Is it possible for experienced boomers to re-enter the workforce successfully after owning a business? Discover how Mark Weber did just that!

In this episode we welcome back Mark Weber, a seasoned boomer who transitioned from leadership roles to becoming an individual contributor. Mark shares his unique journey, offering valuable insights into generational dynamics in the workforce, the importance of knowledge transfer, and the challenges older generations face when seeking new roles.

Highlights:

Generational Urgency: Mark reveals that different generations have varied senses of urgency when it comes to work tasks. While older generations thrive on a high-strung approach, millennials and Gen Z often manage tasks with a more relaxed attitude.

Struggles of Overqualification: Despite extensive experience, Mark experienced significant hurdles in finding employment due to being "overqualified." His story sheds light on the flawed perceptions hiring managers have about seasoned professionals.

Adapting to New Roles: Transitioning from a leadership role to an individual contributor wasn't easy for Mark. He discusses the challenges of letting go of control and adjusting to taking direction from younger colleagues.

Networking and Personal Connections:Mark highlights the power of networking and personal connections over traditional job applications. His eventual job offer came from a casual conversation on a golf course.

Advice for Employers: Mark urges young entrepreneurs and business owners to reconsider the untapped potential of experienced workers. He emphasizes that older employees bring a wealth of knowledge and a genuine desire to contribute without aspiring for high-ranking positions.

YouTube Ventures: Beyond his professional life, Mark shares his passion for cooking and his unique "Bigfoot Grandpa" YouTube channel, showing that pursuing personal interests can provide balance and joy even amid career challenges.

What other topics would you like for us to discuss? Please email either Brad or Steve with your ideas. 

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Welcome to Blue Collar B's, a podcast that busts the popular myth that we can't find good people, highlighting how the different generations of today, the boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z, are redefining work so that the industrial revolution that started in the US stays in the US.

The Blue Collar B's podcast helps blue collar business owners like you build a business that'll thrive for decades to come by turning that Blue collar B's into some blue collar business solution.

In this episode, you're going to learn that there's an apparent sense of urgency between different generations, that there is a workforce available out there and there's a difference between overqualified and willing to transfer knowledge, and that networking should never quit.

Our guest today is Mark Weber, a returning boomer to the show. Mark has transitioned from a leader to individual contributor and welcomes the change and new learning opportunities. We hope you enjoy the show. Welcome back to the show. Brad Hurda. How are you doing, my friend?

I am absolutely fantastic after a wonderful NFL weekend of watching the Detroit Lions win their first playoff game since 1991. I think it was. Wow, whatever.

That was very exciting to see coming from the guy out of Milwaukee and the guy from Detroit didn't watch it.

Well, you know, it's okay. I'm a fan and you're just not. It's okay.

Uh huh. They're just not my team. But it was a good game, though. It definitely was a good game for everybody.

And our guest was probably very elated. To watch the Cowboys get smacked by the packers also is a hunch. Just guessing.

I would say that was a very good game as well for at least one of us.

Awesome. So, Brad, who do we have on the show today?

So we got. Boomer got back, so to, to speak. So, mister Mark Weber, a past guest, is a returning guest here to the Blue collar B's podcast as he has changed his life direction from an employment perspective and can offer our leaders and our current audience a perspective from a boomers point of view as to how much value there is to having boomers enter the workforce as individual contributors versus having to be in charge of everything, etcetera, training in the teaching. So, Mister Mark Weber, welcome back to the Blue Collar B's podcast.

Thank you, gentlemen. Appreciate the opportunity to be back.

Gentlemen, where'd you.

Wow.

You fucking lose how to talk to us or what?

Gentlemen, raise my glass to that.

Well, I was using that term loosely, so.

Okay. Just want to make sure.

Right. So just, just a refresher, Mark, before I forget, to ask. And Brad reminds me, which generation do you fall into?

Well, I am at the very tail end of the boomers, and so that's where I reside. But like I said, the last time I was on the show, I kind of identify with any generation. Just like to be surrounded by good people.

Right? And good people are what matters. And I guess so. You know, the main reason we asked you back to the show, because last time we talked to you, you were in a leadership role. You had done a bunch of hiring of some young gen zs and bringing them into the trade world and creating an environment where that was a positive opportunity. You have since taken on a retirement type opportunity early and then found something else to do through working with your hands and leveraging your background in the world prior, and now you're out fixing shit. So what's. What got you into that I gotta go out and fix things again mode versus just saying, hey, go push carts at Walmart.

Well, I mean, I think interesting enough is it's not as easy to just get that job to go push carts at Walmart as one would think. When you send out a resume, you know, that lists your background, you're overlooked pretty quickly for jobs that don't fit, let's say, your skill levels, meaning I am way overqualified for so many different opportunities. I probably applied at 15 to 20 different places. Every resume I sent out, I put a little note in there, said, yes, I know that I am probably overskilled for this job. However, if you would spend ten minutes talking with me, you would understand more about me and what it is I would like to accomplish. And that just didn't work. I mean, literally, you read the news, you listen to the news, and you go, well, this country has got no employees. However, here I am and nobody wants to talk to me and hire me.

So it was really kind of a confusing period of time for me.

Thank you for sharing that, because it is bullshit that we don't want to take advantage of the skills that exist. Now, the good part is you are very conscious of the fact that you outskill the role that's there. And my assumption is that you also have the expectation that the wages commensurate with the role, not commensurate with the experience potentially as well. Is that fair or not fair?

Well, that's 100% fair. I knew that going into a lower role, I was not going to be paid. I was paid in my prior management roles. I just want to be paid what was fair and reasonable that somebody could make a living on cool.

How has the going back into that individual contributor role from the guy that was in charge of everything for a long period of time and controlled every bit of minutiae. And Mark and I go back a few years, so we've gotten a chance to know each other. And Mark likes control. Mark likes things in a certain way. Mark's a very meticulous kind of guy. How is letting go of some of that been for you to just be the individual contributor, follow the process and just go do your job?

So the best part about that is I'm not laying awake at 06:00 in the morning going, who isn't calling in today? Or who's calling in today? Who isn't going to show up. So it's pretty easy to let go when I don't have to make any of those decisions. So you have workloads scheduled, you have appointments scheduled, and now your whole day gets completely turned over the minute you wake up. And not having any of that is a pretty amazing thing to just go, all right, my job is to, here's my list of things to do. I'm going to attempt to go and do those things. Certainly there'll be things out of my control. Customers aren't prepared for you, you know, things along that line. But at the end of the day, those aren't my decisions to make.

They've made those decisions where, you know, being in that leadership role in every day, my whole day was about making those decisions. So I'm in a really happy place right now.

Excellent. So talk to us a little bit about that journey of the type of people you're now interfacing with and working with, as you know, coming, coming back into the workforce as an individual contributor?

Well, I think, you know, as Brad said earlier, a lot of what I had done over the past couple of years was to bring Gen Z into blue collar. A lot of that helped me think through that was based upon what you guys talked about in all of your podcasts, and we provided value.

Hang on.

Well, Steve did. Steven did. So the interesting thing is it's kind of the opposite direction, meaning now I'm doing more work for Gen Z in millennials. So, you know, a lot of the places that I'm going to work on equipment or interfacing with, they're the ones driving it. So I'm more of the doer and being instructed and led by them.

And how's that transition of taking direction going when your knowledge and experience may be able to jump you ahead of the line? Because of wisdom and experience compared to those you're taking direction from.

So overall, I think it's going pretty well. I mean, there are moments in time where I just kind of roll my eyes and shake my head and, you know, to save myself. Okay, well, you have to remember who you are, what it is you're here for. Right. One of the guys that I've been shadowing is a good friend of mine, and we've been together for 35 plus years. We've known each other. And I'll walk into one of these shops, and then all of a sudden I'm trying to compare that to how I ran my shop and how things were there. And he just looks at me and he says, let it go.

Let it go.

I have to step back. And I'd have, you know, all the time running through, my head's going, well, I wouldn't do that that way, and I wouldn't do that that way. And, yeah, I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be sitting over there. That would be here. But it's not mine to deal with, so I have to just let it go and just concentrate on what I'm there to do, which is take care of that customer's needs. And as long as I do that, everything will be fine. And I just tease them all the time when we get out of those shops because I go, well, you know, I'm going to make a comment to you. I mean, you can do that over.

You can do that over coffee and a donut. You just can't do it in the building, right?

Correct. I've never, I won't say anything in front of a customer or anything along those lines, but, I mean, I have to process those thoughts and go, right. You know, hey, this isn't mine to deal with. You know, my job is to do what I've been asked to do instead of having to always give direction. So it's been interesting how so with.

Those younger potential customers that you're now interfacing with, how have they reacted? When you walk in the door or you're the guy coming in to support their need, are they reacting in a. Oh, good, this should be ten minutes and we'll be up and running. Or, oh, they sent the guy that, you know, looks like he should not be in a technology or in a fix this role.

I haven't run into anything like that. Good. I. Yeah, I think, like, when I, when these people, when I had my business and these people were coming in to fix these things, I had this incredible amount of urgency to everything. I would say the difference that I see is I feel like they have less urgency to get things fixed. Interesting. It's a little bit of a different pace if you're dealing with, to me, like a boomer or Gen X owner, they seem to be a little more high strung about things and a little more worked up. And I feel like the millennial and the Gen Z take it.

Okay, well, you know, we're going to have to worsen parts. I can't get this fixed right now. They just seem to handle. I feel like it's. It's less urgent to them.

Okay, is it? Is it is less urgent, but does the importance change?

No, I don't think so. Because, you know, they all have tasks that they need to accomplish. So, you know, so let me ask.

You this question, right. So when you go on that whole quadrant of urgent and important and prioritization and all those other things. Right. All those fun things, do you think that there might. That there's a shift in the understanding of the. Yes, it's important, but the urgency is out of control. So therefore, let's just make it keep it important, and let's not really burn down the house because we can't control it. It's out of our control.

Yeah, probably kind of falls into that. I mean, I. I don't know, maybe they're less emotional about. I'm not sure how to necessarily explain it.

Okay. But that's an interesting, that's an interesting observation. Something maybe we can do another show on at some point to follow up on that urgency.

I'll kind of give you another example that maybe ties to this a little bit. So if I think back to my shop, you know, everybody was doing something and everybody was busy, and things were to constantly moving. And some of these places I walk into, they're having conversations, and it's not intense, and it's just not moving at the feverish pace. And I don't know if that's generational or if it's just a different methodology of managing things.

Okay, that's interesting, right?

It's an interesting concept because some of the millennial nurse that I work with, they tend to have more Gen Z characteristics, but they are older millennials, more in the zillennial category, and they would. Everything is extremely urgent. It's like almost anything that comes up, they want it handled almost immediately. So that's a very interesting and enlightening, actually point that you're bringing up is. But I also see it as very true. Is some millennial Gen Z's owners tend to take things in a less urgent fashion. So knowing where you've been and the things that you've learned along the way and now back into the individual contributor role, what would you say is something kind of. I would say either ask is surprising or kind of, like, refreshing that you've learned from millennial and Gen Z owners.

Interesting. Can put me on the spot on that one.

Not so easy, is it?

No, no.

Watch what happens when I drink more.

Yeah. Great. I mean, honestly, I'm not.

Probably the best question Steve's ever asked on this show.

He had to ask it of me. Thanks, bud. Appreciate it. Oh, I honestly don't know that I have an answer to that, and that's fine.

I don't know, and that's cool. We all experience different things along the way, and sometimes it's that perspective that we have as the Gen X boomers. We have a certain Persona that we have when we've owned our business. And it's interesting when I talk to some of my former colleagues that are in that older Gen X Boomer category that have went back into the individual contributor role, and I do ask them that similar question, and they both. Well, those that I've asked have kind of had the same response, and they're like, it's. It's a reflection question because how they do things is different, or how you would do things is completely different than how they're doing things today.

Well, I think I would send that back to what I kind of talked about earlier, where sometimes I have to just keep my mouth shut in there, just do what I'm there to do. Right. And, you know, because I may or I may disagree with, you know, how they go about things. But again, it's really not my issue at that point. My interactions with everybody I've interacted with so far has been really, really good.

Right.

Cool.

And that's cool.

Yeah. And we had a guest that we recorded and come out later, Stacia Hobson, who we had, and she told us about her diversity of her workforce, and she's pretty much split pretty equally across. And then she. She gave us the post on LinkedIn going, hey, each previous generation dislikes the next immunity. They're immature, responsibly, have all these other opinions. And she goes, what she realized from talking on the show was everybody's got their own strengths from a generational perspective, and they got their own thing. And you're in a unique position here, Mark, to share with us, because there aren't many folks like you that are doing what you're doing, they've gotten either so frustrated and pissed off, they say, screw it, I'll take my early retirement and I'll figure it out 25 years from now and be pissed that I took it early and whatever it might look like. But I guess the larger message we want our audience to understand is that the struggle you had to find a job, find employment with the knowledge and wisdom for just leaders not willing to take the chance to find out why, to even make the phone call, to have the question.

That, to me, is the most mind boggling part.

I was absolutely blown away that you could send out resumes in a world where nobody can find any help and literally get no response. I would not have expected that at all.

We see your shirt, Bigfoot grandpa there. So we're going to have a little fun here for the last few minutes, Mark. So talk to us about your YouTube channel.

You mean my YouTube channel that's just kind of sitting there doing nothing because I'm back in the workforce? Yeah, that one.

Just talk to us about your Bigfoot grandpa grilling thing. Just talk to us about that.

Well, so one day, a couple of my grandsons, my two grandsons were talking to me, and they were talking about how they wanted to start a YouTube channel. And their mother was sitting there and she looked at them and said, absolutely.

Not, mother beating your daughter?

Yes, my daughter. So I looked at my two grandsons, said, okay, I will. So I had recently bought a Blackstone griddle and decided, you know, all right, well, I love to cook. So we're going to start doing some videos on Blackstone cooking. And so we created the channel. It's Bigfoot Grandpa. I'm a big Bigfoot enthusiast. I have a full wrap on the back of my truck.

That is Bigfoot laying down with a raccoon in front of them. And I have stickers on the side that say that my ram 2500 is the Sasquatch edition. So when we camp, I have a about a three foot high Bigfoot that sits in front of our camper with all sorts of signs and stuff. So that's where the Bigfoot grandpa came from. And we just started doing videos on cooking. Did some stuff when we were up in the. Up last summer. I was supposed to winter camp last weekend, and I was going to do one for that.

But when that snow came in and those minus temperatures.

Do that in the hotel, we'll go. We'll go camping.

Right, right, exactly. So, yeah, that's kind of where that's kind of where it all came from. Doing the YouTube stuff is kind of fun, but it's a pretty big commitment. You want to keep that channel going. I have a friend who has done a lot of hiking, and so he has a YouTube channel, and every time he's on hikes, he does, you know, daily or a couple of day posts. And, I mean, just the amount of effort that goes into it is a lot. So that's why it's just kind of sitting there. But I imagine down the road there'll be more Bigfoot grandpa videos.

I'm looking forward to it because I enjoy, I enjoy them. I enjoy seeing your antics.

Let's say.

That's awesome.

So, Mark, as the boomer entering the workforce, re entering the workforce as an individual contributor, what advice would you give to folks like you that have knowledge, have wisdom, and want to be part of something? What advice would you give to them to make it happen, get it done, so that they can feel that sense of purpose and commitment and belonging versus just taking in the shorts?

Well, I think that the solution I fall into this, at least from my perspective, was you cant just jump onto indeed, and just pump out a whole bunch of applications and stuff out there. And where I ended up being successful with getting a job that I feel fits me really pretty well is just talking to friends and family. And, you know, in doing that, that's where I made the connection. I was literally golfing with my friend and telling him, you know, my frustrations with not being able to find a job that made sense to me. And he's like, well, dude, we're, we're hiring right now. And you know what? You'd be perfect for this job. And so that's kind of how it happened for me. I also think, you know, the good Lord kind of just directs us down some of these paths as well.

You know, I've always been a guy that says if it's right, it's right. And if you force things, it never works out. So, you know, sometimes I just wasn't meant to have those jobs, and this was the job I was meant to have. So, you know, I mean, okay.

And to the younger owners and leaders of organizations that say we can't find good people, what bit of advice would you give them to take the moment to look at applications and resumes from guys of your age and genre?

Well, you know, what? If I was in that hiring position and, you know, I was reading those resumes, which I have been in the past, I didn't discount anything you know, I mean, just, just read through it and, you know, especially when somebody attaches kind of a note to it that just gives you a heads up that, hey, yeah, I know this isn't necessarily, but can we at least have a conversation? So I, you know, I guess I would have just say, especially to young entrepreneurs and stuff, most old guys have a lot of knowledge and, you know, even though I'm not an expert at maybe your industry, I've been in business a long time, and there's a lot I can offer you to help. I don't want to be a leader in your company necessarily. I don't want to be the boss. I'm not looking for advancement. You know what? I want to help. I want to take the things that I've learned through my life, be able to share them off with people and say, you know, hey, you run into this situation, I'd love to give you two cent worth of information. You choose to use it, great. If not, no big deal.

But, you know, just because we've spent a lifetime, you know, being the boss, being in charge, building things, sometimes we like to just keep our minds occupied and just do something where, you know what, we don't have all this stress. It is fun, but yet I'm challenged every day now, which is awesome.

That's very cool. I really do appreciate you coming on and rejoining us here on the podcast and on the show to share that experience and that knowledge. People want to reach, get a hold of you. They can find you on your Bigfoot grandpa YouTube channel and get ahold of you there.

Yes.

Or they could just send me, I have a. A little. I was going to do some consulting before this, so, I mean, I can just take an email@webmanconsultingmail.com. dot. Okay. You can reach out to me through LinkedIn as well.

All right, awesome. Because getting people to understand, not just that, it's not just Gen Z that can add value to your business. You got to have the other side of it as well so you can create the knowledge transfer in some way, shape or form. So, Mark, we really do appreciate you coming on again to share this experience and share with us what you did and how you're doing it. And thanks for sharing the YouTube channel as well.

Well, thank you. I appreciate it, guys.

Yeah, thanks, Mark.

Thanks.

Yep.

Thank you for listening to Blue Collar B's, brought to you by vision for business solutions and professional business Coaching, Inc. If you'd like to learn more on today's topic, just reach out to Steve Doyle or myself, Brad Hurda. Please like share, rate and review this show as feedback is the only way we can get better. Let's keep blue collar businesses strong for generations to come.