Adam McFarland

In moving back and forth for several internships during college and then my job after college, I’ve lived in quite a few different places from anywhere from three months to a year. In doing so, I’ve looked at a lot of apartments and become accustomed to the relatively pain-free process of leasing an apartment. I always figured leasing business space would be the same. I was wrong.

Following our debacle a few months ago, we were pretty certain we found a great place for us a few weeks ago. It’s a short commute, it’s a brand new facility (meaning we have control over the layout), and it had a decent amount of space to grow in to. Then slowly but surely it began to fall apart. They would only sign a 5-year lease (five years is A LONG TIME for a young and ever-changing company like ours….we could have 30 employees in 5 years or it could still be just the four of us), and then the lease they sent over seemed to be a bit over the top. We forwarded it over to our lawyer who specializes in real estate, and hoped he’d tell us it was a good lease. If that was the case, we probably would have attempted to work them down to a 3-year lease and try to get a few other small concessions and if all things went well we could have moved in on 2/1.

Not so much. He came back with NINETEEN points of contention on top of the few that we came up with. And they weren’t just minor things. I’m quoting from his email here:

• “This is burdensome and unnecessary”
• “This particular section of the lease sucks for you and there are a lot of hidden costs here”
• “This is not reasonable and is too suggestive”
• “I think paragraph 5 under Section Nineteen is bull shit and definitely not standard”
• “DEFINITELY NOT. The last paragraph under Section Twenty is OUT. I have never seen it done this way.”

That was enough for us to bail. We’re not going to sign a lease without those concessions, and there’s about a 0% chance they’ll concede on over 20 points in a 10 page lease. It’s not worth wasting our time.

Maybe I’m reaching here, but when you get a lease that sucks THAT MUCH, you have to wonder if they were trying to take advantage of us. This is an established property company in Albany that we were dealing with. They own a lot of commercial real estate in this area, and you’d think their other tenants would have a lawyer review a lease. They’ve been around for a long time and I wonder if they’d try to slip a lease like that by a large corporation. Do they see four 25 year old guys and think “these guys have no clue what they’re doing”? Regardless of whether they are ageist scumbags or just equal-opportunity scumbags, we’re out and we’re happy we took a hard stance.

We’re now looking at cheaper, shorter-term alternatives. After getting together for a few hours last night and calling some of our friends/family/business contacts, we already have a handful of opportunities. If we can trim our rent costs from ~$3k/month to ~$1k/month we can put that extra money away to build our own facility in 1-2 years when we learn a little more about how our company is going to shake out.

Even though stuff like this pisses me off, it always seems to work out for the best.

Lately I’ve been reading quite a bit about our generations’ “undeserved sense of entitlement.” Quite frankly it pisses me off and I want to set the record straight. First was an article in Inc Magazine where a manager asked how to manage “young workers who have an inflated sense of entitlement”, followed by a story on Employee Evolution about managers who want employees to conform to their standards of security (wife, house, kids, etc) to trap them into “needing” their job. Both show a blatant misunderstanding of our generation.

More so than the average post, this one is solely based upon how I’ve seen the world through my eyes. For a 25 year old, I have considerable professional experience, particularly in the role of the “young professional” from my two internships and one co-op in college, and my one year in the working world as an engineer. That said, I’m pretty sure what I’m about to say applies to every industry, not just web development and engineering. I’m convinced that people are looking at this 180 degrees the wrong way. From my experiences, it is the older generation of management that has an undeserved sense of entitlement.

Experience in life and in business is invaluable. But so is a complete understanding of the latest technology. I’m sorry to point out the obvious, but our generation runs circles around previous ones and makes up for the lack of experience tenfold. An engineering student from a top school knows the ins and outs of every latest and greatest piece of software available. All of the places I worked it was OUR generation that was teaching the older generation more efficient uses of THEIR technology. I’m sure the same applies to just about any industry - everything can be improved with technology in one form or another, and that’s where we have the upper hand.

Subsequently, our most skilled ProENGINEER (3D Modeling software) and Minitab (statistical modeling software) professionals were the students who just arrived fresh from college. The students just spent years learning from some of the best professors in the world, pushing each other to learn the limits of the software for challenging exams. When they arrived at our company, they suddenly realized that they were leaps and bounds ahead of the veteran engineers. Therefore they were able to produce far more structurally sound designs in far less time.

Here’s what it boils down to for me - I don’t give a flying f*ck about your previous experience if it isn’t relevant to the current and future business economy. The majority of business knowledge from the 70’s, 80’s, and even 90’s is largely useless in today’s economy and the economy of tomorrow. Therefore, the majority of your prior experiences are largely inapplicable to today’s business world. And if that’s the case, you have to ask yourself - who has the skillset to compete in the future economy? Who has the ability to quickly learn and process massive amounts of information, and make quick decisions using the best tools available? Who is the most comfortable with change? The answers to all of those questions are, in my opinion, my generation…and it’s not even close.

Maybe those who manage recent college grads should worry less about molding us into the next “them”, and focus more on harnessing the skills of their young talent to help grow their company for the future.