Presenting Workplace & Marketplace Trends

For the first time in history, five distinct generations — Matures, Boomers, Xers, Millennials and Gen Z — are employed side by side in the workplace. With differing values and seemingly incompatible views on how the workplace should function, these generations have stirred conflict in the business world. Witness the turnover, the lack of engagement, and management incomprehension and frustration. Knowledge of and effective management of this generational divide is vital to longevity and success. In fact, it is one of the most relevant and important demands your company can make of its leaders.

In this engaging presentation, Cam Marston teaches how each generation developed its core values, how these values manifest in the workplace daily as workplace preferences, and why they can all not only operate alongside each other but do so with extraordinary success. This program provides the detailed insight, concrete examples, and specific approaches to help frustrated managers build the personal connections needed to boost employee performance and retention. Audiences will learn that success results from increased generational awareness and incremental change.

We hear it all the time: "Our people are our greatest asset." But good talent is hard to find and even harder to keep. How do you build your people assets? What do today's employees want?

The rare few workplaces that do not struggle to hire and retain all tend to have a few things in common:

• They have spent years intentionally building a culture designed to address employee needs both in and out of the workplace
• Leaders have been groomed to help employees discover their own inner motivations to find purpose in their work
• They recognize their culture as a strategic differentiator in a crowded and aggressive marketplace, and they protect it at all costs

When these characteristics are in place, the organization becomes a magnet for people eager to join a workplace where they will find fulfillment.

Inherent in the leader's ability to build and protect the culture and motivate employees is an understanding of employees' spoken and unspoken challenges. Trusted leaders are familiar with the trends shaping the workforce, from life stages to generational characteristics to current events. Today's employee marketplace wants to know your plans to address the latest hot topics including mental health, remote workplaces, flexible hours, workplace safety, and diversity and inclusion.

Retaining employees is far more cost-effective than recruiting and training new ones. Experience and institutional memory make your employees your most valuable assets.

Extraordinary turnover. Mental health challenges. Diversity and inclusion. Supply chain nightmares. Confusion about AI. Political divisions. Trembling stock market. Inflation forecasts. Goodness.

The trends shaping today's workplace and marketplace are, each on their own, worthy of a news cycle headline. But in today's upheaval, they're happening simultaneously. Which of the trends making headlines will impact the workplace and marketplace most? Which ones do employers, managers, sales leaders, and human resources executives need to keep an eye on? Cam has opinions on that…

In 2018, Cam began an old-school, interview-style, terrestrial radio show and podcast called What's Working with Cam Marston. His goal: to interview professionals from a spectrum of industries across the country to help listeners better understand the trends shaping their workplace, the workforce, and the marketplace. Today, about 300 episodes later, Cam shares the most relevant trends he's uncovered in customized presentations designed to arm each audience with the skills and information needed to get ahead in their industry.

This presentation delivers thought-provoking content curated for the audience's specific industry. Cam draws on best practices gained from a continuously growing body of interviews, as well as from proprietary research, to equip each audience with a list of the most important trends, their potential impact, and guidelines on how to address them.

Uncertainty. It's not just a headline. It's the air we breathe. Will markets soar or crash? Unclear. Is getting that degree still a safe bet? Depends on who you ask. Will AI transform your job or take it? Yet to be determined.

We're living in a world where the rules keep changing. The maps are outdated. The playbooks are shredded. And as humans, we're wired to avoid the unknown. So how do you move forward when the path is blurred?

You lead anyway.

History's most admired figures didn't have crystal balls. They had strong timeless qualities. They practiced habits that built trust, reduced fear, and propelled people forward in the face of ambiguity. And here's the secret: those habits aren't exclusive to presidents and pioneers. They're within reach for all of us, if we commit to cultivating them.

In this energizing and practical session, we explore five enduring, trainable disciplines that help people lead through the fog: Curiosity, Connection, Initiative, Persuasion, and Vision. These aren't buzzwords — they're tools. When embraced with intention, they calm anxiety, inspire action, and turn uncertainty from a barrier into a launchpad.

If you're waiting for clarity, stop. It may never come. But if you're ready to lead in spite of it, this is where we begin.

For decades, retirement planning has focused almost exclusively on money. And while financial strategy still matters deeply, today's retirees, especially Baby Boomers and Generation X, are discovering that the hardest parts of retirement aren't found on a balance sheet.

This keynote reframes retirement preparation through a generational lens, helping financial advisors better understand the non-financial challenges shaping client outcomes right now. Cam Marston introduces PHASE™ Into Retirement, a practical framework that helps advisors uncover what truly drives retirement satisfaction:

• P — Purpose: Who am I when the title goes away?
• H — Health: How do physical and cognitive realities shape daily life?
• A — Activities: How time is actually spent, not just imagined
• S — Social: The strength (or fragility) of relationships post-work
• E — Everyday Routines: The overlooked engine of emotional stability

Advisors will leave with sharper insight into generational retirement blind spots, better language for client conversations, and a clearer understanding of why well-funded retirements still fail, and how to prevent that.

When presented as a workshop, Cam gives advisors the opportunity to interact directly with the PHASE™ assessment. This hands-on exposure allows advisors to experience how the framework is translated into structured questions, scoring, and insight, providing practical context for how PHASE™ can support client conversations.

This is not therapy, coaching, or role play. It is a professional, research-informed tool designed to complement existing planning processes.

The first rule of selling remains steadfast: Know your customer. With five distinct generations playing active roles in the buying decisions of companies worldwide, that tenet is increasingly difficult to fulfill. It is no longer enough to be personable with your customer and knowledgeable about your product.

Changing dynamics require changing strategies.

To succeed in today's business climate, you need to approach each buyer with an informed generational perspective, recognizing the underlying biases, values and expectations that pave the way to "Yes." These biases, values, and expectations impact everything from how you introduce yourself, how you communicate (both frequency of communication and channels of communication), how you develop and maintain your online impression, to how you ask for the sale.

Once you understand the depths of sales biases in each generation, you'll then begin to realize the opportunities for making new, deep, and lasting connections with your customers. In this presentation, Cam Marston shows you how to create fast and genuine relationships with new customers, sell to your customer's expectations, build trust between generations, and avoid communication pitfalls.

Based on the client's request or customer analysis, Cam can focus the presentation on all five generations or the one or two most applicable to the specific audience.

For decades, financial services professionals have focused on demographic groups that are now largely in retirement. The financial services industry grew up with the Matures and the Baby Boomers.

Now, new generations with different economic and cultural experiences, as well as different attitudes and expectations, are in the age ranges that make them prime markets for investments, retirement planning, insurance, and other financial products.

Connecting and building trust with each of these generations? It's a puzzle and it shouldn't be so hard.

Cam Marston can help. He understands the generations of both today and tomorrow and what they expect from financial services providers. He'll guide you on:

• Each generation's preferred communication preferences
• How each generation values different types of information
• What each generation's definition of "expert" is and how they apply it to financial professionals
• How to offer guidance to younger clients versus older clients to make them want to act
• Which sales tools to use, and how to use them effectively

The next generation of financial services client has arrived. They will not tolerate being treated the same way their parents were treated. Learn what they want in this exciting and impactful presentation.

Most people face financial fears. Young or old, your clients worry that their financial challenges may be insurmountable. They show a brave face to their family and to their colleagues but inside they tremble. Uncertainty underpins all of it.

You, the advisor, know better. Your financial training has taught you that few financial challenges are unalterable. You know what to do, what to expect, and what products can address your client's challenges. However, sharing your confident outlook requires knowing what your client's fears are and how to discuss them. And knowing how to do that, requires knowing a bit more about your clients.

Life's Predictable Fears

• In early adulthood, your clients' fears are largely about themselves and their ability to earn and save
• Later the fears center around children and their future
• Then your client's ability to preserve good health and save funds for retirement
• Then a comfortable and productive retirement
• Followed by the extraordinary human desire to be remembered

Each of these life stages require the savvy advisor to know how to communicate appropriately with the client going through these emotions, these phases of life. Supported by data and research, this presentation equips advisors to talk their clients through their fears and to instill confidence, resulting in more fully developed, long lasting, and fruitful client relationships.