Mets Kramer talks about the different generational expectations

Yes, it's always been a long time between. Generations, expectations. I'm 75, my daughter's 45, my granddaughter's 20, grandson's 16. My generation was the first one to live entirely with a credit card. We also were the first one to see serious implementation of computers. My grandson at 16 has never lived in a world that there hasn't been a cell phone, the internet, or Google. How he views the world and how I view the world are very, very different.

Radically different. You're absolutely right. I asked my granddaughter, who's majoring in bioengineering with a specialty in genetic, what she wanted to do, what she thought her career would be. I haven't got a clue, Poppy. there's too many things that I need to find out about. There's too much I need to learn. So as a result of that, I did a little bit of research and found that last year Gallup did a survey and found that there's 12 and a half jobs per man in the United States over their lifetime. 12.1 jobs for women. In other words, it takes a long time for people to find their place. When we look at an equipment dealership, agriculture, on highway, truck, engine, any of the capital goods industries, they seem to be led by 55 to 75-year-olds for the most part.

So, yeah, and I'm in that tub too. I'm on the top end of that. But the thing that's interesting is if we look down, there's a silent generation, which is the one before the greatest generation, which was the World War II guys. I'm at the baby boomers' end. You're in the millennials crowd. Then behind that, we've got Gen X and Gen Z. There's others that are around. But if I just take those Gen Z, Gen X, millennials, and baby boomers, those four, population-wise, everything's pretty normal. They're about 20% in each,20% to 23%. Yep. But that's not how commerce is being conducted.

You want to address that? Where is that? Who's conducting most of the business today?

If you take that and go further, would you not expect the retail world that's dealing with those buyers or people making that purchasing decision? Would you not expect that there would be a match in generations?

And the sellers. The buyers and the sellers, shouldn't they be in the same generation?

Yeah.

But that's also becoming more common. You know, we were sitting at a dinner table Christmas Eve, the six of us. And, you know, part of that discussion, I looked at my grandson who's 16, asked him, he's in the ROTC. He hasn't got a clue. Wants to be a chef. He wants to design clothing. He really likes math. He plays piano. There's so many options today. Yeah. And he said, I haven't got any idea. And then I looked at him and I said, you know, I had to register for university at your age. Right. And he looked at me and I didn't know any more than either. You know? Yeah. So it's, it's again, you know, you and I've had a previous podcast where we talked about transactions to transformation on the digital dealership. and how this transformation that is required is very slow. And I'm concerned that that's because the leadership we've got in the industry are at a place that they don't want to make change because they're risk averse. They don't want to make a mistake.

My granddaughter uses the telephone for texting, not for talking. Yeah. That's a reflection. You know, Gil Hanna says that, you know, the phone interaction, it takes typically 90 minutes from placing a phone call to getting a response. Yeah. Text is 90 seconds.

You know, as you look at the arrival and change of technology, it's almost become a fashion statement, Matt, that, you know, I got to have an Apple 13. I know people that have Apple 6s and 5s and 7s, and they're perfectly happy with them. It's a telephone. I don't care about the phone or et cetera, et cetera. But Alex Shusher, I think, said it best when, you know, in a podcast, he calls it paper to glass. What we've done with technology is taken a four to six part form that we filled out with a piece with a pen, put a template on a screen and filled it out with a keyboard. Yeah, we have not transformed. We have not changed the process. We just set it up as long as you can type faster than you can write.

it's the three finger speedball, right?

That's right. You've mentioned different people that are consolidators of data, Rouse and others, that the dealer gives them all the information. The dealer doesn't understand the value of that information. The dealer does not treat information as an asset class on the balance sheet, which it clearly should do. And the younger generations, the Zs and the Xs, and I'll put you in as a young millennial.

You're not going to be patient. You're not going to hang around. Why do you do it that way? Oh, geez. Do what you're told. Go away. Yeah. That's a pretty common discussion that people have. Yeah. That leads to this separation rate we've been dealing with. You know, what's an acceptable turnover rate anymore? It's what we're experiencing today is nowhere near acceptable. You spend a lot of money to hire somebody and then three to six months they go away because you didn't pay any attention to them.

That's that's a that's an important way of saying it. You want meaning in your lives. My generation just wanted a paycheck to be able to live. I don't know that we were smart enough to think that we should have had meaning in our lives. That's a pretty powerful statement in my mind. It's the same kind of thing that you want to become what you could be, not what you should be. Right. And that's powerful also. The younger generations want to deal with what they could be. They're not prepared to have anybody tell them what they should be. And a lot of that, my generation, the boomers, a lot of us tell you what you should be, what you should do.

The other thing that's happened to us in the last 24 months is the pandemic. which has forced a lot of people to reevaluate their life. Absolutely. Working from home has really opened a whole bunch of people's eyes. And, you know, just to give you a generational example, my daughter's a teacher, as you know, and early in 2020, when they started shutting down the schools and went virtual, Caroline was told to come into the school to conduct her virtual classrooms from the school itself. rather than from her home. And I said to Caroline, that's really cool. They really trust you to be working when all they need to do is look at the computer and see if you're there or not.

And those are just simple illustrations. This expectation and the, I call it patience, the worker with the separation rate we're seeing now, we're seeing a lot more discussion about four day weeks. As you say, there's a reevaluation of work going on. There's a reevaluation of pay going on. I'm sure you've read some of Ed Gordon, the guy that writes our blogs on economics and education says by 2030, half of the American workforce, that's over 80 million people. will not have the skills to be able to find a job in the work environment at that time. That's only eight years from now.

But even if I, you know, we were having lunch the other day and I said, okay, even if it's 2040, that's pretty serious. How's society going to handle that? He said, nobody's talking about that. Yeah. It's true. Yeah. So South America, some of the major companies down there, every five years they give management a sabbatical for a year. As long as you go to school. Right. And it doesn't have to be anything that relates to their job. As long as they're learning something, broadening their mind. So now we come into employee development, learning without scars. That's our thing. What's your potential? What do you want to be? What's your passion? What's your career going to be? Yeah. And I'll bet you right now, you still don't know, even though you're successful in your own business.

You know, I tease everybody. I still haven't figured out what I want to do when I grow up. And like you say, as long as I say this to everybody very seriously, you don't retire from something, you retire to something. And if you haven't got something to retire to, keep working. As long as you're curious, you like it, you're healthy, go for it.

Well, the work-life balance, that's a personal choice. Absolutely. It's a very different. Some of us are crazy. It will work too much. Yep. Some of us won't work enough. Yep. And, you know, I've been trying to find that little mystery or solve that mystery for a long time with things that I've read, and I don't see a clear formula on that at all.

they are.

Isn't that something?

No, I know. There's no way out of this labyrinth. It's clear. And the generation of leadership that we've got, status quo is not acceptable, but to run a business of any size today, it's very complex. All of the moving pieces. And people are change resistant primarily because they don't know what the impact is going to be on that change. And I try and minimize it by asking people in a room. Are you married? Yeah. Okay. Well, go home tonight and tell your spouse you're going to sleep on the other side of the bed. And tomorrow morning, tell me what happened. And that's change. Change of work is easy compared to that. I don't know why it was that women are the ones that choose which side of the bed they sleep on, but that's a separate discussion.

Yeah, you have to have a bottle of wine when you're doing that. And if we look at it, there's a position that's missing in dealerships today. I don't see many dealers that have people that do dealer development. And I'm going to use that as the title. Yeah. Where they just evaluate a piece of the business, one after another, and maybe do it on the basis of You know, the parts department says, gee, I want to be able to get more parts overnight. The service department, I want to be able to manage my maintenance better. The sales department, I want to have better call to close ratios. The rental department, I want to have higher utilization. Finance, I want to have better collections. And then somebody goes out and evaluates that, puts together a white paper, here's what we think, gives us options and puts it out to the executive and they make choices. I don't see those job functions. And I think they're necessary. I

That's exactly what Six Sigma did. It was an incentive deal to try and help. And you're right. It was cost-saving type of efficiency type of. And then when you went to 5S and 7S, which came in the aughts and later, it was similar things. I teasingly call it repackaging. When I was in school, it was called industrial engineering. Then you go in the 80s to TQM or CQI. Then you go to the 90s and it's Six Sigma. You go to the aughts and it's 5S. There'll be a new one coming. But those guys that were involved as black belts and Six Sigma, what are they doing now? And did those companies replace that black belt function or did they let it die?

traditional roles, you know,

I think they're critical to me. I really do. And I don't see very many dealers stepping to the line. Like you mentioned, it's a cost issue. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. Bankruptcy is a cost issue too. The ultimate measure of the business that doesn't keep up is replacement. And if you look backwards, the number of companies that are trading in Wall Street that started in the 1800s, It's on one hand.

And in the latter, I think it was the decade of the 90s,44% of the S &P didn't exist in the 80s. So it's not just technology that changed transformation. It's not just the generational expectation change transaction. The life cycle of a corporation is shrinking. And if that isn't a reflection of the fact that leadership is not looking after their side of the table, I don't know what is. Yeah.

It was funny. I started in the consulting business in 1980. And there was a... an economic disruption, oh, about two years or three years later in Alberta with all sands going away and all kinds of people were let go, a lot of management, et cetera. And there was a proliferation of consultants.

Those were people that were just, you know, trying to find a job. It was kind of the gig economy and trying to make themselves, you know, I was trying to make a career out of being a consultant. These dudes are screwing it up, you know. So my daughter, at that time, she was in high school. Later on, I think it was down here, maybe she went to some summer education program and everybody, all the kids had to stand up and say, what does your father do? And she stood up and said, well, my father's a consultant. And the teacher said, well, what does that mean? And Caroline said, well, he goes into companies and he cuts out the fat.

I never, and I'm not lights. I don't know where she got the idea, but that's what Six Sigma really morphed into. It was a cost-saving circumstance. We need those disruptors. We need those people that are going to step out. They're going to get ahead of the curve, and they're going to succeed like maniacs. But I don't think it's going to be a boomer that's going to do that. It's

And I like your point. The expectations of the younger generations, Zs, Xs, and millennials, are very much different than they were for my generation, the boomers and the... the greatest generation before me. And they're not, it's really interesting, Mets, and I think you've got, I think you got your finger right on the right pulse. They're not going to tolerate, they're not going to be patient and wait for things to change. They want to make the change. They want their life to have meaning. And that means being able to influence the world that they're in. Yep,

Is that a good place to close it? I

That's a good place to end it, Max. Thank you very much. I appreciate your expertise and your time. And thank everybody who's been listening to us. We look forward to having us join us at a future Candid Conversation. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo!