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The Conference Swag Everyone Wants! #HRTechConf

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I was on my way out to The HR Technology Conference this week listening to Laurie Ruettimann’s Let’s Fix Work podcast she did with William Tincup (Two close friends of mine that are smart and know the industry at another level).

For a long time, Laurie would go to conferences and she has this weird fascination with conference swag. She would go collect stuff from booths, go back to her room and do a video about what she liked and didn’t like. They were great vids.

So, on this pod, Laurie continues her fascination with swag and asks William what his favorite swag for a conference is and his answer was awesome. William said the best swag is “something you like”. Basically, get stuff you like, because if you have it left over, it’s yours, so get stuff you enjoy.

I love that. Probably because that’s how I buy swag. I have DisruptHR Detroit coming up next week and I’m giving away a Kate Spade bag. My wife loves Kate Spade bags, she probably has a dozen. If she likes them, I know others will, or if they don’t, I just got my wife something she’ll love!

Some of the favorite swag I’ve gotten in the past:

  • JBL Flip 3 Bluetooth speaker from Halogen (now Saba). I still use it today. Fits perfectly in a golf cart drink holder and it’s waterproof, and it sounds amazing.
  • Northface full over jacket from the now-defunct Elevated Careers. Love the jacket and still wear it.
  • Ray-Ban sunglasses from CareerBuilder and Paycor. Great sunglasses, still wear them, my sons steal them (I know it’s great swag when my sons try to steal it!).
  • Beats Headphones by Dre from three different vendors including CareerBuilder (CB always gives the best swag!), and two others that preferred not to be named because they didn’t give the same gift to all the influencers (turns out this is common). All three sons have swag Beats, and I’m a good Dad!
  •  Bottles of Gin – too many vendors to name! Turns out I like good Gin and once the word gets out, it becomes a perfect swag gift!
  • Shinola notebook from Quicken Loans. Shinola is a native Detroit company and QL’s headquarters are in downtown Detroit, and I love the local connection!
  • Herschel Backpack from CareerBuilder. Historically, the CB marketing team has killed swag! They are young, fashionable and want to bring stuff that is currently hot. It costs a bit more, but it gets remembered. (Irina – take note as the new CEO – you’ve got swag goals to live up to!)

All of this goes back to William’s point, the stuff I love as swag is stuff I would buy for myself. I wouldn’t buy myself a $1.23 pen. William also said the key to great swag is scarcity. “Oh, I want some of those Beats!” Yeah, well see, those Beats are for buyers, do you want a demo? Bam!

My recommendation with swag? Less is more. Take your $1,000 budget and don’t buy 1,000 pens. Buy 10 of something really great and give away ten great things that will make a buzz on the conference floor. Buy 5 Kate Spade bags and give one away every four hours and you must be present at the booth to win. People will show up, there will be buzz, and you’ll get more than a $1,000 worth of marketing.

I have a theory that you could also giveaway puppies and would always win any show you go to. The problem is it’s hard to travel with a barrel of puppies. It could get messy. But everyone wants a puppy!

What’s the best swag you’ve ever gotten?

(BTW – All Gin swag can be sent to me directly at 3451 Dunckel Rd, Suite 200, Lansing, MI 48911)

Career Confessions from Gen Z: 20 Ways to Work Better with Gen Z!

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Tuesday is one of my favorite days of the year: my birthday! Ever since I was little, I had trouble falling asleep the night before my birthday because I was so excited, and I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it isn’t any different this year. This year is a pretty big transition as I move on from my teenagers year and enter my third decade on this planet.

Pretty cool, pretty terrifying.

So, in honor of my 20 years, I compiled a list of 20 tips and tricks in order to work best with your Gen Z friends, employees, co-workers, nieces/nephews, or whoever else.

  1. Try to limit/reduce your questions about our days/events etc. to as few as possible, especially early in the morning or late at night.
  2. Talk to us as little as possible in the morning.
  3. Be encouraging.
  4. Call us on the phone instead of having us call you. (Recruiters – are you hearing this!?)
  5. Try to accommodate our insomnia by allowing later wake-up times/work times.
  6. Provide caffeine – for free! (good general rule for all people)
  7. Be open to any ideas, no matter how wacky they may be.
  8. Provide non-traditional spaces to get work done.
  9. Be patient.
  10. Bring food whenever a really hard/annoying task comes up that needs to be done.
  11. Don’t be afraid to push us.
  12. Provide guidance without completing the job for them.
  13. When we have headphones on, it most likely means that we are focused/don’t want to be talked to.
  14. Encourage activities that limit our constant phone use.
  15. Give us space.
  16. Acknowledge a job well done, but criticize when necessary.
  17. Don’t stalk their social media profiles (at least not all the time 🙂
  18. Embrace the youthful spirit as much as possible.
  19. Try to give as much detail because although we may have questions, we’re probably too stubborn/scared to ask them.
  20. If you just can’t with the hormone filled moments of rage, step away, roll your eyes, and try to move on. Chances are that’s exactly how’d we react too.

Young people are weird. But, we all were young and weird once. So, try and take that weird and turn it into something awesome.

That’s what I’m going to try and do in this new chapter.  Here’s to the next 20.

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a Gen Z? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Career Confessions of Gen Z: On Instagram, It’s not about likes, It’s about engagement

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If you know me, you know I really like social media. I’m a big fan of almost all platforms, but I definitely have my favorites. I like Snapchat for communicating, Twitter for entertainment, and Instagram to maintain an active profile. Everyone seems to have one or two platforms that they excel at, and Instagram is mine. My family always laughs when I ask them to get “candid” pictures for me in front of scenic backgrounds or cool landscapes, but I know what’s going to get the likes!

Last week, my Dad and I were talking about what the best follower to like ratio on Instagram is and it got me thinking. I know that a good ratio for me is on my personal account (about 30%), but it sparked my curiosity. Should accounts with tens of thousands of followers have a lower ratio of likes than accounts with only a few thousand? Should personal accounts have higher ratios than brand accounts? What is a “good ratio”? I conducted some research of my own to answer these questions.

I wanted to start out by looking at the difference between personal and brand accounts. The top 2 followed people on Instagram are Selena Gomez (140 million followers) and Cristiano Ronaldo (139 million followers). I looked at their last 10 posts and calculated that between 4-5% of their followers like each post.

Account Average Likes Average Ratio
Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) 5.65 million 4%
Cristiano Ronaldo (@cristiano) 6.43 million 4.6%

Next, I compared these to the top followed brand accounts. The top followed brands are National Geographic (90 million) and Nike (79 million). The ratios for these top followed brands was pretty significantly less than the most followed people, at .4% and 1.3%.

Account Average Likes Average Ratio
National Geographic (@natgeo) 374 thousand .4%
Nike (@nike) 1.06 million 1.3%

Now, most accounts aren’t going to have the millions of followers that these do, so I wanted to compare people and brands with more normal amounts. So, I compared my account to my favorite ice cream shop, Blake Slate Creamery.

Account Average Likes Average Ratio
Cameron Sackett (@cameronsackett) 419.6 27%
Blank Slate Creamery (@blankslatecreamery) 132.4 7.7%

This difference in ratios isn’t surprising to me. Instagram posts with faces get 38% more likes than posts without. Personal accounts are naturally going to have more posts with faces because people are going to show themselves on their accounts! Brands want to show their products/services and that can’t always involve an attractive person’s face.

To increase your engagement, it’s important to try and learn from these personal accounts. You want to post as many pictures/videos with people as the prominent focus. Selfies get the likes! But make it a good one, not some double chin mess 🙂

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a Gen Z? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Kununu_Us – Workplace Insights That Matter!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the employer review technology Kununu. Kununu is a technology that allows employees of a company to share their insights with potential applicants of what it’s like to work at that company. It also allows the company to mine that information to have a better understanding of how they can impact this experience in a more meaningful way.

So, they’re Glassdoor?

No, not exactly, Kununu goes much deeper in gathering those insights than a simple verbatim review from a past employee who hates your company!

Each person who gives a review of an employer on Kununu is asked a series of 18 different insights in which they rank the employer. This level of insight allows both applicants and employers to really dig into what the real issues are when it comes to both the candidate experience and the employee experience.

To leave a review of an employer, the person must also have an actual company email address, so you aren’t getting jaded ex-employees, but actual employees who are living in that work world right now. In this type of framework, you’re probably going to get a better balance from both sides.

What I like about Kununu:

– To consume their content you don’t need to log in and create a profile. Just go on there and start reading reviews of potential employers.

– Q&A Tab which allows users to ask a question and those employers who have claimed their Kununu profile will get an alert to go out and answer the question. This is public for all to see. If it’s inappropriate it’s immediately flagged and taken down.

– Kununu doesn’t make most of their revenue as a job board, all job ads are free to employers, which gives them a higher level of transparency when it comes to who their ultimate customer really is. Candidates coming to your profile won’t see your competition’s job ads like you see on that other review site!

– The review profiles created by Kununu reviewers are very robust and have a ton of detail. So, as a potential applicant, I get a much truer sense of what it’s actually like to work at each location.

– Offer both employee reviews and applicant reviews so you get to see what’s it’s like to work at an employer, but also what’s it’s like to go through the applicant experience. This also gives you competitive benchmarks so you can see how your experience is compared to others in your market.

The entire world of employer reviews become much more important with Google for Jobs using this type of data within their algorithm to determine how high your job postings should show up in Google’s search results. Organizations are now tasked with ensuring they pay attention to their online reputation as an employer.

Kununu is definitely a more robust alternative to the one main employer reputation site that most will believe they have. It’s also a great technology to give you real insights to not only your employee experience but also to your candidate experience. Kununu is definitely something employers should be checking out!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Career Confessions from Gen Z: The 4 Essentials Every Office Should Have!

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Ever since I was little, I’ve been pretty particular about the spaces that I live in. For my 12th birthday, my parents took me to Ikea and Target and let me “re-do my room” with a New York theme. I can also vividly remember the time when my Mom and I went to tour a college in Upstate New York and we almost left the hotel because we were worried about bed bugs. This particularness caused a lot of stress before going off to college about having to share a room with another teenage boy (a personal nightmare for me).

As I am entering the workforce, I know that this will carry over into the office that I work in. On average, a person will spend about ⅓ of their life at work. That’s longer than most of us will spend at any house we will ever live in! Since I’ve started interning, I’ve noticed some things that have made a big impact on my happiness and productivity at work:

1. Drink Machines: I am drinking water CONSTANTLY and I know that almost everyone sitting around me has a water bottle or cup at their desk. Having a water machine, like a Brita filter attachment or a Bevi machine, is more important to me than having elaborate coffee makers or nice vending machines. (editor’s note – the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – I’m a life-long advocate for a Diet Mt. Dew soda fountain in the office!) 

2. No Cubicles: I didn’t anticipate this making such a difference, but I now do not want to work in a cubicle. At Quicken Loans (where I’m interning!), we have little half walls that make rows and columns, but they are short enough to see and talk to the people around you. This creates a much more open environment so I can ask questions without getting up or I can eavesdrop on other people’s conversations!

3. Bathrooms: Read my last post for more of my feelings about bathrooms at work but basically, just make them nice.

4. Updated Decor: I get that office decor is difficult. You’re never going to please everyone’s tastes, it’s expensive etc. BUT you could at least put in a little bit of effort to put some decor on your walls that is from this century. A good rule of thumb: if your decor is older than some of your employees, you probably should get rid of it! There’s nothing sadder to me than being surrounded by gray all the time. Liven it up a little!

Now, I could go on for a while about what else I look for in an office, but these are just the basics. Just put a little effort to meet your employee’s requests, and you’ll probably be on the right track!

Another Editor’s Note (because apparently, I don’t have my own platform to say anything I want): I’ve been telling HR leaders this for a couple of years now. With Gen Z – Design matters! It matters in your employment brand, it matters in your personal workspaces, it matters for younger generations. Perception of working in a great place is influenced by design. Don’t discount it! 

 

This post was written by Cameron Sackett (not Tim) – you can probably tell because it lacks grammatical errors!

HR and TA Pros – have a question you would like to ask directly to a Gen Z? Ask us in the comments and I’ll respond in an upcoming blog post right here on the project. Have some feedback for me? Again, please share in the comments and/or connect with me on LinkedIn.

7 Things Startups Teach Us That We All Need to Learn!

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My buddy John Hill works for Techstars as the VP of Network, go connect with him, he’s completely an awesome guy who will sit down and have a beer with you and talk about how to change the world for hours!  Last week he got to meet the latest crop of Techstar startups and came away motivated with some great learnings.

Here are John’s takeaways from the newest Techstar startups:

1. Nothing beats hustle. Nothing.

2. The world is full of good ideas, but only a few will execute on them.

3. Relational capital is vital.

4. Networks matter. Surround yourself with those who can help you.

5. There are some wicked smart people in the world.

6. To build a great company you need help with funding, talent, and connections to business/industry to scale and the understanding of how to navigate each.

7. Suspend disbelief!

I’m drawn to each of the seven for different reasons but #2 jumps out because I witness this on a daily basis. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who execute and those who talk about executing. Hire those who execute. Understand that they are rare and you should overpay for this ‘skill’.

Do you notice nowhere on his list does he talk about failure. John is a motherfucking doer! He gets shit done. Techstars will only take a chance on startups led by people who will execute. John talks about ways to succeed not about just throwing caution to the wind and failing. The reality is most will fail, setting yourself up for success is key.

I love that he ends his list with “Suspend disbelief”. The world is a critic. Those who make it big have that special combination of John’s list. Great idea, ability to execute, the right network to make it happen, super smart, etc. What they also have is true belief! At the end of the day, you have to believe 1000% your idea is going to work. No part of you even questions that it won’t.

If it didn’t work you would be destroyed because your belief was so strong that you never saw it coming when it fails. That’s how most great ideas actually make it. You find a combination of all of these things and you put money and resources behind it.

These 7 learnings aren’t about how to make a startup successful. These are how you make anything successful that you’re working on.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Jobvite goes all in on texting candidates & @UltimateHCM upgrades HR Service Delivery!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a break from the normal tech reviews and give you some insight on some happenings in the world of HR Tech.

For those who don’t know Jobvite, they are a popular Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that actually started out as an employee referral technology before the market was truly ready to buy into that concept. So, they pivoted from employee referral tech to full-blown ATS with employee referral tech.

This past week Jobvite announced they will be one of the first corporate ATSs on the market to integrate the ability to mass text candidates and have an AI embedded tech interact with those candidates. All of this will be powered by Canvas, an SMS-enabled screening technology that I’ve reviewed on my site a while back, and called “Jobvite Text”.

This is a great move for Jobvite! Most corporate ATSs have been dragging their feet on this type of technology over worries corporate TA teams really didn’t want it. Over the past year, though, more and more organizations have been embracing texting candidates in a big way and the results have blown away reply rates of email, phone, and LinkedIn Inmails.

I suspect we’ll see many more ATS vendors build this core functionality into their systems within the next year, as many already have this on their roadmap, but have been pushing it off for other functionality they felt their clients wanted more over the ability to mass message and screen via text messaging.

Ultimate Software who has had a really strong track record of buying HR and TA technology that wasn’t core to their system and integrating it into Ultipro is at it again with the purchase of HR Service Delivery technology PeopleDoc.

PeopleDoc is a best of breed HR Service Delivery software that allows organizations to deliver world-class service delivery to employees through document management, employee knowledge centers, and employee case management. While this doesn’t sound sexy, it will give UltiPro something no other enterprise HR provider has in the market.

Ultimate is looking to move up-market in a big way and the purchase of PeopleDoc will help position themselves as a product that will deliver to large, enterprise-sized organizations. Their payroll is already top-notch, their core HR product is really good, and PeopleDoc will make best in class.

Ultimate doesn’t buy outside technology often, but when it does, it has shown to buy smart products that make their overall offering better, and they actually listen and integrate the talent from the new company into their organization.

We will see many more partnerships and acquisitions in the coming months. Some will make sense, some we’ll wonder why. I look at each of them from both sides. Does it benefit both companies, and does it make the overall product offering of the major player better, faster, than what they could do on their own?

For both Jobvite and Ultimate this happened last week.

 

Compliance vs. Contribution – What Kind of HR Pro Are You? #SHRM18

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I spoke at SHRM National yesterday. I have to say I love the SHRMies! I never feel out of place at a SHRM conference. The pros that come are like most of us. We are trying to get better. We aren’t perfect. We really want to do great work. We have challenges.

There is one thing, though, I can point to that seems to separate those SHRM HR pros who are moving quickly into modern HR, and those who are not.

It really can be boiled down to Compliance vs. Contribution.

Everyone in HR is concerned about compliance. It’s part of the gig. Those who ignore compliance do not have a long career in HR.

Compliance-focused HR is also a trap.

I’ve said this my entire career, that it’s not HR’s job to eliminate risk. It is HR’s job to mitigate and advise of risk.

Bad HR tries to eliminate risk, so much so, that it many times turns into threats. The treats sound like this:

“Jim, you can’t do that because we’ll get sued!” 

“Mary, you can’t ask your team to do that because it’s against policy!” 

“Pat, if you decide to take this direction we’ll have to get legal involved!” 

This is HR trying to eliminate risk. This is bad HR.

Here’s how HR contributes to the success of an organization while mitigating and advising of risk:

“Jim, I understand what it is you want to do. There’s some risk, let’s be clear about this. If ‘we’ go this direction, we have to be prepared for “X”. Knowing this, how do you want to move forward?”

“Mary, I definitely hear what you need from your team. There are some complications because we have some policies in place. It doesn’t mean we can break or change those policies but puts us at some risk in the future. How about instead we try this…”

“Pat, I’m a little uncomfortable going the route you want to take. I think it would be best for ‘us’ to get some insight from legal and see if they might have a less risky way for us to proceed.”

Compliance vs. Contribution is really just a change in language and communication. One will get most of your team to want to work with you and keep you in the loop. The other will shut off your team from wanting to interact with you, and actually increasing the likelihood they get themselves and the organization in trouble.

I love my SHRMies who are looking to contribute. I desperately want to turn on a light for my SHRM brothers and sisters who are so compliance focused they are missing a great opportunity to contribute the greater good of the organization!

Never stop trying to raise the profession.

The Talent Fix – My new SHRM Produced book is now available to purchase! If your organization is having trouble hiring, this is a must buy! 

Talent Fix Review: My mom says it’s her favorite book that I’ve written!!! (I’ve only written one book!)

Purchase The Talent Fix now! 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @ClaraLabs – Book More Interviews #SHRM18

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review the unique interview scheduling technology, Clara. Clara Labs uses an intelligent automation software platform and actual humans to ensure you get more interviews booked with the candidates you want.

What makes a great technology? It’s simplicity.

Scheduling an interview is overly tough. It’s a pain the ass, but it’s not intellectually difficult to figure out! Clara Labs figured out a way to take HR and Talent Acquisition out of the middle of this process, without candidates feeling like they’ve lost contact with your organization and/or your HR/TA Team.

I think most HR Tech companies on the market would call “Clara” A.I., but Clara Labs stays away from this popular jargon to not over complicate a very simplistic idea and process that everyone involved with scheduling interviews love – HR/TA, Candidates and Hiring Managers.

So, how does it work?

Basically, Clara works through your normal email communication channel. All you do is “CC” Clara in your email exchange, just like you would a Recruiting Operations/Admin-type person who would normally become your middle person to set this up.

Once you cc Clara, she takes over on both sides and schedules an interview with the candidate and the hiring manager. And does so using Natural Language Processes that makes everyone feel like it’s a real person doing the work.

You can simply say in the email:

“Hey! Tim, we would love to have you come in and meet with Mary and interview for the position. I”m going to have Clara set this up for us. Can’t wait to meet you in person!”

Clara then takes over and communicates back and forth with all parties finding a common time that works for everyone and even follows up as the meeting gets close to remind all parties.

Here’s where Clara is unique. If something happens that is out of the ordinary and the “Clara” can’t figure this out, a real human jumps into the process, as “Clara”, and takes over, so nothing ever falls through the cracks.

Sometimes setting up interviews gets complicated, or a candidate starts requesting or asking things during this process. It’s important for great candidate experience that these things are handled appropriately, and Clara Labs makes sure “a human is in the loop” when necessary!

I’m in love with simple tech that just works! Clara Labs actually used Clara to set up my demo and schedule a time with me and it really seemed like I was dealing with a real person and not a bot!

If your team is getting bogged down by being the ‘middle’ person in getting interviews set up, or if you’re the type of TA shop that has pushed this onto your hiring managers to set up, this is a great tool to help them! Before adding another person onto your Recruiting Ops team, this would be a great way to increase capacity on your team or pennies on the dollar!

Another great TA Tech you should be setting up a demo to see! If you are doing mass volume interviewing this would be a lifesaver!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Career Confessions from Gen-Z: My Dad is the Greatest!

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I bet you didn’t expect a post from me on a Monday! Well here I am, with an extra post just to celebrate the creator of the Tim Sackett Project, the “foremost expert on workplace hugging”, HR microcelebrity, or otherwise known was my father. Many of you know my Dad from his witty blog posts or his presentations at HR conferences. While my Dad may be a fantastic writer and public speaker, he has a lot of cool, sometimes very strange, and special qualities/talents that I thought I would share!

  1. No one can make a better Valentine’s Day box. My brothers and I would have the coolest boxes every year growing up
  2. He is an expert griller and lawn mower#justdadthings
  3. He is really good at deciphering baseball signs and play calling signals from other teams’ coaches
  4. He can coach just about any sport and will make sure every kid not only improves, but has a super fun time
  5. He is one of the single most caring people in the world. He will go to the end of the Earth to help any person that he cares about
  6. He is really good at finding cool shoes, jackets etc, sending them to me, and then buying them for himself
  7. He can yell louder than most people at the referees at MSU basketball/football games
  8. He can give real and helpful advice for any situation. I wouldn’t have been able to make some extremely hard decisions these past years if it weren’t for his support
  9. He is able to come up with a wildly inappropriate joke/slogan/title for any possible situation
  10. He is the most hard working person in the world. You think you’re hustling, but my Dad is probably hustling harder!
  11. He can find a nickname for any single person
  12. He is an expert dog walker and can speak dog talk like no other
  13. He can find his way anywhere. I swear he has a GPS system in his brain. You could drop him in the middle of any city, and he’d find his way
  14. He is able to find the light and positivity in any situation. There are very few days where I haven’t seen my Dad smiling and laughing
  15. He is the most loving person I know. He loves a lot and unconditionally

As many of you know, my Dad is the greatest. He can write, run a successful business, make a pretty great family (in my opinion), basically he can do it all! There is nothing that I could do to ever repay him for all that he’s done for me, but I thought that I would just make his try and display amazingness for others to appreciate. Happy Father’s Day Dad! I love you so much.

-Cam