many studies. They're the hardest working generation, age adjusted. They work harder than the boomers worked when you guys were as old as they are. Uh huh. It's true. They work harder than you guys and they work harder than the Xers, and they're largely okay with that, believe it or not. And they're starting to produce a lot of income and they're soon going to cross over even the Gen Xers in about four or five years to become the largest income producing generation. So then the question is, why don't they want to work for you? Why aren't they engaged with your organization? And the answer that I've come up with is they're just not that into what you're into. Right? So I talk to a lot of CEOs, I've done this presentation a lot of times, and I hear all the different versions of stories about they have a sense of entitlement, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you know what? They get that the model that you're used to, the corporate ladder, it's gone. Pensions, working hard for the same company up the corporate ladder. By the way, something invented after World War II called the bounded career, to stop your A players from leaving, they created this bounded career economist did this and they put a big carrot at the end of the ladder. And so you work hard, you sacrifice, maybe a little bit underpaid compared to what you could get somewhere else. And you got all these rewards at the end. They know that's gone. They know that's gone. Now I'm a Gen Xer and Gen Xers are kind of the classical entrepreneur. We're kind of Silicon Valley. Most of the billionaire Silicon Valley guys are all Gen Xers. The boomer started right with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and kind of the first group, and then the next group has been the Gen Xers. And we have a good time, but we don't. This isn't our value. This isn't our work ethic. This isn't good enough for us. This wouldn't make it as a Gen Xer, as a boomer, probably, but as a Gen Xer, it wouldn't. This is a Gen Xers work ethic. And you Gen Xers out there can raise your hand if this resonates for you. And oh, you boomers can raise their hand too, because this is all generalizations and stereotypes, right? So none of these things define you guys, right? But here's the kicker. This is what the Millennials have as their work ethic, right? And the reason they have this as work ethic is because they can, right? Because this is the world that they live in. They live in a liquid world where if you're talented, you can get a job anywhere really quickly, really fast. Work as a freelancer, you can make a lot of money. You can make six figures as a freelancer so I'll end with this. So how you manage them, you get them to have passion for what you're doing on their terms, not on yours. And if you can do that, you're going to be hugely successful because they're unbelievably talented and unbelievably effective. And the best of them are going to go to where they can feel that passion and they can live in that center right there. And if it's not your company, you're going to lose.