A Majority Minority Nation
Thursday December 13, 2012 | Filed under:
One of the liveliest discussions at the recent ASI® Power Summit 
concerned a hot-button issue important to so many of you: whether to hire from inside or outside the industry. I used that discussion as a springboard to a favor I asked of the 250 industry movers and shakers gathered in Florida.
In the summit’s closing moments I asked everyone in the audience to hire one minority sometime in the next year. “Don’t hire someone like me,” I said. “We don’t need more 50-year-old white males!”
It’s not surprising so many of you look just like me since white males outnumber everyone else in our industry. But if the presidential election taught us anything, it’s that the country’s demographics are changing – fast.
According to a study released days after the election by the non-partisan Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans backed Obama by huge margins and helped him win. (To read the full report, click here).
Fully 89% of Mitt Romney’s supporters were white non-Hispanics, compared with just 56% of Obama’s. If this industry doesn’t get with the program soon, we’ll lose just like Romney did.
As study after study tells us, people tend to trust and buy from people who look like them, culturally and ethnically. 
So it’s good economic sense for every company in this industry to take an aggressive stance on hiring more minorities. Consider this: if every top distributor hired and trained a minority in 2013, in five years we’d have 25,000 experienced representatives courting new business.
Click here to watch my YouTube video on the subject, which also recaps Power Summit sessions ASI held on building trust and the 2013 industry sales outlook.
In closing, do me a favor: look around your own office and count the number of minorities versus white males. And then let me know what you think of my suggestion by posting a comment or e-mailing me here. I’m also on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
And for more info on the 2013 Power Summit, September 15-17 at the Montage Deer Valley Resort in Park City, Utah, click here. Maybe by the time fall rolls around, I’ll look out and see some new faces in the Power Summit audience.