The Power of Authenticity with Orlando Hampton

Orlando Hampton is the chief customer officer for Afiniti, a company that uses artificial intelligence to best match customers with customer service agents. Afiniti was an early adopter of AI, and Orlando became employee #3 in 2008.

His path to success is a fascinating story that began in Pittsburgh, where his mother fought to get him the best education possible.

Orlando’s career started in call centers, where he honed his communication skills and ability to lead others. As he proved himself, the promotions came until he had a corner office on Wall Street. That’s when he joined Afiniti.

“It’s clear Orlando’s secret to success isn’t a secret at all,” says BEATS WORKING host Mark Wright. “It’s Orlando being Orlando every step of the way.”

This episode is packed with lessons in life and business, but the biggest takeaway is the value and power that authenticity gives to those who embrace it.

Resources from the episode:

Connect with Orlando Hampton on ⁠LinkedIn⁠.
Learn more about Afiniti and the work they do ⁠here⁠.

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Transcript

The following transcript is not certified. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. The information contained within this document is for general information purposes only.

Speakers: Orlando Hampton and Mark Wright

ORLANDO HAMPTON 00:00

For me, work is freedom. It’s actually doing what you want, when you want to do it, with who you want to do it with. Uh, and when you are working at that level, uh, you have found freedom. Uh, if you are approaching work transactionally, right? You work at this place because they pay you this money. And if someone pays you one dollar more, you would go to the other place. That is not your passion. That is not, that’s not your place. And so, finding your passion, finding your place. That is the key to redeeming work at an individual level, right? It’s, it’s knowing the difference between, like, a job and a career.

MARK WRIGHT 00:40

This is the BEATS WORKING show. We’re on a mission to redeem work—the word, the place, and the way. I’m your host, Mark Wright. Join us at winning the game of work. Welcome to BEATS WORKING. On the show this week, the power of authenticity. Orlando Hampton is chief customer officer for Afiniti, a software company that uses artificial intelligence to best match customers with people inside companies. The story of how he got to the pinnacle of success is a fascinating one. His mother was a fierce advocate for his education. She pulled him out of his neighborhood school. Lied about where he lived and re-enrolled him in a better one. Another turning point came the day a man stepped out of a helicopter and handed Orlando a plastic fork and spoon. It’s an amazing story. When he entered the workforce, Orlando started in telemarketing. A job that would challenge most of us came naturally to him. Conversation was easy and he quickly learned the value of a short-term memory if a call didn’t go well. He worked his way up to a banking firm on Wall Street, but then he left to take a chance on Afiniti in the early days of AI. Orlando learned to lean into his strengths, communication skills, networking and dealing with people, but his authenticity is at the heart of who he is and the success he’s built. And it really is a blueprint we can all learn from. I hope you enjoy my conversation with the inspiring Orlando Hampton. Orlando Hampton, welcome to the BEATS WORKING podcast. It’s so great to have you here, my friend.

ORLANDO HAMPTON 02:25

Thank you, Mark. It is fantastic to be here. I’m a big fan of the podcast, so I don’t know how many fans you have actually show up and do interviews, but I’m happy to be here. I’d be fun to listen to it myself in the car with my kids.

MARK WRIGHT 02:38

Uh, that’s fantastic. So, Orlando, one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the podcast is, is not just that you’ve been super successful in the business world, but I think your personal life and your, your, your mission to share information and knowledge with other people on many different levels really sets you apart as a leader. And I think there’s so much gold in your story. So, I can’t wait to get, get started in that. So, let’s start out with, with what you’re doing right now. You work for Afiniti, which is a software company. Explain to people what your job is and if they haven’t heard of Afiniti before, what is it?

ORLANDO HAMPTON 03:12

Excellent. So, I’m the chief customer officer at Afiniti. Uh, at Afiniti, what we do is we work specifically in the artificial intelligence and the customer experience space, and we focus on pairing, right? So, the simplest version of this is imagine calling into a contact center to buy something or to cancel a service or for some customer service request. Before Afiniti existed, your call would be answered by whatever agent happened to be available. So, it’s kind of first in, first out. If you called in 10 seconds later, you would have spoken to a different agent, right? If that agent wrapped up their previous call five seconds sooner, they would have spoken to a different customer. In the Afiniti world, what we do is we actually take everything we know about the customer and everything we know about the agent. And then we pair people together who are actually more likely to be successful. And so, if you can do that right, you can squeeze out somewhere in a road of calling a three to 6 percent gain. And if you’re, you know, a company with tremendous scale, a 3 to 6 percent improvement could be significant. So that’s what we do. We use artificial intelligence to actually make better pairings. Uh, if you think about pairings that are done randomly, we can do better than that by effectively using some intelligence.

MARK WRIGHT 04:24

Yeah. Is it limited to call centers, Orlando, or what’s, what’s the application? Uh,

ORLANDO HAMPTON 04:30

It’s not. We actually started in contact center, so I’ve been at affinity for 16 years. I was the third employee at the company, and so it was now about 2,500 employees. So, we started in the contact center space, but we actually work in chat. We work in offline pairing, right? So, there’s some situations where you can actually pair, for instance, like a nurse practitioner at an insurance company with a patient, as opposed to just randomly putting nurse practitioners and patients together. So, if you think about any situation that requires a pairing of people, and that situation today is random, effectively, we can come in and use intelligence to make that pairing more optimal.

MARK WRIGHT 05:10

Wow. And, and IE make the experience more pleasant for everybody.

ORLANDO HAMPTON 05:15

Exactly. So, what happens is, is that we drive up higher customer experience and customer engagement, and then really kind of a side effect of that is like increased profitability from the customer and from the client standpoint, right? So, our clients actually get to decide what success is. So, one client may consider success to be. That they sell more long-distance service. Another client could be retaining you on their broadband service. Another client could be pushing more credit card applications through a banking, uh, you know, a bank set up or something like that, right? So every client gets to go back and set the level of success or determine what success is for a particular client.

MARK WRIGHT 05:54

That’s super interesting, Orlando, because I think one of the biggest frustrations we all have when we deal with call centers is that agent that just doesn’t understand what we’re trying to say and doesn’t quite get, get it. And we keep having to restate, no, no, no, no. What I mean is I want you to X, Y, Z. And boy, when you get that customer service agent that gets you and it’s smooth and it’s easy and it’s like, wow, I would, I would pay almost for that experience.

ORLANDO HAMPTON 06:21

It’s so true. It’s the thing about contact centers. And I say this as like a long-time contact center veteran is that what we’ve tried to achieve in contact centers is effectively a replication strategy. We hire Mark. Mark is successful. We try to hire 10 other people like Mark, and we try to put those people on the phones. We train them with the same material. We give them all a script so that they say the same words. We may even measure how long they talk to ensure that they’re talking for the same amount of time. And with all of that standardization, you still end up with performance that’s variable. Some agents are at the top, some agents in the middle, some agents at the bottom. And what I would actually say is that that missing piece there is in fact the personality. It’s the actual characteristics that particular agent is bringing to a situation. So, if you call an airline to book a flight and there’s 2,000 agents at that airline, you might make an assumption that all of those agents fly. That would be an incorrect assumption. In fact, some of those agents are probably afraid of flying. And if you happen to get one of those agents, they’re less likely, for instance, to put you on a connecting flight, even if it would save you 50%. Because in their mind, who would want to fly two flights? So, so there’s these little, tiny things, these personality connections, uh, that can actually make something go incredibly well or incredibly poor. And it’s really nuanced, but if you can capture it and do it well, you can do better than random. And that’s what we do.

MARK WRIGHT 07:52

Wow. When you said you’re a veteran of the call center industry, you really are. You had many, many years in the trenches, many, many years of, of calling people and interacting on the phone. We’ll get to that in a little bit in this interview Orlando. But I’d love to go back to your childhood because I think who you are today really was shaped by uh your mother, by the childhood that you have, the growing up, the schools that you went to. Take me back and uh talk about young Orlando back in the day. And what were some of the seminal moments? I know that school and uh transferring to another school was a big turning point in your life. So, what, what was childhood like for you Orlando?

ORLANDO HAMPTON 08:33

It’s a very big deal. So, I’m gonna I’ll try to start at the beginning and I’m gonna start with something that, you know, maybe a little shocking to the listeners, but I have an intention on why I’m saying that. So, you know, as a child, you know, I would say I’m not a book that can effectively be judged by its cover, right? So, my grandmother was a heroin addict. My father was born addicted to heroin. Uh, he was actually prescribed methadone to ease his heroin addiction by the time he was in fifth grade. My mother had a severe speech impediment. It actually prevented her from speaking clearly for most of her childhood and well into her teens. My father was in and out of prison, mainly for petty crimes that had to do with his drug addiction. Um, you know, I lost some of my best friends to gang violence, uh, before I even started high school, uh, and all of that might sound like it’s really kind of a bad situation, but that isn’t to suggest that my youth was terrible, uh, far from it. Actually, uh, my parents were incredible. My father was such an inspirational figure, even behind bars. Uh, so he’s teaching, uh, inmates to read and to write. It’s helping many high school dropouts gather, get their diplomas. He ran a chess club that competed against local colleges. Uh, when he was an inmate, uh, he was a voracious reader with book stack to the ceiling, uh, whether it be a cell or any room that he was ever in, uh, I watched some of the seemingly toughest people in the world just melt when they made the connection that you know, I was the son of Edward Hampton. Uh, sadly, his most productive years coincided with incarceration because it was in those moments that he was not saddled with an addiction, uh, that he had had since birth. Um, my mother is my biggest inspiration, uh, biggest cheerleader in the world. Uh, my mother worked every day, uh, paid all the bills. Put the food on the table, manage the household at the same time. One of the reasons that I’m so passionate about women in business, for instance, is that I saw it every day real time. Uh, you know, I saw it every single day. My mother poured into me everything and anything that I’ve done well in life. It’s rooted in some sacrifice that she made. Um, if you go back to, you know, the story around my school, um, I won an award, uh, in fourth, uh, in the eighth grade, I won an award. So, I had the fourth highest score for an eighth-grade student in Pennsylvania for Math. Uh, and it was kind of a big deal. You know, my school district was happy about it. It was like they had never had a student win this award. And they had a little ceremony for me, uh, in the principal’s office and they had my mother come in and we sat in the principal’s office. And, you know, I was, you know, happy, you know, made my mother happy and the teacher seemed to be happy. Um, but my mother, I could slowly see that she was kind of becoming more and more horrified by what was going on. And that was because the school actually said directly that they wouldn’t be telling anyone I won the award. Uh, intentionally because they wanted to protect me, uh, and they made the decision, uh, that, you know, it’d be better off to just have some private ceremony. And my mother just didn’t get that. She’s like, what kind of school is this? Where, uh, if it got out that my son was like some kind of math prodigy, it would be bad for him. Now, I actually intuitively understood that, uh, that it wouldn’t be the greatest thing for me to be known in school as a kid who had some like incredibly high math score. Uh, but that was unacceptable to my mother. Uh, and she decided right then that I was going to go to a different school. We looked at a private school and actually went down, you know, taking an entrance exam to get into a private school. Only then did I realize that it was going to be so expensive that my mother was going to have to take another job. And so we had to come up with another plan. And that plan ultimately was actually going to another school district. So, I ended up using a person’s address. It was actually a friend of my grandmother’s from church. Uh, I used her address, uh, to go to school in, you know, a better district, uh, and that’s how I ended up, uh, in a better high school, uh, than I had grown up in.

MARK WRIGHT 12:47

Wow. I want to get back to your father. When you were a kid, did you recognize those talents and those abilities that your dad had or was the fact that he was incarcerated, was that, was that kind of traumatic and, and just something that you couldn’t see past the incarceration?

ORLANDO HAMPTON 13:07

It was actually surprisingly not very traumatic. Uh, it was, you know, I, I didn’t know any different, uh, and he was in and out. So, he would disappear for a few months and then come back. And so, I kind of get used to that as a child. Um, the, the thing that was, like, really shocking to me was, you know, I just like most people had a perception that, you know, people in jail are criminals, right? And that the jails are full of people who are kind of career criminals. And, uh, you know, they’ve been planning crimes, executing crimes. And what I learned at a fairly young age from just spending time kind of going back and forth is that, you know, about a third of the people in prison are actually in there for some decision they made in probably 10 seconds. Something happened and they reacted to that situation. And now they’re sitting there, uh, for 10 years. So, uh, when you think about some of the things that go on in prison, so some of the violence and all that kind of thing, part of the reason why that exists is because about a third of the inmates are not actually prisoners. They’re just normal people. Uh, they’re not actually criminals. They were living normal lives, and they made some poor decision in a very short amount of time. And now they’re like living with a bank robber, uh, or a murderer. And so, and so it’s a very strange situation to be in. And I, and I think for a lot of us, we lose empathy for that because we assume, well, if you’re in prison, you must be a pretty bad person yourself, but that’s not really true. It’s not actually the case of who’s there.

MARK WRIGHT 14:36

So when you were in school, there’s a story about plastic wear. That you told me that I found just fascinating that that really changed your perspective on life. What what grade were you Orlando when this happened?

ORLANDO HAMPTON 14:52

So that happened to me in 11th grade, and actually I should, I should back up a little bit and tell you a little give you some context around my experience here because I think this is just helpful, right? So when I went to school to this new school in ninth grade I effectively had a perfect transcript. I hadn’t seen a grade on a report card that was less than an A since I was in third grade. And by the way, I still dispute that B that I received at heart. It was questionable. I entered high school with, like, almost no confidence socially, right? I didn’t dress like the other kids. I certainly wasn’t in the same economic bracket as the kids in my new school. Um, I didn’t know anyone. So, I, you know, all these kids that know each other, they all grew up and they went to grade school together. And so I was kind of an outsider, but I was incredibly confident in my academic prowess. I, I kind of viewed myself at that time as a prodigy and I thought, okay, well, you know, I may not be like socially or, you know, fit in with everybody. It may be a little awkward, but I’m going to like blow these people away when I get there and they see how smart I am because like I’m just going to like change everything. Well, it didn’t actually work out like that. I, I get to the school, and you know, I start, you know, my, my first week at the school and you know, they like put me in a bunch of classes and it was kind of funny to me because it was like, okay, we’re going to put you like in an algebra one class. And I’m thinking, well, you know, these people obviously don’t realize that I took a trigonometry class last year and I finished with an A and that’s like three levels beyond this and you know, soon that they’ll realize that I’m a, I’m a genius and I kind of started my first week and I was struggling a bit and I remember being in a Spanish class where it was supposed to be an introductory Spanish class. But all of my, all my fellow students were just like speaking Spanish with the teacher. And I was like, wait, did we, did we learn yet? Like, how does, how does everyone already speaking? And I, and I realized that they have been taking like, you know, Spanish classes in seventh grade and eighth grade building up into high school. And as I was kind of sitting there, I heard this announcement come over and they said, you know, Orlando Hampton, can you please come down to the guidance counselor’s office? And I thought, oh, this is the moment. This is the moment where, you know, they obviously have my transcripts and they probably figured out that, you know, they have a genius on their hands. And I kind of proudly walked down to the guidance counselor’s office. And, and when I get in, it’s the guidance counselor and the principal, uh, which I didn’t expect to see, but I thought, oh, well, they must be really stunned. Uh, and so they’ve called out all the big guns to see what I’m going to say here. And so, I sit down in front of them and the guidance counselor starts and he says, he says, you know, Orlando, he says, you know, you have, you know, we, I had taken an admittance exam to get in because I was new to the school district. They want to figure out where it was. And he said, you have the single highest math score of any student that has applied to this school this year. And I kinda, I kinda tried to pretend like I was surprised, but like, I wasn’t surprised. I was like, of course I had, I, I knew that. Why did it take you guys so long to know this? And then he said, and also you have the lowest English score of any student that’s ever applied in the history of this school.

MARK WRIGHT 18:18

Oh, my goodness.

ORLANDO HAMPTON 18:20

And it just went silent. And I didn’t know what to say. And he said, and we just wanted to know how that was possible. And then they, they said, look, your transcripts have arrived. And they said, we don’t know what is going on with your transcript. You’ve taken all of these advanced classes, but you never took any of the basic classes and you’re never going to graduate in time. Now, keep in mind, I’m in 9th grade and these people are saying, you’re not going to graduate from high school because you don’t have enough, enough of these courses. And so, in 9th grade and 10th grade and 11th grade, I went to summer school, the straight A student. I had to go to summer school and make up all these classes that no one, you know, had ever decided at my other school district where we’re even necessary. And, you know, you talk about a humbling experience when my 9th grade year, when I went to summer school, I literally was in a class with like a bunch of 6th graders. Like we were, we were reading the pledge of allegiance every day because, because I was so far behind on some of the pre classes. They’re like, you didn’t take civics. You know, where are your intros to language? How did you get into a trigonometry class without ever taking algebra? And so, I just had to take one thing after another. And so, so that was, my experience very much in the school was, you know, I call it like Forrest Gump. I don’t know if you remember when Forrest Gump would go around and learn new things. They just kind of blow his mind. Well, I spent at least three out of my four high school years. As that, that character, right? Like they, they would show me the student parking lot. They would say, this is the parking lot for students. And I would say, oh, that’s, that’s pretty cool. Like when your parents come and they would say, no, no, these are for students. And I said, I don’t understand what you mean. They say, well, this is where the students park their cars. And like, I had never even considered that students might have cars. Um, I didn’t have a car in my whole family. So, the idea that students would have had a car was like, well, I, I didn’t understand that I didn’t know that was a thing. And so, I, I kind of constantly was like bombarded with this new information. And I mean, like things that sound very basic. I remember one of my classmates, and said that, you know, he had a pipe that burst in his house. And I said, well, you know, certainly you called the landlord. And he said, no, no, we own the house. And I’m like, oh, you’re the landlord. He’s like, no, we own the house. And I was like, wow, like That’s new. I, I never met anybody who, who owned the house that they lived in. And so, this kind of led me all the way around to a few years later, by the way, I didn’t see another A on my report card until I was in 11th grade. So, so I, I struggled mightily in 9th and 10th grade, uh, you know, just trying to keep up. And so, in 11th grade, this is at the end of the year now. And so, I’m pretty versed at this point and like learning new information and I’ve learned to be comfortable being uncomfortable, and just asking questions that I would have found really awkward three years before.

MARK WRIGHT 21:24

Yeah, because you’re like a fish out of water. I mean in in many, many ways. You’ve just been parachuted into this very foreign environment, but good, good on your mother for recognizing that the level of education that you would get there would be so much more rich, right?

ORLANDO HAMPTON 21:38

It’s, it’s totally the case. I was I was on my way to graduating possibly as a valedictorian with straight A’s and having no possible chance of succeeding in college or maybe even getting into a college.Uh, and you know, it was one of the first lessons for me around, oh, actually, I thought all schools were the same. I, I thought if you went to school and you got an A, that was the same as going to school anywhere else. But I realized that in my previous school district, um, part of the challenge they had was just, you know, they were trying to cheat, you know, students in class. So just showing up for class was like worth some points doing your homework was like, hey, you did the homework. Here’s an A, don’t worry about whether or not it was actually completed or whether or not it was actually correct. And so, I didn’t realize that the standards had been lowered so much that these A’s that I was producing were you know, essentially, like, we’ll give you these A’s because you’re well behaved. Uh, and, and I didn’t learn that until I got to this next spot. And so, so I, I get to the end of my 11th grade year. At this point, I’m used to this now, right? I’ve asked, I’ve asked a million questions, uh, about a million different things to people.And on my final day of school in the 11th grade, I had this system where I would actually wait after school until the school bus is left. Uh, before I would start to walk home, and the reason why is that I live in the school district. And so, I would actually walk home, and all the kids would go by me on the school bus, or they would drive past me in their own cars or with their parents.And it was just embarrassing. I was like, okay, I’m gonna. So, I came up with a system of, I used to get to school really early, and I used to stay around the school and leave late after the buses left. And so, this was the actual last day of school. The buses were gone. And there was an upperclassman, a senior who has just graduated from school, and he was just kind of waiting around and I knew him, and I asked him what he was waiting for.And he said he was waiting for his father and that his father, you know, was going to take him to Maryland and they had to like rush to the airport. So, his father would be right here. And I was like, okay, you know, and then he said, there he is. And he looks up in the sky and there’s a helicopter approaching the school.And it took me a second to realize to make the connection that his father was actually in the helicopter. I said, wait, your father like took a helicopter ride to come get you. And he said, well, he has a helicopter. I said, your father has a helicopter. He says, well, it’s not really his, it’s his company’s, but he runs the company so he could use it.And I’m like, wow, this, this is amazing. Like, you know, even after three years, I haven’t seen this. Well, he, the helicopter lands and by the way, it landed on a helipad, uh, that was like right next to the school that I promise you right up into that moment. I thought it was some kind of track and field circle.I had no idea that that was a place to land helicopters. So, I was like, wow. And so, he had went back in school and his father jumps out and he walks over. And so, at this point I’m ready. And I say, sir, look, please don’t take this the wrong way. I hope this doesn’t offend you, but I noticed that you have a helicopter.What do you do? Like, how, how did you get a helicopter? And the root of that is at that moment in my life, I kind of thought that all wealthy people, uh, were either famous, uh, or they may be invented something, or maybe somebody left them some money. Like I just didn’t know a lot about wealth creation and what people had.And you know, this guy, I don’t know if it was just the way I asked him. He kind of took some sympathy on me. I And he said, you know, son, he reached into his pocket and he pulled out a plastic spoon and a plastic fork. And he said, I make these, and I said, I’m confused. He said, he says, I make plastic ware and I sell it to every school district in Pennsylvania, uh, in every hospital in New Jersey.And I’m, you know, just trying to get a deal to sell it to all the school districts of Maryland. Which is why we have to rush there right away. And I’m here today in a helicopter. And I’m like, well, you know, can you, like, how did you, did you invent forks? Like, I’m thinking maybe I’m with the guy who invented, you know, forks and spoons.

MARK WRIGHT 25:57

For this fork, the hybrid.

ORLANDO HAMPTON 26:00

Exactly. And he’s like, he’s like, no, I, I didn’t invent this. I just make them. And, you know, I have, I have a factory and, you know, my whole deal is, you know, just trying to get business development and getting deals and, you know, getting long term relationships with people. And I, I just, I just remember like at that point, his son had came out and they were like heading off to the helicopter where he left me with the spoon and the fork, he actually handed it to me and I carried that around with me for the entire summer, my entire 11th grade summer, sitting in summer school and everywhere else every day. I kept this fork and spoon with me, and I couldn’t wait to tell people the story. I, if it was like, I was looking for reasons to like fit this in that I knew a guy who had a helicopter and he got it from making plastic ware. And the reason why this story was so important to me, the reason why it’s important to tell people is that, you know, it was new information for me, right? I, I learned something new. I learned that actually, you know, a guy making plastic ware, uh, ives a life that is far more extravagant than people that I thought were like very successful who might have been like drug dealers, for instance. It’s like, wow, like, I know people who are actually risking their lives. Uh they’re, you know, they are, they have, you know, rival gangs that they have to deal with. They’re running from the police. Uh, their lives are in danger, uh, because of their profession. And they don’t live like this. They don’t have helicopters. They’re not even close. In fact, there’s, there’s kind of a fallacy, uh, about drug dealing. Uh, it’s that most drug dealers, uh, live with their parents. Uh, most drug dealers have minimum wage jobs that actually helps to supplant their income because drug dealing is a pyramid scheme. The people at the bottom make no money. They take on all the risk and just slowly rises to the top where you get all of the money and none of the risk. And so, you know, there’s a narrative out there, right? That drug dealers live this fabulous life. They, they ride around on yachts. That is not true. This is not a thing. I actually understood that. Um, but I knew that they didn’t understand that, hey, you could be selling forks and knives. And you could have a much better life than this. Uh, and so that became my thing. I was, you know, I, I told that story so many times and in so many places, uh, I became known for it. I probably still have that fork and knife somewhere. I’m almost sure.

MARK WRIGHT 28:38

So, you go to college. Um, and how did you end up getting into the call center industry? Because I think most of us think of that job as probably one of the worst jobs you could possibly have in that you call people you don’t know, and they yell at you and say no and slam the phone down. But how did you get into call center work?

ORLANDO HAMPTON 28:57

It’s true. So, um, in college, I worked, uh, the entire time. And again, this was a thing where you know, I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. Uh, and so, uh, it, I actually kind of thought that I would go to college, take out these loans, you’d go to school and then somehow you find a job and then you have to like pay back the loans. And when I get that like immediate first bill, I was like still in school and I was like, wait, I thought these came four years later. It’s like, no, you have to, you have to start buying books and you have to start doing stuff right now. And so, I was like, well, okay. And so, I had a series of jobs. I worked at Wendy’s, uh, I folded clothes at JCPenney’s. I worked in like men’s sweaters. I still am pretty good on folding sweaters to this day. Uh, and then I worked at a toy store, uh, and I actually stocked shelves. And so, uh, my freshman year of college, I actually stock shelves from 10 PM to 10 AM And I would go directly from stocking shelves. to school every day and take classes, then try to get a little sleep in and go back and stock these shelves from 10 PM to 10 AM. And at some point, I, you know, I’m old enough to remember newspapers. I don’t know how many people in the audience will remember that, but I was looking through a newspaper and there was a help wanted thing for a contact center. And I said, well, you know, I don’t know what this is, but it’s probably easier than, you know, cutting open boxes and stacking toys on the shelf, uh, from 10 PM to 10 AM. And I went to apply, uh, at a telemarketing company and, you know, I got the job. Uh, it paid $1 an hour more than I was making for stocking shelves. And I was, you know, I was like, wow, I get to sit in an air-conditioned room and just, you know, talk and I’m going to make more money. And that started my telemarketing career. Uh, the first thing I ever did was nonprofit. Uh, so I actually make calls for mothers against drunk driving, uh, which is still out there today, drunk driving, by the way, is, uh, still the leading cause of death, uh, and traffic accidents. So, you know, mad is still out there doing this work. And I was actually cold calling people to ask for donations to mothers against drunk driving. Um this is, I didn’t know this at the time, but now looking back on it, this is the most difficult call that you could make. Uh, you were actually calling someone, you know, you’re uninvited, you’re calling them, and you were attempting to ask them for money, and they don’t know anything about you or why you called. And so, the entire thing comes down to how you sound. Nobody could see you. They didn’t know anything about your reputation for all they knew you were calling from your kitchen and telling them to send you $10. And so convincing someone to send you money. And a situation like that is incredibly difficult. Uh, and in fact, like, you know, I, I use this example with folks in your normal life, if you were told no, like three times in one day. You just went home, and they said, Mark, you said, hey, can you have that remote? I said, no. You said, oh, can we have this for dinner? No. He said, hey, that no. You’d be like, wow, this thing is going terrible, right? This was, this is a really rough day. Well, outbound telemarketing, you can get three no’s back to back like that in 30 seconds. Uh, you know, in, in many days, you know, you’d go home having, you know, 200 no’s, uh, that comes in and, but eventually you learn, you learn these things about, you know, communicating with just your voice, the tone of your voice, the inflection, right? Uh, you know, if I say to you, uh, Mark on your way home, uh, do you think you might be able to stop and get some milk? That, that rise of my inflection at the end, that little milk, that actually signals to you that I don’t mind if you don’t do it. I’m just asking you, could you do it? But if you don’t do it, it’s okay. Uh, if I say to you, Mark, before you come home, pick up some milk. There’s, it’s almost the same words, but that actually implies that you do not come in this house without milk, right? I am directing you to this milk. And so, you learn these little things, right? If you put your chin down, for instance, you lower your inflection. So, you actually can’t talk in a high voice with your chin down. And so, so you actually learn these things around how to communicate and how to get these things across. You learn about, you know, objection responses, and you know, you hear a dog barking in the background, or someone has a baby and how do you deal with those particular things? So, I actually ended up learning a ton of skills because if you can sell people on the phone with gesture voice. When you get to get a chance to sell something, and people get to look at your smile and look at your fancy suit or they can test drive the car and they can kick the tires. All of that stuff is easier, uh, than just calling somebody up saying, hey, gimme money.

MARK WRIGHT 34:09

So, you found your secret weapon really was your communication ability, right?

ORLANDO HAMPTON 34:13

For sure. For sure. And it’s, you know, it’s, it was honed over, you know, a long time. I spent, you know, probably a year and a half, you know, making these calls. And so, I started off with, you know, nonprofit stuff. But eventually I moved into commercial calls. And so, I was like eventually calling people to sell them long distance service or, you know, try to retain their long-distance service as people are calling in to cancel. And you learn like, there’s so many lessons. One of the lessons I learned for instance, is that no matter how good a call goes or how poorly a call goes. The next customer is completely unaware of that, right? So, when you get into that next call, it doesn’t matter. The last person could have cursed you out, called you a bunch of names. When you get into that next call, if you go in and you’re down and you’re defeated and you sound like everyone is telling you, no, today, you give permission to that next person to tell you, no, as well, you already sound defeated. If you go in and you’re positive and you’re upbeat and you’re asking, hey, be a part of this mission that everybody else is already a part of, then that positivity carries over, but that’s totally up to you. It actually has nothing to do with the previous call because the other person doesn’t know. And so, this, this ability to reset yourself. Uh, and do it in a very short period of time was a skill that I learned at that time. And I still use that to this day, uh, of, you know, being able to look past a negative situation and get to the next situation without carrying that baggage with you

MARK WRIGHT 35:48

Yeah. My father-in-law spent his whole career coaching at the high school level. And when one of my sons was playing basketball, he offered some advice and he, he did, he normally doesn’t give advice, unsolicited advice, but he gave my son the advice. He said, I should be able to come to one of your games in the middle of the game and look at you on the court. And I should not be able to tell what the score is. He said, if you’re up by 30 points or down by 30 points, I shouldn’t be able to tell that. And it’s kind of like your analogy with the phone calls, regardless of what’s happening, your job is to show up in the present and be as good as you can be and not worry about what just happened or what you hope will happen, but just to be in that moment, right?

ORLANDO HAMPTON 36:35

: It’s, it’s totally the case. And it’s, it’s one of these things where, you know, I, not that I want to ban or sentence everybody to, you know, a year of outbound telemarketing, uh, but you learn so much about, you know, yourself, you learn the impact that you can have on other people. Uh, you learn that you know, there’s a there’s a thing about being a thermostat or a thermometer. Uh, and a thermometer, uh, is a person who matches the energy in the room. They can tell you what the temperature is in the room. If you go in a room and you see them yelling, you know people are yelling in this room. Uh, and they will raise their level or lower their level to whatever is happening in the room. And then you have the thermostat, right? These are the people who set the temperature in the room. They go in a room where, you know, everybody’s quiet and then suddenly they got the place jumping, right? They go in a room where everybody’s loud. They get everybody to quiet down because they are the thermostat. And learning the difference between being a thermometer and being a thermostat is one of the skills, actually, that I learned way back in the day of telemarketing, because you could be a thermometer. You could get into a room, and you could just go along with whatever’s happening in that room, or you could declare, hey, I’m actually going to change the temperature, uh, in this room, I’m going to make this person happy that I called them and interrupted them and asked them for this. Uh, and so it’s a big part. And I mean, like, look, that’s great advice, actually, that, you know, your face should be the same, uh, because, and the truth of the matter is, is that your next customer doesn’t actually care, right? So, like they don’t actually care if your last call was poor, if your last sales call was great and you had this great connection and you can, you know, you convince these people and you sold them, you know, a bunch of enterprise software and everything is great. The next customer doesn’t care. So, so you carrying any kind of emotion into that is just a waste of time because they’re not feeling that.

MARK WRIGHT 38:39

Yeah. So, as a call center worker, you kind of got forced by a supervisor to take a managerial role. You did that. You were very successful. You really learned how to motivate people that led to a job in the banking industry. Um, and you really started rising up through the ranks. Orlando, how did all of these job experiences get you to Afiniti and being one of the very first employees at Afiniti?

ORLANDO HAMPTON 39:04

You know, so it was an interesting journey, uh, because you know, at every stop, uh, I, I didn’t really know what the next stop was. So, I, I just kind of expanded in these roles. When, when I first got into management, uh, for instance, like you, I, you know, I was naive about it. I thought management was curative things that I used to do as an employee. And I did those things very well. And now as a manager, I’m simply going to just, you know, teach other people to replicate the things that I did. Um, one of the things I quickly learned in management is you have to learn to coach people who are actually better at the job than you. Uh, they know more, uh, about the job than you and they’re better at it than you. Uh, there’s a, there’s a weird thing in, you know, in corporate politics or, or just, you know, corporate leadership. And that is, the higher you go in an organization, the less you know about what’s actually happening in the organization, right? So, so, you know, as, as you get more and more promotions, you actually get further away from the nuance, from the things that are going on. And, you know, I get this all the time from, you know, young managers and they’re like, well, how, how am I supposed to coach people? When the people are better than me, or you get this from employees, right? People point up at the boss and they say, well, you know, I know more than Orlando, right? Why is he the boss? And my answer to that is, well, that is why I’m the boss. Like, like I’m only going to surround my p, myself with people who know more than me. Otherwise, I could just do the job myself. So, if the people around me don’t actually know their jobs better than I do, then I failed as a manager, but that’s something I just, I learned along the way, right? That never, nobody taught me that. It never came up. That wasn’t a thing. Um, when, when I got into this banking world, I moved to San Francisco. And so, this was kind of my first like real job, uh, where, you know, I was kind of, I was living in a new place. Uh, at this point in my life, I was what you would call a townie. So, I grew up in Pittsburgh. Uh, I never left Pittsburgh. I went to school to University of Pittsburgh. I just stayed there. I’ve been on one flight, uh, by the time I was 24 years old. Uh, and for, you know, I’m 49 now, and I’ve been to nearly every continent in the world and certainly every state, uh, in the U.S. Uh, but I’ve lived two very distinct lives, the first life as like a townie that didn’t go anywhere in the second life as a person that went all over the place. And so when I moved to San Francisco, for me, In many ways, that was, you know, if I moved to the moon, it would have been the same, it was, it was like, that’s, that’s the distance, that’s how far away, uh, it felt and, you know, I’d got there and, you know, I started to learn that, you know, okay, the management things, the things that I’ve learned to communicate to call center agents actually apply in this other world, this corporate world where, you know, I’m still coaching people and some of these people still have more skills than I do. Uh, and you know, communication and building trust are like super important. And so, this was my world. I was, you know, a young, uh, you know, I, I, I moved pretty quickly in my career. So, I was often like, even though I was, you know, oftentimes the manager, everyone on my team would be much older than me. Uh, and so I was like, you know, young and upcoming. I was kind of constantly bringing in new information. Um, when I lived in San Francisco, this was in the middle of the dot-com bubble. So, every day people were coming in and saying I’m leaving and going to a startup, and I didn’t do it. Uh, I was too conservative. I felt at the time that like you know, I finally got this real job. I’m working in a bank. Why would I leave and, you know, auction off items from the East Bay? And they’re like, no, no, it’s called eBay. It’s an open. Yeah, I don’t know what that means. And so, I didn’t do it. And I stayed at the bank, and I watched the dot-com bubble go all the way up and then come down. And I said to myself, if I ever have an opportunity, uh, to, to do something again. I’m going to do it. Uh, and I think that’s just that might have been a cop out. That’s an easy thing to say to yourself. You don’t expect the Internet to come along again. And so, you know, years later when I’m, you know, I was working in a bank. I was working in New York. I had a corner office. I had 20,000 contact center agents, uh, you know, between internal centers, BPO’s and a big team of people reporting to me. And I got this, you know, it came across my desk as, you know, a company that had this idea around using artificial intelligence to pair people to pair people in contact centers. Um, keep in mind, you know, 16 years ago when you would say artificial intelligence. People would just start looking for the robot, right? It’s like nowadays everybody’s talking about artificial intelligence, but that wasn’t a thing back then. And, you know, I looked at that opportunity and it occurred to me that it was such a good idea. That it was definitely going to work. And if I didn’t do it, I would be looking back on this 10 years from now, wondering why did I let another internet pass me by? Uh, and so I jumped on this artificial intelligence revolution 15 years ago. And look, there’s been lots of ups and downs like between 15 years ago and now. But I think now when you look at how prolific AI is and how much everybody’s talking about it, the kind of step change that it’s making in the world, I think that was a good decision. Uh, but you know, at the time it was questionable. Uh, you know, I left a big bank. Uh, I worked on Wall Street. Uh, so when I, when I told my family, I was leaving and going to work. You know, at a startup company where I was going to pair together people using artificial intelligence. I think half of my family think I was fired. I had the back.

MARK WRIGHT 45:01

Come on. You were just tell us you got fired, right?

ORLANDO HAMPTON 45:04

They’re like, you’re going to leave your job on Wall Street and do what? Yeah. Uh, you know, use machine learning to pair together people. But, um, you know, ultimately I, I, I learned so much, uh, from being like in a startup and I’ll tell you, Mark, something that’s interesting is, you know, my job today as chief customer officer is I’m, I’m working with some of the biggest companies in the world. So, I’m still very much tied to Corporate America, and you know, how these corporations work. And so, the interesting thing about being at a startup is that I actually learned a ton about corporate America from being at a startup, right? So, so cause when you’re in corporate America, you kind of don’t know what you don’t know, right? So, it’s like, you know, this is just the way things are set. So, like in Corporate America, leadership is on a ladder. You normally report to one person, and that one person normally reports to one other person. Uh, and the challenge with that, though, is that it becomes a funnel, right? Because it only takes one person to say no. One, if you can’t sell an idea to your manager, the idea’s dead, right? So, so it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter how good of an idea it is. It doesn’t matter if your manager’s manager would have thought it was a good idea. If you can’t sell it to your manager, it dies right there. Right? And because of that, Corporate America has kind of forced people like me to try to sell from the top down instead of the bottom up, because they basically made it impossible for any information to kind of flow from the bottom up. Uh, and so now you have everybody trying to come in and like, you know, get this pressure coming down, but when you come down, that creates its own issues, right? People don’t like to be told what to do. They don’t like that the boss is bringing them something. They don’t like that you’ve talked to their boss before you’ve talked to them. And so, uh, again, I feel like that telemarketer who’s like calling somebody who didn’t ask me to call again. And, you know, I got to convince them again, that this is worthwhile.

MARK WRIGHT 47:06

Orlando, what advice would you give young people just coming out of college right now? It seems like change really is the norm, especially when you think about the impacts that AI is going to have. What would you give as advice to, to set them up for success in life and in work.

ORLANDO HAMPTON 47:24

Yeah. So, um, one thing is ask questions, right? So, you know, that, that this idea of being comfortable and being, uh, being comfortable in uncomfortable situations, this is an incredibly valuable skill. Uh, and you know, you won’t know unless you ask. Uh, unless you talk about it. So, you know, ask those questions. Um, another thing that I would really kind of key in on, and I’m big on this, is information is power, uh, and networking is something that is incredibly powerful. It’s incredibly important to me. And this is something that I don’t think that we teach well, networking is something that is passed down in families. Not passed down in universities, not passed down through classes, right? Your, your parents either teach you how to network effectively, or you go into the world, not knowing how to do it. And networking is kind of a secret sauce of how people get things done. Uh, so I’m going to say something here that it may be a little jarring, but who you know, can be as valuable as what you know. And I think that that stuns a lot of people, people, there’s kind of a visual reaction. You don’t want to believe that you want to believe that if you know these things, uh, this will ultimately be better for you. And what I’m here to tell you is that people do not buy products from companies. They buy products from other people. And when you go in and sell someone a product, yes, they are looking for the benefits of their company, but I promise you, they are trying to figure out, are you trustworthy? Can they trust you? Are you, are you the kind of person that would sell them something that could be of risk to them? Uh, because again, think about what I said about that ladder system in corporate America. If, if I come into your office with a great idea, I say, Mark, I got an amazing idea. This is going to make your business, you know, tons of money. It’s going to be amazing. And you like the idea, but then you take it, you put it in your drawer, and you’d never open it again. Nothing will happen to you. It’s just, no one is going to ever come to you and say, Mark, why didn’t you do that idea? But if you implement that idea and it doesn’t work, you could very well be fine. So, we have taught a generation of leaders to be fast followers. To not do anything, to wait until somebody else does it. Uh, it’s one of the big questions I get, I talk to people and they say, well, who else is doing it? Right? So, so it’s, we, we’ve taught people not to innovate. And I actually think that for young people, we have to go back to that. We have to go back to innovate. We have to go back to swinging and missing. It’s okay to swing and miss. In fact, not swinging and missing probably indicates that you’re not taking big enough chances. Uh, and you’re not actually doing a bunch of things. Um, the, the last thing I’ll say about this point, and, and this is, this is probably what my main passion is. It’s I realized because of my background and, you know, this is the reason I started this story about, you know, what my background is, is because I want people to realize that the potential, uh, is there in lots of people, right? I am a firm believer in that, you know, talent is evenly distributed but opportunity is not. And so, I have a pretty keen eye for finding this kind of potential in people. And one of the mistakes that we make, we make this in education, we make this in job interviews, we judge people based on where they are, as opposed to how far they’ve come. Uh, and because of that, this is why, you know, you look at people and you say, okay, well, you know, this person had a B on the, on the quiz and this person had an A on the quiz. Well, if I told you that the person who got a B on the quiz, that English was their second language, uh, that they were a migrant farm worker up until two years ago, and now they’re getting a B, and I told you the person that had an A has been going to private schools all their lives, they have a tutor, then suddenly it doesn’t look the same. And, and I promise you this, this is the same thing in job interviews, it’s the same thing in positions. Um, if I can mark out, I’ll give you a story that I, I talk about. Um, so, you know, in the African American community, the barbershop is somewhat of a sacred place. It’s like, it’s like maybe one of the first uh, social halls, uh, for African Americans when it couldn’t be accepted and, uh, country clubs and things like that. So, the barbershop became that place. It’s the place for banter, uh, discussion, maybe even therapy, uh, in some cases, uh, for people who wouldn’t get therapy, they may be getting it from their barber. And the thing about that barbershop is, there’s certain characters that exist in the barbershop. There is like the entrepreneur, right? The person who owns the barbershop. So, it’s like, wow, that’s an actual business owner, right? There’s somebody there. There’s the workers, the people who are working in that barbershop. Uh, you know, they’re actually doing a lot of the marketing on their own. You don’t hear a lot of commercials for barbershops. You don’t see a lot of things. So, it’s kind of guerrilla marketing. So, you get to meet the marketing people. And then there’s always that thermostat, that person who comes in and changes the temperature, right? It’s normally somebody who is either worked there or they come frequently, right? So, in my barbershop as a kid, uh, the guy’s name was big Mike, uh, and big Mike was the guy who serviced the vending machine, uh, in the barbershop. So, he would come in every day. And as soon as he would hit that door. The people would go crazy. Oh, it’s Big Mike. Now. You have to answer for what you said. You said that Magic Johnson was better than Jordan. Now explain that here. You said that you know Mike Tyson couldn’t lay a glove on Ali in his prime. Didn’t you see Tyson last night explain that here and Big Mike would you know hold court, and everybody loves him. Everybody’s excited when they see him, and when he leaves, you know, we’re sad to see him go. But the thing is big Mike is the vending machine guy. So, he goes next door to the cleaners and they’re happy to see him because he talks about movies with the guy who owns the cleaners. And then he goes next door to the law office, and he has, you know, his own review on a new CD that came out that, you know, everybody else loves, but he doesn’t. And what I learned, what I didn’t know at the time is that Big Mike, actually has an incredibly valuable skill. He just happens to be fixing vending machines. But if he was a software salesperson, if he was a pharmaceutical sales technician and he was showing up in doctor’s offices, he would have the exact same impact on people. They would be thrilled to see him. They’d be happy he was there. They want to listen to him. The only difference is he’d be making 10 times warmer, right? And so and so, so how do you find those Big Mikes? Uh, and you know, I’ve kind of dedicated a career to doing that, right? To finding people, because, you know, I learned this after getting on the startup side is there are tons of people out there who their principal skill is knowing other people is like, you don’t quite know what they do. They’re just kind of like this master networker. And the thing is, a lot of them don’t have innate skills that are like more effective than Big Mike skills. They just have better locations. So, they’re just hanging out in the lobby at a Ritz Carlton. Instead of, you know, the barbershop at Wilkes Barre, Prince of Wales.

MARK WRIGHT 55:12

That’s such a great story, Orlando, um, and I think a lot of us underestimate our ability. We think of skill as just whether you have a law degree or whether you have a medical degree or whether you finished college, and we’ve seen some of the most successful people in the world drop out of college and not finish high school in some, some instances. Um, as an African American Orlando, tell me what it was like rising to the level that you have today, because if we’re honest, Corporate America is still very white, especially at the leadership levels. There’s been some, some headway in DEI over the last few years. Explain from that lens what, what it’s been like and if you have advice for other people of color just starting up.

ORLANDO HAMPTON 55:59

Yeah, I do for sure. Um, it’s challenging, right? So, you know, one thing is, you have to recognize it for what it is, and you have to understand that you may go into rooms and be the only person that looks like you in that room. And so, the imposter syndrome can be high in this particular case, and you feel it, right? It’s like, no one has ever been in this room, and I’m carrying the weight of all these other people into the room with me. If I make a mistake, it’s not just going to be me. It’s going to be like, we tried a black guy. And it didn’t work. So, you know, we have to go another direction. So, there’s a, there’s a weight, uh, that comes with that. One of the things I would say, and, and this is, you know, this is like a good, uh, a good thing I’ve figured out for imposter syndrome. It was something I had to learn about myself, is once you are in the room, there’s no point in you fretting about, you know, not belonging in that particular room. That decision is already made. Somebody made that decision. You know, whoever made that decision to put you in the room, they made that decision. They believe you should be in that room and now you’re in there. So, there’s no point in trying to figure out, like, do I belong in this room? Because you’re already there. And once you’re in the room, that’s showtime. It’s time for you to put forth your best effort and make sure that you’re actually contributing and understanding what’s going on. And look, I talked a little bit about information, and this is, this is one thing I counsel people all the time is I, I consider myself kind of like a Robin Hood of information. Uh, so, you know, we’re Robin Hood kind of, you know, stole from the rich and brought it back to the poor. What I’m actually collecting is information. Uh, if I am around people and there’s information, I am dying to bring that back and give that to people, uh, who otherwise wouldn’t have it. And what I find is that with information, you know, when, when I was in 8th grade and then I, you know, went to a new school in 9th grade, I didn’t change as a person. The opportunity just changed, right? My, my school, my new school was only 2.1 miles away from my house. The only difference was that the average annual income in that school district is 87,000. And where I lived, it was 37,000. Uh, so that two miles of difference, uh, also was like 2.3 times the income. Um, but keep in mind, nothing else changed for me. I didn’t start dressing nicer. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have money. I only had the opportunity. And once you have the opportunity, that’s where you have to do your best, and that’s where you have to put your best foot forward. Um, I am going to say something, though, uh, about, about networking and intentionality. Uh, and, and this is important. In the African American community, um, there’s kind of an elephant in the room about networking. And that is, not only do we not teach it, uh, we may, in fact, discourage it. Because, you know, it’s, there’s, there’s, there’s a, there’s a historical precedent around this on, you know, why this doesn’t happen. Um but there’s a certain baggage that African Americans can carry into a situation like that. And so, I’m going to give you an example about this, right? If, if you work in a corporation and you hire a, uh, a Russian engineer, uh, as like your chief engineering person, um, and then you came back three months later and there were a few more Russian engineers there. That actually wouldn’t be shocking to anyone. You’d say, oh yeah, well we hired, you know, Sergei and he came in and he knew some people in his network, and he brought them in. Um, whereas if you hired an African American and you came back and there were two or three other African Americans there, um, you may get a thing of like, wait, what is this guy doing? Right? Is he, is he only hiring African Americans? Is he, is he, is he somehow being unfair? Is he discriminating against other people? Um, and so we have to, to let go of that kind of baggage, that kind of thing. And it’s okay. We are, the, the, the whole argument for diversity is that if you get different perspectives in the room, uh, you’re liable to work out the best idea. Well, guess what? If you’re an African American, you probably have better access to African Americans who can bring different perspectives. And so, it’s like incumbent on you to actually go out and find people, not because you’re playing favorites, but because this is actually better for everyone. This is part of the reason why we’ve hired African Americans is we want you to dig into your communities and be effective there. The, the other thing, and I was going to say this, like, this is a real story. This just happened to me. Um, I was in a restaurant, uh, with my mother and I looked over and I saw the CEO of like my preferred airline, uh, you know, waiting for a table. And I said to my mother, hey mom, there’s, there’s, uh, the guy’s the CEO, uh, of the airline I fly. I’m going to go over there and talk to him. She said, she said, leave that man alone. You don’t know that man. You’re only going over there because he’s important, and also leave that man alone. And I said, you know what? I have to admit she is right. I don’t know him. I literally don’t know him at all. She’s also right. I am going over there because of who he is, but what she doesn’t understand is that networking is not transactional when you do, when you’re doing, uh, when you’re doing the real work of networking, it’s not transactional, it’s actually being of service. And so that conversation, I approached them, and I said, hello, Sir. I fly your airline three, four days a week. I see you on the video all the time. I just wanted to come over here and thank you. I worry about lots of things when I’m traveling and meetings I have to go to, but I never have to worry about the safety of the flight. That’s because of you and the people on your team. He said, thank you so much. He said, most people who recognize me, they fly a lot, and they want to complain and, and that was it. That was, I wanted nothing from him. I, you know, I left after that, when I left out the restaurant, he gave me a head nod. I nodded back at him. That was it. Two weeks later, I’m at a golf course. I’m, you know, hitting, you know, at a driving range, hitting balls very poorly in all directions except straight. And I hear someone yell over my shoulder that, you know, he still likes the stakes better at the other place, but the golf is better here. I turn around, it’s the CEO of the airline. And we have a conversation, and we talk, and we decide we’re going to play together at some point. And I still don’t want anything from him. There is no transaction to be had. But having the CEO of my preferred airline in my contacts in my network is a valuable thing to do, right? So, you know, it’s not just telling people to network. It’s teaching them how to do it, right? Learn how to do it, learn how to have intentionality, learn that networking is not about transactional relationships, but legitimate relationships where you can be of service to me. Uh, one thing about me and I, my team will tell you this. I, I’m not good enough at my job to fake, uh, to fake relationships, right? So, I’m not good enough to have inauthentic relationships. So, if I meet with a customer or prospect and there’s not a good fit there, I just turn it over to someone else on my team. I don’t fake it, I don’t pretend that I’m interested in them if I’m really not or I don’t try to change myself into somebody they might be interested in. Because authenticity is actually my secret ingredient. If you are in my network, if people know you from my network, then they know that I authentically like you, uh, that I, you know, I’ve given you some kind of stamp. And when somebody comes and says, you know, Orlando, you know, told me that he knew you and wanted me to introduce you, then they’re coming along with my stamp. Uh, and you can best be assured that, you know, they’re a good person and they’ve showed themselves to be that.

MARK WRIGHT 01:03:51

Well, I can’t believe the hour flew by so quickly, Orlando. This has been so great. I’d love to just ask one more question before we wrap up our time together. And that is, you know, our mission is to redeem work and that is to make work better. You know, we believe that you can make money and still honor human beings at the same time. And it really seems like you’ve done that throughout your career. I guess what I’d like to know, Orlando, is what does redeemed work look like to you in your world?

ORLANDO HAMPTON 01:04:18

Yeah, it’s, it’s knowing that, you know, for me, work is freedom. It’s actually doing what you want, when you want to do it, with who you want to do it with. And when you are working at that level, you have found freedom. Uh, if you are approaching work transactionally, right? You work at this place because they pay you this money and if someone pays you $1 more, you would go to the other place. That is not your passion. That is not, that’s not your place. And so, finding your passion, finding your place, that is the key to redeeming work at an individual level, right? It’s, it’s knowing the difference between like a job and a career. I actually didn’t know this growing up. I actually just thought, you know, if you were a doctor, you did that because doctors make a lot of money. I actually, the idea that you wanted to be a doctor, you wanted to help people, it was like, okay, yes, but really you’re doing it because they make a lot of money, And so, I had to learn that finding your passion, uh, is more important, uh, than just, you know, making money. Uh, and so that’s, that’s a big thing for me. It’s also important for me to just tell people like what I do, people don’t know me and they just kind of see me at the airport every week and I’m flying around. And they’re like, I don’t know what this guy does. I don’t know what kind of job.

MARK WRIGHT 01:05:39

He’s probably like selling a plastic forks and knives to somebody.

ORLANDO HAMPTON 01:05:42

It probably is. Yeah. And so, it’s, it’s, you know, one way we can redeem work is by, you know, this podcast is a great example of this is amplifying the message around what people do. Uh, it’s amazing how there are so few narratives around like if go to a career day, uh, my son is in second grade, uh, and if you go into a career day, I promise you it’s the same careers that I was looking at when I was in second grade. It’s like, here’s a doctor. This person’s a teacher. I’m like, you know, where are all these other positions that are wildly successful that no one ever even heard of that? No one knows about. And there’s almost like a place where, like, information is being held and kept back from people. It’s I could go for hours about information Delta, but it’s you know, there’s an information Delta. If one person has more information. So, if you are going into a negotiation with me and I have more information than you, you are almost guaranteed to lose the negotiation, right? So, if you go to buy a car, it’s the third car you bought in your life. You’re buying it from a person who sells three cars every day. They are going to kill you in this negotiation, right? So, so information Delta is like a huge thing. And to be aware of, and I find that so many people are victims of information Delta because they literally just don’t know they actually don’t know. Um, I’ll leave you one thing for, uh, for your audience when you think about work, and this will be wildly uncomfortable for people to, uh, to think about. But, uh, this deal with something like compensation. Compensation, uh, we have convinced people, we’ve convinced poor people that compensation is secret. Uh, that no one should ever know what you make from work. This is what we tell employees, right?

MARK WRIGHT 01:07:37

Oh yeah. When we’re kids, you know, kids often ask, how much money do you make? And your parents are like, stop, don’t ask that question.

ORLANDO HAMPTON 01:07:42

No, no. Yeah, it’s, it’s a secret, right? But, but guess what? Go to any publicly traded company, open up their annual report, and right there, right in the report, Will be the actual compensation of the top five executives in that company. And you might ask yourself, well, why is that? What, what is the advantage of this big telco having their executives compensation there? And I’ll tell you what the advantage is. It’s because if you are in that role, that is hugely valuable information. Imagine you want to go and look for another job. You know, exactly what people make in that job. Imagine you’re negotiating a new contract in your job. You know exactly what your peers are making. So, we’ve only kept this secret from people who make less money. We say your, your, your, your, your salary, your commission, that’s all a secret. And if you don’t tell anyone, that’s the right thing. And guess what? That keeps all of us ignorant. That limits the bargaining and negotiating power of everyone because we’ve convinced ourselves that this is not a thing we should talk about. So, I know that that’ll make people wildly uncomfortable. I, I myself had to fill out some paperwork my freshman year of college. And I called my mother to ask her how much money she made, and she hung up on me. So, I know, I know how people feel about this, but I promise you in your network, like amongst your friends and your close friends, you should talk openly about compensation. You should talk exactly what you made, exactly what the milestones are, how it all worked, and the reason why is all of you are better off because of it. It doesn’t actually change the money that you make because you tell someone. If you’re embarrassed because you don’t make a lot of money, telling someone does not lower the amount of money you make. So, so like getting people uncomfortable, again, comfortable and uncomfortable situations, and that’s one that people can run with. So, uh, we’ll, we’ll see how much I stir up with that, uh, that conversation.

MARK WRIGHT 01:09:48

Well, information is power and, uh, Orlando, I’m just so impressed with your life story and how you show up in the, in the world of work and just the good that you’re trying to do in the world through work. So, this has been an honor and a treat. Thank you so much for spending time with us.

ORLANDO HAMPTON 01:10:04

It’s amazing, Mark. Thank you so much for having me on. I, I’m a big fan of the podcast. I listen every week. Uh, so I’m, I don’t think I’m going to tell my family. I’m just going to have it pop in. Here he is listening to BEATS WORKING again. And I’ll just pop in with my own story. So, looking very much forward to hearing it. And thank you so much for having me on. This has been great. I’m looking forward to, uh, starting next time. I think there’s some, uh, some more things people should, uh, share information about.

MARK WRIGHT 01:10:32

All right. Keep in touch.

ORLANDO HAMPTON 01:10:34

Thank you, Sir.

MARK WRIGHT 01:10:36

I’m Mark Wright. Thanks for listening to BEATS WORKING, part of the WORKP2P family. New episodes drop every Monday, and if you’ve enjoyed the conversation, subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Special thanks to show producer and web editor Tamar Medford. In the coming weeks, you’ll hear from our Contributors Corner and Sidekick Sessions. Join us next week for another episode of BEATS WORKING, where we are winning the game of work.