Popular Articles

Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

read more
by Beth Ewen
June-July 2016

Related Article

Space

Read more

GENERATION juncture

 

What generation gap?

At SkyWater Search Partners, an executive search firm founded in 2013, they’re aiming to close the divide between millennials all the way up to the Greatest Generation, and counseling clients how to do the same. Co-founders Kurt Rakos, Tony Fornetti and Paul Beard tell how they’re learning to be  flexible.

Upsize: Describe your company as it stands today.

Kurt Rakos, SkyWater: We are a 30-person search firm placing professionals in sales, IT, engineering, digital market- ing. We began on January 1 of 2013, and last year posted $5.8 million in revenue.

Upsize: You’ve all been in search for years. What has changed?

Kurt: Everything. How we communicate has changed a lot.

Tony Fornetti, SkyWater: Especially texting. Our staff will only communicate with text. I’ve done search for 13 years. In the past it was always the phone and now it’s emails, texts and the advent of LinkedIn.

Kurt: Your ability to have confidence in your writing and being creative is the most valuable skill.

Paul Beard, SkyWater Search: Oral skills 20 years ago out- weighed written skills, and now it’s flip-flopped.

Upsize: A liberal arts major like me loves to hear that!

Tony: The likelihood of having anyone pick up the phone— you just can’t call someone anymore.

Upsize: How old are you?

Paul: Kurt is 54, Tony is 42 and I’m 49. Older people want to use the phone while younger employees don’t want to.

Tony: We actually used to manage productivity by daily call logs. We haven’t generated that report for three years now because it’s useless.

Upsize: It sounds like you’ve evolved to this point today. How did you get there?

Kurt: It took us a while to figure that out. I’ll talk about one of our highest producers ever. Five years ago, we’d sit in leader- ship meetings and this person would make only three calls a day.

Tony: Yet he was having more success doing it the way he was doing it. We evolved by hiring people like him.

Paul: One of the biggest game changers is the value of a firm’s database was at a premium. Now it’s LinkedIn and everyone has access to it.

Kurt: The changes we’ve seen are driven by technology. The millennials come in with more technology skills than the veterans. They work differently. So we used to manage to 5:00. Now it’s 24/7.

Paul: My daughter and I even have that problem. I want to talk to her on the phone, and she says don’t call me. She wants to text.

Kurt: It was 10 years of seeing, we were the old-school thinking of how you do it.

Upsize: Tell me about the older generations, though. They have their strengths, too.

Paul: The three of us do the senior level search. To contrast, on the senior-ranking searches it is all done by the phone.

The more senior workforce, where the low end is 45 years old, and older tends to communicate by phone.

Upsize: What is your age range here?

Kurt: We start at 20, and Mike Peters is 74. He just retired at age 74.

Paul: Mike had excellent client service skills. Mike was really good at servicing clients.

Upsize: What are some things you do to bridge the generations?

Kurt: Everything we do is a group. For example, a lot of organizations like this would have a presidents’ club. We decided to have more spontaneous group outings that included everyone. We thought about it as a participation aspect. If we had an exclusive presidents club, 80 percent of the staff would stay behind. That doesn’t seem right.

Paul: It’s an inclusive culture.

Tony: We made it less us vs. them. They get recognition but we don’t create separation. It didn’t seem right that 70 percent of our employees, who were our future, were staying behind. Upsize: Many people, especially baby boomers, complain about managing millennials. What insights do you have about that?

Kurt: One of the things I’ve come to realize is they want to be part of something, not just their job. I always had pride in my work, but I think the image of how we’re viewed as a company is important to millennials. They really are into how the company is viewed from the outside. Also, I don’t think we wake up every day thinking about this, but they want recognition and feedback.

Tony: A key difference is millennials are much less structured than we were—how we acted when we were at work; what

we would wear to work. This has changed significantly in our office in the last 24 months. We’ve come to the point that we’re open to what our audience wants.

Kurt: They’re changing us.

Tony: The idea of someone coming to work at 9 a.m, is dumbfounding to me.

Upsize: You mean dumbfounding in a bad way—that it’s so late.

Tony: Yes, but I’m not talking to a candidate at 11 p.m. either, and they are.

Paul: Today I got here at 6, Tony got here at 6:30 and Kurt at 7:15. But by contrast, our top producer in the firm took 70 days off last year.

Kurt: I think our mentality is still 90 percent of what we do is here, in the office. There is no line for them. These guys don’t think anything of working whenever.

Paul: Take the three of us. After about 8:00 at night you don’t want to call someone. But the millennials can text to the wee hours of the morning.

Upsize: And their candidates are probably texting back. I’m sure you have clients all the time wanting to know how to better work with millennials so they don’t drive other generations crazy, and vice versa. What advice do you give?

Paul: First you have to accept they’re different.  The younger crowd, they need to understand what’s expected. Hold them to the standards and cut them loose.

Tony: One of the things is not to over-think it. We just did this new addition in our office. There are 10 people in an open area with no cubicles. Mike Peters, he is 74 years old, the Greatest Generation, he went over there and worked over there.

Upsize: So he really enjoyed that space, vs. your more tradtional space with cubicles and such. Kurt, what’s your advice?

Kurt: Just listening and understanding and trying things. You can’t argue their success. Like the person who took 70 days off last year and his revenue numbers were never before met in the history of this company.

Tony: We have the advantage of being a small firm; it’s harder with a 10,000-plus employee firm. But for smaller firms, we don’t write as many policies that are everything for everybody. We have flexibility.

Paul: We’ve been forced to be more consultative to the clients and help them with the differences in the millennials, which is the largest workforce now.

Upsize: Your firm used to be known as McKinley, but you separated from the founders and started SkyWater. They started their own firm. At the time McKinley was up to more than $14 million in revenue. Is it a drag to start over?

Tony: We started over, yes, but we started with 17 people, we had capital. Not that it was easy, but we did a pretty good job of writing the separation agreement so it worked out.

Kurt: What happened in the split, it’s kind of like you’re going through a divorce. But even in the first months after we started, someone nominated us for a best places to work award and we won. There was a passion and commitment that evolved out of the split and a fresh start.

Upsize: What’s one lesson you’ve learned, about operating a high-growth company?

Paul: Be flexible.

Kurt: Listen to people and give them a chance. We’re trying things, and it doesn’t have to be a black-and-white policy. If you have the right people, it doesn’t matter what their age is.

Paul: Get outside of your comfort zone. I wore a suit for 22 years.

Upsize: And now it’s a dress shirt and slacks look for you.

Tony: Kurt said it well, the listening side. They’re 22 years old and what they say doesn’t matter? Absolutely not. They have things to say. They’re the majority of our employees. They’re our company.

Paul: Respect the difference of opinions. There’s not a single silver bullet approach.

 

[contact]

Paul Beard, Tony Fornetti and Kurt Rakos are partners at SkyWater Search, an executive search firm in the Twin Cities founded in 2013: 952.767.9000; krakos@skywa- tersearch.com; www.skywatersearch.com.

 

 

Interview by BETH EWEN

Photographs by jonathan hankin