10 Give Young People a Chance!

In this powerful episode of Winning Regardless, Coach Rodo makes a compelling case for giving young people a chance. He opens with a touching story about a young man who was given a chance to play basketball at the local YMCA, a small act that had a massive impact on the young man's life.

Using that personal anecdote as a guiding principle, Coach Rodo reveals his unconventional philosophy for business and life: "getting the youth off the bench." He pulls back the curtain on how he intentionally hires and mentors young employees at his company, Aldevra, sharing unfiltered stories of their growth and success. He doesn't shy away from conflict, detailing a no-holds-barred story about firing a 60-year-old employee who refused to take direction from his brilliant 23-year-old boss. This is a must-watch for business owners, mentors, or anyone who wants to learn how to empower the next generation and tap into their incredible potential.

Key Discussion Points:

A Simple Act, A Lasting Impact: The story of how one young man's life was changed by a chance to play on a basketball court.

Hiring for Character: Why hiring for a person’s attitude and potential is more valuable than their qualifications on paper.

The Power of Mistakes: A crucial lesson on why letting young people make mistakes is essential for learning and growth.

Age vs. Authority: The story of a 60-year-old employee who was fired for refusing to respect his 23-year-old boss.

Empowering the Youth: How Coach Rodo helped a shy young professional and an employee with no HR experience become in-demand experts.

"Get Them Off the Bench": A call to action for older generations to empower young people and trust them with opportunities

Transcript

Hello everyone, I would like to welcome you to another Coach Rodo's Winning Regardless podcast. Today we're gonna talk about giving young people a chance and that's in everything, whether it be work, whether it be ⁓ on sports when you got a player on your team that you haven't really seen what they could do or a student in your class.

who never speaks up or anything of that sort, you know, to give them a chance. And what resonated with me was I was coming out the YMCA the other day and there was a young guy, well he's not young anymore, I don't know, I think Jason is probably maybe 30, 31 or something. And he was like, man, let me holler at you real quick, Rod. And I was like, what's up, man? He was like, man, I just want to tell you, I remember...

very first time I came up here to the Y, y'all wouldn't let, not y'all, said I just couldn't, they wouldn't let me play. Said I came up here another time, they still wouldn't let me play. But you noticed that I kept coming up there and then one day I came up there and they was like, nah, you can't play, you can't play. And you said, man, let the young kid play. And he was like, man, and I've been playing ever since. He said, man, I just wanted to tell you how much that meant to me even still through this part of my life.

I tell people all the time, you gave me a chance by giving me a chance on the basketball court. He's like, nobody knew what my skill was, nobody knew what I could do because they didn't give me a chance. He said, and it propelled me to go on and play high school basketball and rec league basketball. And it wasn't about basketball to him, it was because he was good in basketball.

You know, he still to this day plays basketball, you know, and is plays it pretty well. It was it was it's more of a metaphor of life. Like the one thing that we do as grownups is we don't listen to the younger generation or we think that we know everything and we don't give them a chance to tell their side of the story or tell what they believe or even tell how they could.

possibly help make things better. that was one of the things that I wanted to get away from because me giving him a chance to get on the basketball court with us at the YMCA wasn't a big deal, to him it was. But I'm one of those people who gives anybody a chance.

You come out and we lose a basketball game. I'm gonna get on next anyway, because it don't matter, because I'm sweet. So it didn't matter to me. I'm get on the court next anyway, so come on and run with us. We end up winning. But my thing in life is always like, we need to give young people a chance. Because I remember being that young person who had good ideas, but nobody wanted to hear them. Because I came up in the era of kids were to be seen and not heard.

Never, know, when grownups is talking, you know, know the old saying, shut your mouth when grown folks is talking. You know, that was what I came up under and that was pretty much what I rebelled against as I got older in, you know, giving younger people chances to step up, you know, and I took that with me in owning the company. Like I have...

I'm almost 55 and I'm the oldest person in the company. I mean, by a long ways, I mean, let's see, my second, which is my wife, she's 48, but then after that, it dropped dramatically down into like the, maybe like 32 and below. And it's simply because when they came in, as young people, you gotta look past the qualifications sometimes.

because sometimes the qualifications don't match the character of the person. Sometimes they can't get that qualification that you may be necessary because nobody ever gave them a chance. know, we take Zoe Dillman, for instance, who's the head of our services department here in our company. Zoe is 26, 27 and...

She came to us when she was 23. We had an interview with her and she was working at a blood bank. ⁓ Very, very intelligent young lady, know, political science major. But, you know, was never given a chance because of her youth, because she was still in college. So nobody took the chance to pick her brain. However, when she came in for an interview, the wife and I sat down and we talked to her. And it was just something about her that...

made me understand that first of all, where they have her working at now, she's way beyond that. Not that she was above it. Because that's to say that she's better than the people that's working there now. No, she wasn't above it. Obviously not because she took the job there, but she was beyond it. ⁓ I said to my wife, you know, after the interview, she's gonna be, she's gonna be, you know, second or third in charge of this company, you watch.

My wife said, what? You must be out of your mind. Well, she runs her own division of the company, you know, five years later because of the chance she was given because the thing that I noticed about her is her aptitude to learn. And the thing about having an aptitude to learn, if you have a great teacher, like my wife is a great teacher and Zoe, who had an aptitude to learn, who was a very bright girl I knew.

you put those two together, you can get a master product out of it, which is essentially what I got. If you knew Zoe, and if you knew my wife, then you would understand exactly what I'm talking about. mean, the young lady is extremely bright, but it goes along with giving the young person a chance. You know, we have other people here in our company who, you know, we just hired another young guy who could have went, very, very smart young man, could have worked for Stryker, could work for anyone.

but chose to work for us because for one, the environment that we created as far as chances, okay, you don't know this part of what we do, but you wanna learn it rather than saying, just get proficient at where you're at or what you're doing. We'll give you a chance to try to learn something else as well along the way to keep.

so that you're not stagnant, so that you don't get bored. know, the thing about smart people is they get bored very, very quick. So if you can keep them busy with things, with learning things, you know, the possibilities are endless with them. So, given, in doing so, and giving him a chance, he, you know, says flat out, ⁓ we asked, why wouldn't you go work for Strikers, am I like that? said, because.

I would not get the chance to grow into the person that I know I can grow and be working there. I'll be behind a desk in a cubicle meeting a deadline, whereas to I have a deadline with you guys, but it's different because the work is different. And it's because the learning curve is different. It's not.

Every day is a different thing when you come here to work at Aldevra. And that's the one thing that our young kids, our young employees learn. And that's all because as young employees, we gave them a chance. I didn't want to, ⁓ you know, at the chance of not sounding like an HR violation, ⁓ I didn't want to have people who I could not train because you think you know more than me or.

you're at a certain age or a demographic where you feel like you don't have to listen to me because you're already or you've already done it, but you haven't done what we've done or what I need you to do. But you still feel that, you know, they still feel that they still are too advanced in their lives to take direction from me. had to let an employee go because

Zoe, ⁓ you know, was his boss and he was a 60-some year old guy and he said, I'm not gonna have a 24 year old or 25 year old tell me what to do. And Zoe quickly corrected him and said, I'm 23. So, ⁓ you know, but you know, it came down to a choice that had to either he had to go.

or he wasn't gonna have to listen to Zoe. And I empowered Zoe. So it would have been completely unfair for me to take this guy's side over her. And there was no way that was gonna happen. Let's be clear of that. So I told him, you have to go. And his first thing he said is, I'm master in this industry and you're taking the side of a 25 year old.

over me and yeah, pretty much simply because that 25 year old means a lot more to my company than you ever could simply because of the time that she put in and the aptitude that she has and the chances that I gave her and my wife gave her to learn from us. She knows how to do the things that we need to get done. There was no retraining. We didn't have to, you can't retrain.

a guy that was 60 something and been in the industry for this many years, you know, and we needed, I mean, the guy couldn't even do a fucking email. So, you know, it was a, he, it was a case where, you know, I understood that I need employees that I can train.

our way, which was very, very unconventional. And what I've learned that to be is the young people who are very, very eager because they've been sat on the sidelines, you know, even in their lives, they were sat on the sidelines, you know, nobody gave them a chance. It's like I tell the young kids in politics today, you know, you have a problem with what's going on, you know, with politics in today's society and not just like.

August, ⁓ August the 21st or today, not August 21st 2025. I'm just talking about politics in general. You know, I tell them, well, if you have a problem, then you need to get involved because what's going on is you have all of these old people that are making choices, telling you what's best for you and how to live when they have no idea how to live how you live.

They have no idea of what it's like to have to pay $2,000 a month for an 800 square foot apartment that's the size of a closet, or what EBT is, having to to met ERs that...

are subpar, and yet and still these are the people that are being elected to make choices for you young people. I say, you know, young people are on the bench because we put them on the bench. We have to get them off of the bench. And the way to get them off of the bench is to encourage them and let them know that it's okay.

to give your opinion, to voice your opinion. And if somebody doesn't like your opinion, then what you do is show them why your opinion is relevant. Don't just take them saying, hey, you know what? Your opinion is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but thank you and that's the end of it. No, I mean, yourself. I have a young man here, his name is DeMarco.

⁓ He fucks up sometimes, but the thing about goddamn DeMarco is it don't matter if this motherfucker fucks up. He sees the next opportunity as a chance to be great again. And he don't shy from the opportunity. He might have just fucked up, and a 30 seconds later, if another opportunity comes in, the first thing he gonna say is, I got it. Because he sees it as his chance to redeem himself. That's the enthusiasm that young people...

bring into certain situations in life. I mean, he brings a certain Jenna Saquard to the office, you know, that makes people laugh, but at the same time, his fire and his willingness to do whatever it is that he's asked to do, even if he doesn't know it, you know, we got him doing cold calls on equipment that he has no idea about.

But he's such a team player and he's so eager to get off of the bench. He's so eager to have that opportunity. The opportunity that young people want to have that we don't give them, that we keep them on the bench, that he'll fucking make cold calls on equipment that he knows nothing about, simply because he want to be in the game. And it's up to us as grownups to quit putting these young people.

on the bench and not listening to their opinions. The thing about it is opinion is an opinion. Everybody has one. It doesn't make it a fact. It doesn't make it the truth. But it can make you think. It can probably make you weigh it towards your opinion. And maybe you put them both together and it becomes a solution. ⁓ The thing that I love about young people is

They're innovators, know, I mean hell, what I'm doing right now, I would have never thought in my lifetime that I'd be sitting here doing this. But it was young people who inspire me to do this, but it was young people who also create the innovation for me to even be able to sit here and do this. It's not us old people, I mean I'm not really that old, but you know a lot of y'all, it's not us who...

created this What what I'm what I guess what I'm trying to say is we got to give our young people People more credit and in order to do that. We have to give them more opportunities we have to give young people a chance to Get off of the bench get in the game show what they can do if you don't believe that they can do it Then you give them the opportunity to prove to themselves Why they may be in a position that they're in? Okay

I know that you could not do this, that you're not incapable, but maybe you weren't educated enough. So I gave you the chance so that you could see it for yourself. That's all the young people want. That's all they want. Let me see if I can do it. And if I can't do it, I'll be the first one to tell you that I can't do it. But at least I'm learning what it was that I couldn't do and how to do it so that I can do it. You know, that's what...

Learning is and that's how you teach young people. That's how you know you get them to become better players get them to become better employees is you give them the opportunity to Fuck up You know give them give them that opportunity because you know, I always used to tell my kids basketball to me If you don't make a mistake, then you're not trying

If I tell you to dribble the ball a hundred times with your left hand and you dribble it super slow, but you do it a hundred times and you don't mess up.

That's not, you know, that's nothing for me to congratulate you for. But if I see you pushing that ball real hard to get your 100 dribbles in and it bounce off your foot, it bounces left and right, you're making all kinds, you're sitting there, you're getting frustrated, you can't do it. That's the kid that I go over and I say to him, man, that's some good shit. If you're not making a mistake, then you're not trying. People who try and make mistakes. And you know who ain't afraid to make mistakes these days? It's the young people. The ones that we're keeping on the bench.

the ones that we're not allowing to make the mistakes so that they can learn. You know, we were always told you learn from your mistakes. Well, you have to be given a chance to learn from your mistake. And the one thing that we're not doing with these young people is giving them a chance because we're trying to equate it to our success as well. When it's to me, my success is in the mistakes that my younger employees make because we gave them the chance. And then when we put them back in that same situation that they learn from that mistake, that's where my triumph come from.

because you fucked up and it allows me to go back to you and say, man, you fucked this up and now look what you did. You done made it great. You learned from your mistake. You did such a great job. You made it even better because you had a chance to learn where you was deficient at. How can these young people understand where they're deficient at? How can they learn where they're deficient at? We don't give them a chance to learn that. I have another employee here, her name is Courtney Klein.

and knew nothing about fucking HR. But we were having so much problem finding a HR person, hiring him, firing him, hiring him, firing him. And the whole time, she is such a team player, she was doing every fucking thing. And we finally said, know, Courtney is in every goddamn HR meeting. She's...

interviewing every HR person that we hire and then she does the paperwork for every HR person that we fire, why don't we help her learn to become our HR specialist? And of course, what do you think Courtney said? If that's what the team needs, put me in the game coach. Knew nothing about HR.

Now she spends her time dealing with the biggest HR violation in Aldevra. And that's me. It was because we put her in the game. We gave her a chance. The thing about putting these young people in the game and giving them a chance is, like me and the wife say, the one thing that we're very proud of is the young people that we gave a chance here at Aldevra. If these motherfuckers...

If we closed down today, every single one of them could go somewhere else and be in high demand. Hell, we got people trying to poach them right now. That's how good we've trained them. But that's how good they've also worked to learn their craft.

when we put them in the game, the work that they put in, the extra practice, the conversations, the work groups that they had together. I mean, it's incredible when you actually give these young people a chance to do some things that, you know.

To us as grownups, we're afraid to let them do because, well not grownups, because they're grownups. But us as older individuals are afraid to do is because we think it affects us directly. I can't put you in charge of this because it affects my money. Can't put you in charge of this because it affects this, that. ⁓ But sometimes, yeah, it'll affect it in the short run, but what does it do long term?

We have to really start to long term when we're thinking of putting the young people in the game. Because long term, they are more of a benefit than they are of a hindrance. And that's the thing that we have to understand when you're dealing with these young people. You have to A, meet them where they're at. But once you meet them where they're at, you also have to

help them push themselves. Can't let them get comfortable, can't let them get complacent. You also have to put them in comfortable, uncomfortable situations. You know, the thing that we say in the military is, you know, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And that's the one thing that I like to do to my young people. I like to put them in comfortable, I got a kid here named Adam, you know. You'd be lucky to get them over to say two words to you if you don't know them. If you know them, you're chit-chat with you.

Smart as fuck, brilliant, brilliant, young person, again, very, very versatile, was stuck on doing one thing, but working here, the one thing that we did was we gotta get Adam out of his box, you know? So we put him in uncomfortable situations to where...

he got comfortable, then his youthful voice, his youth voice started coming out when he's dealing with certain situations. As far as where work goes, or when he's out in the field, he has to deal with other people that work for other companies, but you know, we're doing a project together where he asserts himself. Whereas to anybody who knows Adam, Adam would have never, Adam's not, that's not his personality. But it has become his work personality.

because he got put in the game. We told him where he was deficient at. We told him why he wasn't scoring as many points as he thought he should. And he worked on those things to the point where he has become a high point scorer. know, it's, we again, we have to give the youth a chance at...

whatever it is that we feel that they're not in, or they're not, they don't have the aptitude to do because they can't get it if we don't give them the chance. You never know, you know, you, you, you, you, again, Zoey, the political science person, never did she believe, think that she was going to be the head of a government contracting services department for a company because that's not what she was going to school for.

But you know, when you put a person in the game, they find out that they have other skills that they may not have even thought to work on because it wasn't anything that they were ever talked to about or even given thought to. And you find out exactly how versatile the young people are compared to us. They can use the computer in ways that we can't. They know.

programs that we don't know. They know coding that we don't know. we try to make it seem like we know a lot more than we do, but it's the young people that we have to lean more on. And in order to do that, we got to start trusting them. if you know young people who sit in the background, you got to call them out to the front.

You you got to make them assert themselves as well. We have to give them that. We have to empower them. And in order to do that, we have to call them up to the front. You have to call them up to lead. We have to let them be in charge and take charge of their destiny so that they can also understand that they also have other people's destiny in hand with their brilliance.

And the thing about brilliance is it manifests itself in so many different ways. People think about brilliance in book studies and this, that, and the, no, brilliance is, brilliance, I have a buddy of mine who's he's a military brilliance. You tell the guy that,

Well, he just saw what Rangers look like. Saw, said, I'ma do it. And everybody laughed, motherfucker, you ain't about to be no Ranger. Motherfucker signed up for Ranger school, finished like top three in fucking class. And then didn't even want to join the unit that did the register. He did it just because he has that ability to.

Focus in on seeing something and wanting to do it and he does it and when he does it he does it at a hundred percent That's his brilliance in life You know my we we all have our own brilliance in life and you'll never find out What that young person's brilliance is if we keep him on a bench? so You know in closing what I would like to say is

Give that young person a chance, know, put them in the game, get them off of the bench, push them to their potential, help them see their potential. And once you see their potential, you start to work on honing that potential along with them. I would like to thank you for listening to Coach Rodo's Winning Regardless podcast. And you can find us wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. Have a great day until next time.