Dan Haar: Millennials come with challenges
If David Lewis was looking for a punctuation mark for his presentation on the challenges of running a small to midsize business in Connecticut, he got it on a platter, like room service.
He was due to take the stage at 8:40 a.m. Friday, and at precisely that moment, his device buzzed with a news flash about the national jobs picture: A decent month for workers, with 201,000 positions created, unemployment at a low 3.9 percent and, Lewis noticed, a year-over-year wage gain of 2.9 percent — not enormous, but healthy.
Bingo! The perfect illustration for his point — as owner and CEO of OperationsInc., a Norwalk human resources outsourcing and consulting firm — that employers need to bend rivers to attract and retain workers.
“Yesterday I wore a New York Giants jersey to work because it was the beginning of the football season. Well, that’s one of the 19 different days that we have where we can do things like that,” Lewis told 250 people at the Connecticut Business & Industry Association’s fall conference.
“I wear jeans to the office every day and all my employees do, too. When you come to the office, there is a cabinet filled with cereal that I thought I gave up when I was 12. We feed everybody lunch . ... We make it OK to bring your kids to work on days when schools are closed.”
What is this, a workplace or a summer camp? You have to wonder. Lewis’ firm started 2018 with 67 people and just hit 90, so the task is great and the list of perks, office quirks and smart ways to shape the company culture goes on and on.
Lewis was one of five business owners and executives from Fairfield County and New Haven who talked about their company cultures Friday at an odd time for the Connecticut economy. Many firms are struggling to attract people, especially coveted millennials, even though the overall state economy remains sluggish.
For these businesses, the challenges are all the greater as they’re growing faster than most.
LoveSac, a Stamfordbased maker and marketer of couches and high-end beanbag chairs, had its initial public offering on June 27 and has seen its headquarters staff grow from 70 to 90 in a year.
“I work on the intangibles because we can’t compete with what New York City has to offer,” said CFO Donna Dellomo, referring to pay scales in New York. “Plus we’ve got a great product and a great name.”
And now, a great stock
ticker symbol: LOVE. You gotta love it as a cultural signal and that captures the spirit of the technologydriven product line — with, Dellomo pointed out, the first couches that can be delivered to customers by FedEx because they’re modular.
“But you probably want it tomorrow,” she said. “It’s not good enough to give it to you in 10 days.”
And LOVE captures what employees need, all the time. “Millennials want a total experience, they want the social experience,” Dellomo said. “I become a cruise coordinator.”
“It’s not enough to have a gym in the office, you’ve got to have a gym instructor,” said Lynn Fusco, CEO of Fusco Corp., the large construction and property management firm in New Haven, founded by her
grandfather. “They want the experience.”
Ah, so it’s a cruise, not a camp. But no, these executives were blunt about Connecticut’s struggles and a state culture that isn’t exactly business-friendly. That’s hard to define, of course, and it certainly is friendly to the hundreds of companies that have received grants and lowinterest, forgivable loans from the state Department of Economic and Community Development.
LoveSac has 73 showrooms — they don’t call them stores because you custom-order online — including one in Danbury. And Dellomo made it clear, although the headquarters will continue to add people, when it comes to showrooms, “We sell furniture. We only really want to be in places that the population is growing.”
That would exclude Connecticut, right? Not so. The company is opening another
one at an undisclosed location — perhaps, I’d guess, downtown Stamford or the new mall under construction in Norwalk.
Cindi Bigelow, CEO of Bigelow Tea in Fairfield, said she’s known to spontaneously invite employees to product innovation meetings, among many other ways to keep workers engaged in a broad way. She, too, said it’s impossible for a tea-maker with 400 employees, half in Connecticut and half of those in manufacturing, to compete with large companies on salary alone.
“We hired someone recently that was a receptionist for us and I just fell in love with this woman. She never worked in the corporate world before but I said, I’d like to bring her into marketing,” said Bigelow, who, like Fusco, is a thirdgeneration CEO of a familyowned business.
And so it was, the woman hired as a receptionist
now helps market tea. Bigelow, who always delivers inspirational stories, talks with her employees about the product as mundane and soaring, at once — as a way to motivate them.
“I say, ‘I make a teabag every day; that’s what I do. But I’m proud of that teabag and ... from that little teabag,’” she quotes herself, “‘look at all the great work we can do, and that’s each one of you in the room.”
Treatment of millennials is an issue in itself but it’s also an allegory for running a business at a finicky time in the economy, when there’s great wealth but so-so growth, and with everyone wanting everything to their precise satisfaction.
“Millennials are a pain in the butt when it comes to managing that group,” said Lewis, the HR consultancy founder. “They are looking for progression in terms of months, not years. … You’re going to lose them if you don’t maintain an extraordinarily high level of communication with them.”
Bigelow said she prefers to treat everyone alike. And while some executives say Connecticut’s costs are too high in relation to growth — Fusco said her firm would be better off in Florida or California — others see the state’s productivity as a huge plus.
These are good problems to have — how to manage growth and attract and retain employees. And by all accounts, that’s really the heart of Connecticut’s woes, along with a dysfunctional state balance sheet.
Everyone talks about education, of course, and for John Traynor, executive vice president and chief investment officer at People’s United Wealth Management, the key is the community colleges, not Yale and its ilk.
“My town of Fairfield, we lost 30 percent of the 25- to 34-year-olds,” Traynor said, not giving the time frame. “Our kids graduate from college and the first thing they do is go to New York, Boston or San Francisco. … With Connecticut, if there’s a challenge we’ve got, it’s holding on to that seed corn.”
He added, “Massachusetts has figured out a way to harness this intellectual engine.”
Some mentioned taxes, but no one talked about the need to build up cities as magnets, an endless effort that doesn’t jive with eliminating the state income tax, if you’re following the race for governor. I looked out on this Hartford crowd listening to Fairfield executives, and I saw zero, or almost zero, faces under 30.
On the way back to the office, I called my 23-yearold daughter, 16 months out of college, with a new job — in Boston.