IAM2326 – Speaker and Author Helps Organizations Retain and Keep Millennial Employees Engaged

Jeff Butler is a speaker, author, and passionate millennial who helps organizations improve their relationships with Millennial employees.

Jeff has worked with top companies like Amazon and Google, and his unique insights on millennials come from his personal experience as one, rather than just theoretical knowledge.

Jeff also started a consulting side to scale the business, where he trains others to provide consulting services to companies, which helps expand his reach.

He emphasizes reinvesting profits into the business rather than indulging in personal luxuries, building a frugal, focused, and sustainable business model.

Jeff recommends doing the little things right over time to build a business, rather than trying to create something fancy or complex from the start.

Website: Jeff Butler

LinkedIn: Jeff Butler

Previous Episode: iam194-speaker-and-author-helps-organizations-retain-and-keep-millennial-employees-engaged

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Transcription:

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Jeff Butler Teaser 00:00

So essentially how it works is that whenever you go to conferences, you or have meetings, annual meetings, they usually bring in speakers and those speakers are authors, people who can entertain the crowd, provide some information. So infotainment, basically, do you want to.

Intro 00:17

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:41

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jeff Butler of jeffjbutler.com. Jeff, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Jeff Butler 00:50

It's great to be here.

Gresham Harkless 00:51

It's great to have you. And what I wanted to do is just read a little bit more about Jeff so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing.

And Jeff Butler is a speaker, author and passionate millennial who helps organizations improve their relationships with Millennial employees.

You may have seen him on Forbes, USA Weekly or on the TED stage. A native Californian and raised in Silicon Valley, he graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in computer science.

During his time in college, he was training for the Olympics under three time Olympian Tour Gustafson.

But he left that pursuit because software engineering paid more. Unlike other experts on millennials, Jeff has been in the trenches of what it means to be a millennial and what it takes to retain and keep him engaged.

With Jeff's versatile background, he has addressed companies like Amazon and Google as well as thousands of professionals across North America. Jeff, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Jeff Butler 01:46

I guess I am. Let's do this.

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Gresham Harkless 01:48

Let's do it. And I appreciate you throwing me that lifeline. I knew I was going to trip over that name, but I appreciate. No worries.

But the first thing I wanted to hear, I know it touched on it a little bit, but I wanted to hear a little bit more about your CEO story. What led you start your business?

Jeff Butler 02:00

Yeah. So CEO story, I more see it as like you run a business, your last line of defense. And it really started when I first graduated from college.

So I had the golden handcuff job, software engineering. And as you probably would guess, UC Berkeley, it's ranked number two in the nation.

You walk out with a six figure salary and you're like, oh baby, I got it made things are nice, things are awesome.

But then I was there for about two weeks and I realized the guy next to me probably was earning 50k more than me, and he was 15 years older.

And I'm like, wait a minute, 15 years for 50k? I don't know if I want to go through that. That's not really worth it for me. This sounds like, I don't know, some people love it, some other people don't.

So I was like, ok, what can I do to run my own shop? And so at that time, I was 23 years old. At 24, I already had a company founded that was commercial real estate data business.

And about a year from there, I quit my day job. It was profitable. Not enough to pay the bills, but I thought belief would be the best thing. My parents both were Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, still are.

And they're like, Jeff, don't quit. You don't have enough revenue. And I'm like, no, mom and dad, I got this. I know what I'm doing.

So I quit. And about like, three months in doing that, I was like, wait a minute. This is just looking at data all day. This is boring. Not that I jumped from a lot of things because I was at that company for 18 months, but I was like, you know what? This isn't what I wanted to do.

So I had a little nest egg. I quit that, right? And I'm like, now jobless. I don't have any company whatsoever.

And I'm like, what the heck am I gonna do? So I started, I went down my dream list and one of them was speaking and I said, let me try that. So I spoke and do you know Toastmasters by any chance?

Gresham Harkless 03:37

Yes, absolutely.

Jeff Butler 03:38

I go into a Toastmaster, go in the front. I speak for one minute. I totally forget everything I'm going to say. Sit down. I was like, dude, that was amazing. I got to do this for a living.

Like, it was just boom. I could see myself doing this for the next 15 years. So I said, let me build a business around that I am.

So I went there for about several months, probably six to 12 months, I successfully evaporate all my savings, like, poof, gone. Went completely broke and had to go back to working as a software engineer.

So I'm probably the first person who you ever met who quit their job and had to go back. And so it was brutal. Got a lot of ego check on that.

And I stayed with it. Got on the TEDx in four months of speaking, ended up building a successful speaking business that now I started speaking corporate, professional speaking about a year ago, and it's been about anywhere from 50 to 70% growth each quarter.

It's just been rapid and it was already like six figures. But it's blowing up rapidly. And I'll go into this later in terms of the really crazy remote team that I built, because usually people for this type of business, it's a sole proprietorship.

You don't necessarily have a seven, eight person team for it. But I'm like, you know what, I want this to be a seven figure, strong business. Let's build the foundation now.

So let's just say my CEO's story consisted of me being very naive as a quote unquote millennial, trying to quit my job and live my dreams, but got knocked around a bit, but finally came out top, I guess four years later.

Gresham Harkless 05:03

That sounds awesome. And as a millennial who has done something similar, only when I took the leap of faith and quit my job, I landed on my Achilles tendon and it broke 30, 40 days after that, I got beat up a little bit too.

But like I've always learned, and I'm sure you can definitely say you just keep on going is the biggest thing.

Jeff Butler 05:19

Exactly, exactly. You just keep going, keep iterating on that, and the perseverance will hold itself through.

Gresham Harkless 05:25

There you go. Absolutely. And I know you touched on it a little bit, talking about, your business and how you're doing public speaking. Could you drill down a little bit deeper and tell us exactly what you do?

Jeff Butler 05:33

So essentially how it works is that whenever you go to conferences, you or have meetings, annual meetings, they usually bring in speakers, and those speakers are authors, people who can entertain the crowd, provide some information.

So infotainment, basically. And that's what I do. So you basically are hired for like an hour, anywhere from like one hour to eight, depending on what kind of stuff you're doing, it's usually about 45 to 90 minutes.

And you go in there and deliver a keynote and that's the main source of revenue that I have in my business right now.

Now it's great because it pays. When you first start out, you're charging, you know, 5Ks once you start getting professional level, and then you start breaking like the 10k, 15k mark 4:1 speech.

So it's a really good living. But then you get kind of caught up in, okay, this can get you to mid six figure high, six figure even seven figure level.

But it can't scale very well. Like what if you get sick and go to the hospital. How do you go past that? Well, there comes the consulting side.

And so what we're currently building right now is the consultant side of the business, which is I can duplicate myself, and someone then can go and who's trained, help consult a company behind the scenes. So those are some of the services that we provide.

Gresham Harkless 06:43

Awesome, awesome, awesome revenue.

Jeff Butler 06:44

Like business model kind of a thing.

Gresham Harkless 06:46

Yeah, absolutely. And I wanted to hear a little bit more about, like, you've been able to, obviously, it sounds like, position yourself.

So how have you been able to kind of do that as the expert, as the person that they want to hire, to be able to do these keynote speeches?

Jeff Butler 06:59

Yeah. So I saw a glaring problem in this space is that not a lot of people who are in their twenties are crazy enough to do what I do, because it's like, you're the youngest person there.

They're like, okay, what does this young buck have to say? And so what I realized is with millennial, millennials, talking about them is like, I'm actually a millennial.

There's a whole bunch of people out there who are like, here, I'm 50 years old. I'm going to tell you what millennials think. I'm like, no, no, no. I'm a millennial. I'm like, living through this right now. This is why it's happening.

And so that was the big, unique selling proposition on that front. So there was that, and then the second part was my background in terms of interview experience.

I've been in over 500 interviews. When you're our software engineer, it's constantly go through interviews, especially when you're straight out of college.

And I mean, I worked in about five or six different places. Most of them were internships, building up experience through college.

So having all that and walking in there, I'm. I was just out of the job industry, and I'm a millennial. Let me tell you how it is, right?

Gresham Harkless 07:53

And I think that's very powerful, like you said, because it kind of plays in your own trail. Because not only are you speaking to the people that everybody wants to know about millennials, like, how are they operating? What are they thinking? Things like that.

You're able to speak to that, but then you're also of that ilk, so to speak. So you're able to say this is actually the truth, because I know. Because it's actually me.

Jeff Butler 08:11

Right? Exactly.

Gresham Harkless 08:12

Awesome, awesome, awesome. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. And this could be your unique selling proposition, your differentiator. What feel kind of set you apart.

Jeff Butler 08:20

That's my secret sauce right there.

Gresham Harkless 08:22

Is it?

Jeff Butler 08:23

I saw it as that millennial side of things. But the way I like to see more secret sauce is that most businesses don't have a secret sauce.

It's that there's about, like a hundred attributes in a business, and they somehow get more of those higher than, say, their competitor, right?

So say, maybe their website looks better, their product has a little bit more value. The way that their, I guess, their sales team reached out was a little bit better.

Like, all those things start to add up over a period of time. So instead of me just sitting on my back and being, oh, I'm a millennial, I have this figured out.

This is a good enough value proposition. I'm like, no, keep on going back to the business. How can I make my website better?

How can I train my sales team better? How can we have better pr? Right? Keep doing all those things over and over, and eventually they'll start to have an exponential effect in terms of revenue.

Gresham Harkless 09:06

That makes perfect sense. And I feel like I've heard that at least from a financial terms. I don't know if that's the same thing, but definitely let me know in terms of building a moat.

So once you find your niche, you find what you do better than everything else, you start to grow out.

Like you said, start building a better website, start doing better PR campaign or something like that, all those things start to add up, and all of a sudden, no one can kind of defeat you just because you have so much more that is above the average. Right?

Jeff Butler 09:29

And that's one of the biggest challenges that a lot of entrepreneurs have is that, how can I get over to this point where I'm earning more money in my business? Like, it's not profitable, right?

And usually what happens is, if they get to that profitable area, there's another hurdle, which is how do you reinvest the money?

Do you put it back into the business or do you put it into your wallet? Because usually what happens is they've gone through so much struggle that they want to reward themselves.

Be like, oh, I gotta get some Louis Vuitton stuff for my girlfriend, because I haven't been spending much time with her or gotta get a new suit, because now I'm a profitable entrepreneur.

It's like, no, no, no, no, no. That goes back in. And you like, shut up. Keep your living expenses as low as possible, because you're gonna need that money later on.

So if you take that money, keep putting it back in, it starts to build up. Because if you have this very frugal, hungry state of mind and you keep taking those dollars and applying them really wisely, man, is that deadly.

Gresham Harkless 10:19

Yeah, absolutely. It's funny you say that. I just literally saw a video, I want to say yesterday. It was on LinkedIn and it was with Jeff Bezos and he was driving and doing.

The guy was doing an interview for CNN and he was like in a Honda Civic or something like that. He was at that time worth like $7 billion.

So the guy was like, what's with the Honda Civic? You're worth like $7 billion. That's true.

Jeff Butler 10:41

It's that mindset. Like people would think it's weird. Like I earned mid six figures and I run my bike places.

They're like, man, you don't have any money whatsoever. What are you doing riding that bike? Or man, your shoes are messed up. I'm like, yo, don't look at that, man, look at the bank account. That's what matters, man.

Gresham Harkless 10:56

Okay, exactly, exactly. No, I love that. And now I wanted to switch gears a little bit, Jeff, and ask you for what I call a CEO hack.

And I know we touched on it a little bit, but this is something that you feel like makes you more effective and efficient.

Jeff Butler 11:07

Yes, yes. So in my story I mentioned how my first speaking business, I failed. I wasn't able to produce revenue. Part of that was I was in the wrong space.

But more importantly is like I didn't know how to build systems and operations to sustain a strong business.

So a really good hack is if you look at your business, it's filled with activities and usually you want to do is start off with the sales. Part of it is that if you don't have sales, you're not going to grow.

So you look at what sort of activities I have to do every day that are in sales, collect emails, follow ups, proposals, and when you write something down, it's called a system of procedures.

Every single activity, write down how much time it takes and how much does it emotionally drain you.

Then once you have that all written out, massive clarity. What you do is you take the most time intensive ones that are easiest per se, and then you hire someone for that position.

That is you go for someone like remotely. Like let's say it's email collection, right? And you have a direct emailing campaign.

You hire someone off of Upwork or OnlineJobPh someplace where you can say, okay, 100 emails, $25, right? Little liability there. Then someone comes in and starts doing that, great.

You go up to the next level activity, find someone for that, get someone doing that too. And then eventually you have a group and it's like that could be a full time hire.

And so what I did in my business is I started very small and I'm like, oh my gosh. My business partner was helping me with this and I'm like, I don't know if I can manage two people.

And I was like freaking out over that, like what do I do? And he's like, no, no, no, just you do X, Y and Z. So he walked me through and eventually the team grew enough.

So I had a manager. So any questions didn't go through me, they went through her. And I kind of just stepped back and the whole machine started to run.

And now it's like it built that sort of structure in place. And so for CEOs, they usually, they Garyvee it.

They're like, I have to do everything, stay up later, do this crazy stuff. It's like, no, no, no, break it down, look at the activities, see what you can do and maximize that dollar value.

Gresham Harkless 12:57

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And it's funny, like the more you start to look at businesses, you realize they're made up of systems.

And if you can figure out exactly what those systems are, those processes are and you're able delegate them to somebody else or coach somebody else in order to do that or to think of a better way, then often you can be able to scale your business. So I love that you've been able to do that.

Jeff Butler 13:16

Yeah. And a couple of hacks here because I feel like that was very high level. Some lower things are when you hire someone for short jobs, make it performance based and hourly. That's a big mistake that people make.

So they would say, hey, I'm going to hire someone for $4 an hour. They hire them weekend. They basically paid 100 bucks. They haven't gotten any results. That happens so frequently. Make it tangible.

So you time yourself. How long does it take you to accomplish this? See what the market rate rate is for whoever you're hiring, then charge that for the project.

Now you have little liability. They don't get it done, you don't pay them money. Right. Very simple.

Gresham Harkless 13:49

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Jeff Butler 13:59

Oh, it's too much. I would say the biggest thing would be perseverance is first and foremost. That pops into my mind.

The other one is if something in your business really makes you uncomfortable, figure out how to compensate in some way for it.

So for me, I have a huge hard time with. I'm very introverted and I. Even though I do professional speaking and I don't like doing cold calls or anything like that or emails and stuff, I thought, oh, I just got to tough it out and listen to my Les Brown tapes and go crazy on it.

But no, no, no. You can find someone who can handle that a lot easier than you can. There's people out there who can do your job and actually love it.

My aunt loves to walk into stores, knock on doors and try and sell things. I think she's crazy, but it works for her.

So thinking about, hey, you can comp for those weaknesses, but you have to be a strong enough leader to do so.

Gresham Harkless 14:47

Yeah, that makes sense. And you gotta be the leader to be able to recognize those and that and other people to understand what their gifts are. So how that comes together and makes your team.

Jeff Butler 14:54

Exactly.

Gresham Harkless 14:55

Awesome, awesome, awesome. And this brings me to my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO.

We're hoping to have different quote unquote CEOs on the show. But, Jeff, I wanted to ask you, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Jeff Butler 15:05

Last line of defense. In a company, it's also the person who sets the vision. I think too often people, when they first have this title CEO, they think it's this big grandiose thing.

Put it on my business card. I'm a cool person, but honestly, like, you're the person who gets the biggest problems and you have to own it.

No one else is there to back you up. I'm sure your team's there, but you have to handle every single fire if it's big enough. So it's a big responsibility.

Gresham Harkless 15:26

Jeff, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and our listeners know and then also how best they can get a hold of you.

Jeff Butler 15:35

I guess if it's for people who are looking to just start something off or maybe they're initially growing, like they're like the negative six figure level, basically say you don't have to be fancy, like create the next Facebook app.

To have a big business, you just have to do those little things right a little bit better and those will grow enough over time where you'll be able to separate yourself.

Gresham Harkless 15:57

Absolutely. And then people that want to reach out to you to book you for speaking or hear more about you. What's the best thing?

Jeff Butler 16:02

Website's great. Jeffjbutler.com don't forget the J because jeffbutler.com is like really mad at me now because everyone sends him emails and he's like, yo, change your domain. I'm like, no, I'll buy it from you.

Gresham Harkless 16:15

Absolutely. Well, we'll make sure we'll put the J edit. We'll have that in our show notes as well so that jeffbutler.com will get angry as well.

But Jeff, I truly appreciate you and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Jeff Butler 16:25

All right, you too, man.

Outro  16:26

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books and habits to level up your business at CEOhacks co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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