Kate and Rob: Episode 33

Transcript

[0:00:36] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Kate Athmer and Rob Johnson, the authors of Millennial Reboot. As a millennial myself, I can tell you first hand that after we graduate from college, we expect to do really well in the workplace. I mean, we grew up with the internet, we have digital communication skills, we can solve problems but the reality is that we struggle to drive change in the corporate world. Kate and Rob figured out simple solutions that help millennials bridge those communication gaps and in this episode, they’re going to give you a crash course in professional corporate success. And now, here is our conversation with Kate and Rob. Tell me the story about when you first realized that millennials not knowing what to do in the workplace was a real problem?

[0:01:54] RJ: I think from day one of starting each of our careers. I can talk about a lot of the different struggles that I’ve grown up over the years. In college, my first semester, freshman year, 18 years old. I had a professor and he was working with the newly expanded, Houston Texans football team in the NFL and they were playing their hall of fame game in Canton Ohio and he was involved in the radio broadcasting. On and on he would go about all the different types of moving parts and other things that went in to the business in the NFL. I became kind of enchanted in it and that’s an issue. Because there’s not a lot of jobs particularly in professional football and professional sports to – there’s only 32 teams there and only a few hundred nationwide where you can work in professional sports but somehow I became infatuated with this and wanted to see if I could make a career of working in professional sports and entertainment and that’s really where the struggles began. Because I thought because I’m from Philadelphia, I’m a Philadelphia Eagles fan that I could just write an email or a letter to the Eagles and say “Hey, give me an internship.” That’s all I need to do. I’m going to college, I’m doing the right things. This is what people told me to do to be successful, why wouldn’t I be able to do this? I was rejected multiple years and so by freshman year, sophomore year, finally, my junior year and I really – it took enough struggle to figure out how to get to somebody to even answer me. I’m not lying, it was something like my aunt’s, uncle’s, former roommate from college just happened to work in the box office for the Philadelphia Eagles and would at least read my resume. During that time, I was learning in school, learning a little bit more about professional sports and what it took to run just business in general and after years of literally asking everybody. “Hi, I’m Rob, do you know anybody who works for the Philadelphia Eagles?” I finally found somebody and it literally took three years to do it, got an interview, got a chance for an internship and that was something I absolutely did not want to do for my career after that. You know, it was something that you learn, I got into an office space for the first time as a 20, 21 year old. Noticed that I was coming straight from college athletics which I knew how to be a leader but I wasn’t really learning how to be a follower. It was an internship. You’re starting at the ground level and learning about certainly, office politics, how to be – how to grow into an employee. These were things that I didn’t really have a grasp on.

[0:04:28] Charlie Hoehn: Tell me real quick. A story about you not understanding office politics or when did you first realize there was a big knowledge gap?

[0:04:39] RJ: It might have been the first day that I got there. It was coming from a leader on a sports – I was a rower so being a leader of a sports team, into taking instructions and not having input and it was the very first day that I know that what I was learning in college wasn’t going to translate. I had to make a drastic change and the job itself ended up being something that I knew I didn’t want to do but I did want to be in professional sports. Looked at, as I was graduating, what I wanted to do which I launched more towards the creative and creative business and marketing. A lot of the jobs I was looking for required or asked for an MBA. That’s what led me to go to business school and using my rowing background I was lucky enough to get a grad assistance job at Jackson university where I was able to coach rowing, get my MBA. But then I was stuck again trying to find out how to get in to the Jacksonville Jaguars, the NFL team that was there, how to do it. I had multiple interviews and just like in undergrad, I couldn’t get a response or even get interviews and was failing at them and just continue to go at it. There was one day at Jacksonville university in the cafeteria. There was a flier up and it said, “Try out to be the Jaguar’s ice cream truck driver.” I had in my mind that this is it, this is my way in, I was so frustrated trying to get my foot in the door, that I came prepared with a literal 20 page document of how I was going to have this Jaguar’s ice cream truck, take over northeast Florida and then the world. Fill out the stadium and it was going to be the best thing ever. I walked into this room, there was four, five people in there and went through my plan. I practiced it, I was passionate about it, everything I learned up to this point. I was like, “This is going to get me in the door.” About maybe seven and a half minutes in, they stopped me, they said “Listen, this isn’t what we’re looking for.” I said, well “I want to be Jaguar’s ice cream truck driver, I can nail this.” “No, come back next week, we have a bigger role in mind for you.” That led me to a paid internship that turned into my first job in professional sport. Along the way, learning all the different ways to fail and for anybody listening, failing is not necessarily a terrible thing. But, as long as you’re learning from it. I was able to learn and able to grow my career because I failed so many times in order to do it. But it’s a great way to grow up.

[0:06:54] Charlie Hoehn: Before we get in to Kate’s story, I want to know how did you fill out 20 pages on how to sell ice cream?

[0:07:02] RJ: Well, there’s different kinds of ice cream and then I was taking a truck, definitely needed at least racing stripes and then all the different conventions, schools, I had a map of the ins and outs of Jacksonville Florida. Duval County is one of the largest counties in the continental United States. There’s a lot of places to go with this thing and then I had interview scheduled, I was ready to take this thing worldwide.

[0:07:23] Charlie Hoehn: That’s amazing. You should totally post that on Medium and just be like, my – this was my crazy plan to sell ice cream that ended up getting me my first real job in the NFL.

[0:07:37] RJ: The most fun part of it was that I ended up having to drive that ice cream truck a couple of years into my job because the ice cream truck driver that they hired ended up calling out There was a huge sponsor promotion. I did end up getting to drive the ice cream truck once and it broke down on me.

[0:07:53] Charlie Hoehn: Alright, Kate, your turn to top that. What’s your story?

[0:07:58] KA: Well, my experience was a lot less filled with friction than Rob’s was. I think partly because I was less specific in my goals following college graduation. Just like Rob, I was also a rower, a division one athlete in college and I felt like that prepared me pretty well for balancing a lot of different responsibilities. When I was in school, I encountered – our business school was a bit oversold and so I had trouble getting the classes that I need to finish my degree in time. As a person in the business school I actually transferred to the support management program. Rob and I actually had similar degrees and by transferring to the support management program, I was like, “Okay, sports, this is cool, I’m interested in this field but not definitely committed to it.” I also was interested in becoming a rowing coach and so the opportunity – I graduated in 2009, there was no jobs then like really none. University of Tennessee had a graduate assistant position open as a rowing coach. I took that because a free MBA and the opportunity to coach rowing is not really something that you turn down. Especially in 2009 market. I did that, that taught me that I didn’t want to work in sports or be a rowing coach, primarily because I was tired of being poor all the time and Ramen for dinner sort of thing. I started down the path of what – how else can I put this marketing education to use? I was interested in a career in marketing and that’s where I have, spoiler alert, landed now as well. I think a combination of my flexibility and willing to test things out in the real world and get my hands dirty and explore, maybe not the perfect job, but finding roles within organizations that will help me bucket, “Yes, no, I want to do this, I don’t want to do that,” kind of thing. As well as learning to function within a corporate environment regardless of whether it was my dream job or not. I think that taught me where to look next and how to sort of hone in my focus. No crazy stories like Rob, it was a pretty traditional path that I think a lot of my friends took around that same time period too. What I did uncover later on is that I was fortunate enough in my switching degrees, kind of as a last resort to get my classes done, I accidentally sort of switched myself into a program at my university that really did a lot for preparing you for future jobs and for the real world. We had two semesters of classes about resumes, job interviews, we had a whole class about how to network, we had classes where you would shadow people in their place of employment. Or where people, you could be responsible for finding someone in the field that you were interested in going in to and bringing them in to speak to the class. We were really able to get hands on and get experience in the working world while we were still in college. I uncovered after speaking with friends now and for the past five-ish years. That that was not the norm and most people didn’t have courses like that. They weren’t graded on the public speaking, they weren’t graded on the resume, they weren’t mandated to contact 20 new people a semester in the industry they were interested in. I was like, “Why wouldn’t you be?” I think every school should be teaching this because I realized how much of a leg up that gave me when it comes to knowing what to do for myself next. That was a big thing that inspired me, I sort of organically started helping my friends with those skills that I assumed were basic and they had learned in college but they actually hadn’t. That was organically turning into, they would tell me how much I helped them and then they would refer me to their other friends who needed that kind of assistance. So I was just expanding my network of people that I was helping with kind of the similar things I learned in college and then some of the other things I learned later on by having a bit of an accelerated path.

[0:12:45] Charlie Hoehn: Were you getting them results Kate or were you just kind of improving what they had? Were you helping them land jobs faster? I mean, obviously, you had good enough word of mouth that they were referring other people to you.

[0:12:58] KA: Yeah. There was a couple of them that I helped land so I have one friend who really – well, I actually helped her get hired at my company initially. She was also a former rower and I kind of – I reached out, I met her by reaching out to whenever we have entry level positions, I would reach out to rowing coaches because I’m like, “I know that you have athletes that are probably smart, they know how to work hard.” “Give me the ones that are interested in this industry so I can hire them.” I helped her get hired there and then coached her and she wasn’t really – she didn’t want to do that job forever and I don’t blame her because it wasn’t a particularly fun job. I then took her and helped coach her how to find a job in an industry that she was interested in which she did probably about a year after I hired her. People might be like, “So you helped her leave your company?” But she wasn’t going to stay anyway. Then I have another friend who actually just recently just got another job and I’ve been working with her for about two years on just how to navigate the whole process of looking for a new job. She had the same job for years and years and there was no room for her to advance. But she also didn’t really know how to go about looking for a new job, where to find it, what any of the protocol was. Then also, any of my interns that I’ve helped, I’ve always been straight forward, we’re not going to be able to hire you so let me, in exchange for you having to do all this grunt work over me, I will help you make sure your resume is formatted properly and highlights the meaningful work that you did while you’re here so that when you’re done, you can go find somewhere else to work.

[0:14:41] Charlie Hoehn: Let me ask you guys, why did you write Millennial Reboot? Why not start a business where you’re coaching young professionals and redoing their resumes for them and charging whatever amount, just having that be your living? Why did you decide to sit down and write out the whole book?

[0:15:01] RJ: There was a lot that built up into kind of the moment where we decided to do this. She and I both being professionals and both with executive backgrounds, we want to learn and we’re always trying to grow. We started getting our own frustration of going to see either speaking events or reading materials particularly, when they show up on your newsfeed of some sensationalized headline that millennials roll into blank. You can put in whatever you want there and it has –

[0:15:30] Charlie Hoehn: It’s the worst by the way. Can you just like, I just have to say, nothing infuriates me more than traditional media slamming millennials just arbitrarily and blaming them for every problem under the sun, it is infuriating.

[0:15:48] RJ: That infuriating tone, the same thing that you just said, that kind of started to eat at both of us. Kate and I have lived together for a while now and there’s not a lot of prime-time television in our household. There’s usually discussions over what we’re reading or what we’re doing and it became often and more often than not, of millennials run blank. We’ve went to conferences that were supposed to be speaking to millennials and there’s typically somebody, let’s say they’re in their 40’s or 50’s in order to…

[0:16:16] KA: 60’s.

[0:16:17] RJ: 60’s even. Bringing these talks to these groups and we didn’t think that was enough. As much as we read and much as we’ve done at that point, we thought there might need to be something that’s a little more synced of what message we’re trying to say to fight a lot of these stereotypes. To exactly what Kate said of helping people grow that might not have had the opportunity. A lot of the successes that we’ve had to date – how we can share that and bring people along with us?

[0:16:47] KA: Yeah, a lot of it comes down also just to purely scale. We can’t help everyone but if we write a book, theoretically, everyone would have access to it. We think of this book kind of as a baseline. This is the starting point so if somebody’s like, comes to us and is complaining about their job, or looking for advice on how they can drop working at this company that they hate. Or make it better because they love the company but they hate their boss. Any of those kind of things, if people come to us, we can say, “Okay, start with the advice in this book, it really covers a lot of ground and it fills in a lot of gaps that are missing.” Then come to us and we can address the questions that remain.

[0:17:36] RJ: And yes, millennials, we could have put this on a Google Drive and called it a day. But we thought to make it a little more official. I would say, one of the scariest things of writing a book is probably the first time I’ve ever really put something that wasn’t deletable. That’s what we’re talking about the whole time, this is in ink, this is permanent. We try to make sure that we got the best information possible, to give a baseline to anybody that once that wants a future discussion, or that we can build on when we’re speaking to people and it seems to be working so far.

[0:18:07] Charlie Hoehn: Okay, it’s called Millennial Reboot. I don’t think this book is for every millennial. So, can you tell me who this book is definitely for and who it is definitely not for?

[0:18:21] KA: So, it is definitely for millennials as well as I think the generation coming afterwards will probably benefit from a lot of it too. Anybody that grew up as a digital native, by that I mean, they almost can’t or actually can’t remember life where they couldn’t simply Google the answer to something or communicate with someone in real time.

[0:18:51] Charlie Hoehn: Sure, I guess I should explain that I mean, I don’t think it’s for every millennial because there are some millennials obviously that end up becoming immersed in a creative culture or a startup culture where there’s less of the professionalism and structure that you would find in a corporate setting. Does that make sense and is that assumption right?

[0:19:16] RJ: This is talking a lot to growing in a traditional corporate structure and you’re reading this because you’re probably frustrated in that traditional corporate structure and we can say that millennials or any group, they like to be creative and man buns and whatever you may have for today. But, remove millennials and man buns and it was generation X or the generation before that that was going to ruin the world. And every single generation, has had some type of struggle. It’s just today. Now it appears on your newsfeed all day every day, versus your daily paper or your monthly magazine.

[0:19:54] KA: It’s very sensationalized now. I would say that the only people or the only millennials that wouldn’t benefit from this book, would be the ones that are completely unmotivated. You have bad apples in every generation, the ones that aren’t interested in improving, the ones that are totally complacent, just going to a nine to five job, doing what they’re told and going home. They’re not really going to benefit from this because there’s no reason for them to read it if they’re not trying to improve themselves in one way or the other. But specifically is not just for people on a corporate environment. A lot of it is focused around that but there is plenty of advice in there that would apply to a more creative role. One of the things that we really touch on in there, a lot actually is dress code and so a lot of people would say, “I work in a creative role. The office dress code is board shorts and flip flops.” And we would argue that if you just dressed 10% better than all those people in board shorts and flip flops and if you maybe wore jeans and a nice polo, the CEO of the company is going to take you more seriously and you’re going to get promoted faster.

[0:21:16] Charlie Hoehn: Right, whether it’s consciously or not, people will take you seriously. Yeah, that’s great advice. Dress code, that’s great, is that actually, what would you say is the number one piece of advice from the book that everybody can benefit from this week, apart from dress code.

[0:22:25] RJ: Everybody can benefit and as we interviewed executives, it doesn’t matter what their age were, up and down. As we got into this book, we went into this with a clear insight of how can we help our fellow generation succeed, if they want to succeed. What we found was not a generational gap, we found a communications gap and the one thing to take from this is it doesn’t matter if you’re managing a millennial or you’re a millennial that has a boss that you can’t communicate with, take 10 minutes a week and just touch base, in person, not over phone, not over text. What we’ve seen and what we found and what we’ve researched to date is this will significantly increase your satisfaction as an employee. Your management capability and it will grow the parts of your business that might be falling apart. Just that 10 minutes a week, touching base will really help.

[0:23:18] Charlie Hoehn: Any additional tips to that Kate?

[0:23:20] KA: Well, I think we’re often, well, millennials specifically, we’re expecting that real time feedback or at least frequent feedback, we don’t want to wait for annual review to know that we’ve messed something up because then it’s too late to fix it. Having these frequent check-ins, I think I agree with Rob that that is the number one take away is the communication between not even just a boss and the person they report to but anybody on your team that you work with. Frequent communication can allow you to solve conflicts quicker but it can also allow you to become more creative and move ideas along faster. I actually work completely remotely from my company so I don’t get a face to face meeting with anybody I work with more than once a quarter. But, we check in every single week on Monday at 1:30 PM and it’s just a half an hour where we kind of all go around and see what each other’s feeling and then in the projects we’re working on and then we’ll have individual check in’s as well as if needed. I have another additional check in with my boss and then the person that reports to me. This allows us even in this age of not working in the same office to all be on the same page in terms of where each other is and be able to resolve any differences and talk them through fast enough that it’s not holding the business back.

[0:24:54] RJ: Let’s talk about the why too. We can be generalized here. For the most part, we live in, if you are 35 or under you have social media that gives you instant feedback on almost anything you do and a lot of your life you’ve grown up that way when you post something, you get some feedback on your Instagram for your story, whatever you do your grades in college you typically get them back almost immediately and then you will be thrown in a world where there is annual follow ups and check ins. That is a little bit of a hard adjustment particularly for a generation that can see everything instantly and that is a lot of why we suggest from the manual and the manager to keep those check ins and know that it’s doing a feedback for every single day and every single project is not practical and will harm the business. However there is a middle ground where the manager and the employee can work this out.

[0:25:48] Charlie Hoehn: That makes me think part of the reason why Slack has to be effective for teams is you get that pseudo instant feedback on work that you’re doing.

[0:26:00] RJ: Well Slack works because Outlook doesn’t have animated gifs on it and if it did I think it would be a little bit different. That’s a big part of it but having the instant communication and the alerts that are customized, it certainly helps with the younger generation in communication.

[0:26:16] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so what are the most common mistakes you guys see millennials making in the workplace?

[0:26:26] KA: I think not having patience when they want to bring change and what I mean by that is we will come in guns blazing saying, “I know that there is better way to do this process” or “We need to have this technology in place” or “I can’t believe that this hasn’t been changed” and we assume that we are the first people that ever thought of these ideas, that we know what’s best especially when it comes to technology and we are not careful enough to ask more questions and to ask or to learn more about the whole big picture of the business. To get an understanding of where we might be able to productively drive change without just making people mad.

[0:27:20] RJ: And I will give an example of this. I was running a marketing team for a major sports organization and a lot of feedback from my younger employees, a few years younger that were much more into Snapchat than being a few years older, the question always came up is “why are we more active on Snapchat? Why can’t we snap this, why are we pushing it?” and when I go talk to colleges the first thing that’s out of their mouths with a question is why aren’t you guys more present on Snapchat? And this was probably for 18 months or so is one of the biggest questions that I got and it came from really the lack of understanding of okay, how does this drive the business. We are in the business of in sports and entertainment, selling tickets and making sure that the product on the ice, the field, whatever it may be looks the best. Now Snapchat doesn’t and as of today it can be questionable, did not at the time have any type of way to make revenue. To find out the metrics of who is really interactive with you or have any way to say, “Okay we have to pay people here and resources and we want to take this off” whether it is our primary business goals in order to put it towards Snapchat where there is no business case whatsoever and learning that, it was able to –

[0:28:36] KA: And this was pre-ads on Snapchat and pre Snapchat being clickable and so this was what, two years ago?

[0:28:45] RJ: Probably two or three years ago just for perspective but at the time, it’s a new social media that hasn’t been proven but it was extremely popular with the younger group and not understanding that it does not fit whatsoever any type of business case and that dawned on me to make sure that everybody on the team and this is important for almost any manager know what the business goals are and when you ask questions then you could say, “Okay, great. I love your idea. How does it fit into our business goals and we’ll do it”.

[0:29:12] Charlie Hoehn: Absolutely and just to back up what you said, social media doesn’t convert to purchases like other mediums like email so it makes total sense to not focus on that but from a person’s perspective who is spending most of their day on social media, it’s baffling to them why a business won’t be on there but they have no –

[0:29:37] RJ: Yeah, I hear the question all the time why we weren’t more active particularly at that point.

[0:29:41] Charlie Hoehn: Right, even still the data has not changed in the last two years. Social media doesn’t convert that kind of stuff but yeah, I remember when I had just gotten out of college I remember giving a presentation to a local organization on what they could do for their marketing and I went in just as Kate said, guns blazing basically being like, “Why aren’t you guys on Facebook? Why aren’t you doing a Facebook group?” and I graduated in 2008. I think I gave that presentation in 2007 so Facebook was still relatively speaking still pretty young and they didn’t have an answer but in retrospect that was a really arrogant statement that I made because I had no grounding in the reality of how business actually worked and how they actually made their profits. So how do you encourage millennials in the book to retain that humility and patience? Because you really do have to sort of immerse yourself or keep your head against the wall. To realize that you don’t know what you are talking about, so what do you suggest to millennials who may have that ambition to go make a company so much better and to rewrite the rules, what do you tell them?

[0:31:12] RJ: The first thing is to slow your role and there’s a time and a place and perfecting your pitch is a lot of what we talk about the book to make sure you call it an elevator pitch or whatever you like but make sure that when you are ready to speak or if it’s appropriate for you to speak that you’ve researched enough and being a millennial and a digital native, you know how to find all the answers and if it is either searchable or it’s a great way to start a conversation with a co-worker or a possible mentor or somebody else in the company that you can start to grow from and take the steps to learn.

[0:31:47] KA: Yeah, I would agree with Rob and slow your role. I would say take the time especially when you are new to a company to ask a lot of questions. Collect data so instead of saying, “We need to be on social media” maybe say, “Why aren’t we on social media?” I am trying to learn and understand whether it is a decision that we’ve made or whether there’s maybe a gap here that I can help fill and so definitely start with asking the questions and then secondly, try to align yourself with the person or people in the organization that are pro change and that have experience initiating change. So I recently spoke with someone who, she’s a boomer, baby boomer generation and she said, “I am the person that comes in guns blazing to the meetings to drive change” and we talked about that a bit and she said, “But I can get away with it because everybody here has seen what I can do. I’ve been with the company for 15 years. They understand that when I come in and want to change something that I have done my research and I’ve proven to past experiences that I am someone that they can trust to move a project forward”. So I would say as a millennial find that person in the organization, align yourself with them, learn from them what works for this business and get them on your team when you are ready to advance an idea, ask them for feedback. Use them as a mentor.

[0:33:29] Charlie Hoehn: I love that, that’s great advice. I will add to that if that is all right of what you can do that works in pretty much any situation is instead of coming in and saying, “I have this idea, we should do this” and putting the workload onto other people for coming up with your idea, do a lot of the ground work. Show them the plan, show them and back it up with some research. Show them what it could look like, what the points of failure are and just do your homework. So instead of coming in and just saying, “We need to do this” and assuming that everything is going to work, assuming that they’re immediately going to be on board with your thinking, do the work and give them some options of how you might test it out and execute it without damaging the reputation of anybody in the company or hurting the brand. If you do that, you are giving them the ability to improve upon your work rather than just saying yes or no.

[0:34:32] RJ: Yeah, I’ll take the next step from there. It’s execution gets rewarded not the idea. So make sure that as you present it, it’s planned out, that you are able to execute it and then as you do, your reputation will grow and it will start to grow within your organization.

[0:34:45] Charlie Hoehn: Much more syncly said, nicely done.

[0:34:48] KA: But yeah, I would agree that in any scenario it is always better to come to the table with data. That is something to keep in mind.

[0:34:57] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so you guys mentioned a phenomenon that I hear so often from people in our age group which is ending up at a company where they hate their job and it’s often described as soul crushing, soul sucking, how do we avoid those jobs in the first place?

[0:35:20] KA: Well looking at the company before you go to work there, do your research online.

[0:35:28] Charlie Hoehn: What do you mean by that?

[0:35:29] KA: There is a ton of resources online where you can learn about a company starting with their website, maybe look at their about us page and see what the makeup of their executive team is. I would never just use one data point. Check the glass door reviews, take them with a grain of salt but if they are all bad or if they all have little hidden pieces that say the same thing then that might be some cause for concern. During the interview process know what questions to ask that are going to tell you about how the company functions. So ask about what the opportunities are for advancement, ask about how the company approaches new things, ask what you’ll be equipped with to do your job. So whether that’s the technology that you will need or the budget to actually deliver on what they are asking you to deliver, ask how the teams within the company work with each other. I think the biggest thing though is asking what opportunities there are for you to grow. I also think that you will get a sense of the company based on how they treat you just in general during the interview process whether they call you or join the call when it’s scheduled, whether they are on time for the interview, whether they are just treating you with respect, whether they give you a free offer. I think all of those things can come into play and you want to compile all of those data points and get a feeling for the organization as a whole and whether that is somewhere that will be suited to your working style.

[0:37:10] RJ: And if you’re in a soul crushing job it’s only on you to get unstuck. So you have to take the next right step in order to do that than complaining about it and we do coach people and they often just complain about their job and don’t take the next step or even worse, their next step is blindly just sending out a resume to the thousand and one different sites or even linked in has an easy click button, that is not getting yourself unstuck. You need to grow and a lot of the best jobs or a lot of the jobs that you want that probably aren’t on LinkedIn or on in deed are probably through in a network of people. So how can you find either a meet up around your profession or your likes, how can you start growing your own network in order to find the way to get unstuck? And that all falls on the individual, if you really want to do it you have to take the next step to do it and it is not going to be easy process. If it was easy anybody would do it.

[0:38:07] Charlie Hoehn: Right, now tell me what have your guy’s favorite reader success story has been? What have been the most remarkable stories of people using the materials in millennial reboot to reboot their lives?

[0:38:24] RJ: This was one that we were hoping for but one of the best things that came up as we are writing this book was to hear the stories of how people are using it and to some of which to a surprise and I know I have a longtime friend. He was flying to a job interview across the country and it was something that he really wanted. He read our book for the most part on the flight there and as he told the story to me, he used almost every piece of job interview advice that we gave, how to respond and got in the job within the next few days. And he was nice enough to credit us with it, I am sure he had a lot to do in making sure he was prepared but that was a pleasant story to hear very early on after it was released but then also the non-millennial and how it’s helping them learn a little bit more about how to manage their younger employees. That’s been a surprise and something that we are starting to grow as we coach people that this is a problem in rebooting millennials and not just getting rid of the sensationalized headlines. But making sure that we’re put in a better light if you want to be a successful professional, that’s been a positive surprise too.

[0:39:35] KA: Yeah, I gave a presentation to a group of managers of millennials recently just on how they – to help them understand the way millennials think and the way millennials prefer to work in the workplace and then also maybe some of the things that have just gotten forgotten over the years that you should be teaching your employees. One of the things that I mentioned was make sure everyone understands how the company makes money. Millennials are much more motivated to contribute appropriate and advance ideas to the organization if they understand how the company makes money and it seems so simple that so many companies forget to tell and to teach their new hires the ways that the company makes money and so one person actually emailed me and it was the next day after their presentation and he said the first thing I did when I got to the office was I pulled in all of my employees and went through how the company makes money. And three of them came up to me afterwards and said, “Wow we had no idea and this makes so much more sense and I have this idea or this idea” or “Oh I need to reprioritize because my projects are going to make our company money” and it was just like that real time feedback. I mean he did it the next day as soon as he realized and he got then feedback from his employees that that made an impact.

[0:41:02] RJ: And we’ve talked to a couple of people that just feel like they have gotten unstuck with it as well and the key being and we’ve talked about communication. The little part of just the 10 minute meeting and asking your manager for that and getting say it’s regular feedback, not every day, it certainly helps in job satisfaction for people that feel like they’re stuck as well.

[0:41:25] Charlie Hoehn: I love that, those are great stories. You know Kate as you were telling that, it struck me that I think part of and I am curious what you guys think about this but I think part of the reason millennials have a little bit of a different communication style is because we grew up with the internet where they internet is focused on getting to the point, get you to the solution, the thing that you’re looking for in the most efficient path possible. And older generations didn’t necessarily grow up with that. A lot of the books from many, many years before they were meandering. They had tons and tons of fluff and it’s just a different style of disseminating information and when you communicate with a millennial now, if they don’t get the road map, if they don’t get where point B is from where they are starting, if they don’t understand the result they’re ultimately trying to get, the communication really falls flat and I don’t think older generations have that problem as much, does that make sense?

[0:42:34] RJ: It does make sense and when you have an entire population of people that grew up with effectively all of the knowledge of the world and the thing that’s in their pocket, a super computer in their pocket, you’re going to have this most efficient generation ever that is able to find most answers to anything they want and that mystery of getting to point B is lost on everybody that has access to that as growing up with that and I think that is a little bit of a difference. It is just being able to have your entire life of knowing how to search for something and finding an answer that’s new.

[0:43:07] Charlie Hoehn: So what does the rest of this year look like for the two of you?

[0:43:10] KA: Well we are working on scheduling regular events where we speak to either millennials or managers or people who work regularly with millennials. We are doing a couple of webinars and I’ve actually started working, just started working with another person in the space on developing a podcast which will be called Millennial Playbook also for millennials.

[0:43:39] RJ: A lot of our goals is making this a little bit more experiential and making the book come to life. So as Kate said we’ll be working on regular event but we’ll probably bring on our first employee and have an event manager and then start in the northeast and the west coast will be our first few events toward the end of the year.

[0:43:58] Charlie Hoehn: Cool, do you have any parting pieces of advice or a parting piece of advice for aspiring authors?

[0:44:07] KA: I would say have some sort of mechanism that keeps you stuck in a timeline otherwise you will be – so either pay someone or put your money somewhere otherwise it’s very easy to say, “I’ll work on that tomorrow. I really want to go have a cocktail with my friends” I think for me that was the biggest thing I needed to know I had a deliverable deadline and just like back in school where you chunk it into pieces. It can’t be like the book has to be done by December. It has to be like, “This part has to be done by this time. This part has to be done by this time” setting milestones that someone else is holding you to I think is really the most helpful part for me.

[0:44:53] RJ: And part of what I always want to be able to write a book and I put it all for years and years until Kate and I had enough conversation toward this made a lot of sense and I asked what was I waiting for. I could have done this years ago, it’s like anything. It’s doing now, today is the best day.

[0:45:15] KA: It’s never going to be perfect timing.

[0:45:17] RJ: Right and then we could have written this forever. So keeping a karat and making sure you have a deadline and holding yourself accountable to it, those are really important things because if we didn’t have a deadline we’d still be writing this seven months later after it came out.

[0:45:32] KA: Someone to tell you when to stop. It’s done, let it go.

[0:45:36] RJ: Whether it’s internal or not.

[0:45:38] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so what is the number one way our listeners can help you guys? Is it to buy your book? Is it something else?

[0:45:46] RJ: Yeah, buying our book would be great. It’s available on Amazon. We have millennialreboot.com where you can see our blog. Also the book is available there. If anybody wants to contact us on Twitter is on @rebootbook and then there’s rob@millennialreboot.com and kate@millennialreboot.com is our email addresses and feel free to ask us questions. We will get back to you and we love to hear from you.

[0:46:09] KA: And the number one way they can help themselves is buying our book too. So it will help them more than it will help us probably, yeah.

[0:46:18] Charlie Hoehn: Perfect. Well thank you guys so much, this was great.

[0:46:21] KA: Thank you.

[0:46:21] RJ: Thank you.

[0:46:22] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Kate and Rob for being on the show. You can buy their book, Millennial Reboot on amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.