What an incredible time to be in business. 14-year-olds are rejecting $30 million buy outs for their start ups. Entrepreneurs are literally minting money by sending potatoes to friends. You can buy shares in a cow before it’s butchered into a delicious T-Bone. Donald Trump is on the road to being president. This is officially the weirdest time in human history to be alive.
One of the hottest new ways to make money, according to the Wall Street Journal, is by being a “millennial consultant.” Here’s the play: You use your connects with big businesses like like Google, Oracle, and Time Warner to advise companies how they should deal with millennials, who now make up the largest single group in the work force. According to the Wall Street Journal, some of the consultants that companies are hiring to advise on their millennial employees are making $20,000 per billable hour.
Millennial issues also have become a source of income for a host of self-anointed experts who say they can interpret young workers’ whims and aspirations—sometimes for as much as $20,000 an hour. Oracle, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s HBO have retained millennial advisers to stem turnover, market to young people and ensure their happiness at work.
In short:
Here’s another example from the Wall Street Journal about how much money people are making in the millennial consulting industry, which I can’t believe is even a real thing:
Lisa McLeod, a 52-year-old independent consultant, has addressedAlphabet Inc.’s Google and other companies about engaging young workers, and boasts a millennial of her own, her daughter Elizabeth, age 23. The elder Ms. McLeod typically charges up to $25,000 for a keynote address; booking the Atlanta mother-daughter pair costs $30,000.
The McLeods help companies set a “noble purpose” to strengthen young employees’ connection to their work, the elder Ms. McLeod said. For a concrete company seeking to boost employee engagement, she suggested that managers share stories of how constructing solid residential foundations helps people feel safe at home. She also advises clients to strip out numbers from internal presentations because, she says, millennials find stories more compelling than figures.
Go read the whole article over at the WSJ. It’s mind-boggling. That’s a lot of money to tell people that millennials want to be able to swipe Tinder during boring-ass status meetings and need occasional breaks from software coding projects to eat Fruit Roll-Ups and browse Reddit. Like, why am I sitting here grinding away at blog after blog when I could be getting $20,000 to tell a room full of 40+ year olds that when a millennial adds “AF” to a text it means “As Fuck”? Hey 45-year-old project managers! — If you want to know why everyone keeps saying “thirsty” in your office in reference to things that aren’t hydration, that’s going to cost you. This type of intel isn’t free. You can’t Google context, after all.
Getting rich by communicating common sense and truths about my generation. That’s the American dream right there.
Then again, who am I kidding? I’d probably blow all that dough in one night at Hakkasan in Vegas. That’s the true millennial thing to do, right?