01
Customer to Producer
They spent sixteen years consuming a curriculum. You’re the first place that has to write one.
For HR, Talent & L&D Leaders
You didn’t
hire wrong.
You hired sharp, credentialed people and watched a lot of them stall. The instinct is to blame the generation. That instinct is expensive and it’s wrong. The problem is the gap between the system that trained them and the one you’re asking them to operate in — and unlike the generation, the gap is something you can actually fix.
60-minute keynote · 45 minutes + 15 minutes Q&A · In person or virtual · Booking Q4 2026 & Q1 2027
The Problem
The readiness gap
has a price tag
Forty-six percent of new hires wash out inside eighteen months. Eighty-nine percent of those failures are behavioral, not technical — they were qualified, and it still didn’t work.
Every departure costs you somewhere between half and twice that person’s salary, and that’s before you count the manager hours, the team drag, and the requisition you have to reopen.
Here’s what makes it fixable: none of that is a competence failure. It’s a transition failure.
School trained your early-career people to work alone, get it perfect, follow the rubric, and wait to be graded. You’re asking them to work in public, ship at good-enough, operate without instructions, and self-assess. Nobody walked them across that line. Not high school, not their university, and — be honest — not your onboarding either.
“This isn’t a generation issue. It’s a transition issue. And your organization has more leverage over it than you think.”
— Kevin Gosa & Bryan Horvath
Your managers feel it every week. Most of them don’t have language for it. That’s what this talk hands them.
The Keynote
The
readiness gap
Why your new hires are struggling — and what your organization can actually do about it.
60 minutes · 45-minute keynote + 15-minute live Q&A · All-hands, leadership summit, or virtual
Kevin Gosa and Bryan Horvath have spent 25 years inside the rooms where cultures are made and early-career professionals quietly come apart. They’ve facilitated the offsites, run the leadership retreats, and been in the debriefs afterward. This keynote is what they’ve concluded.
They reframe the most persistent talent problem in the modern workplace as a structural one — then show the room exactly where the leverage sits. Onboarding design. Manager language. Feedback mechanics. Visibility norms. The unglamorous, high-return stuff that determines whether a promising hire ramps in five months or leaves in fourteen.
It’s built for two rooms at once. Leaders leave with a diagnosis and three interventions. Early-career employees in the audience leave knowing why work has felt the way it’s felt — which is, in practice, the fastest culture win in the room.
What leaders walk out with
The structural diagnosis.
A clear frame for why the school-to-work transition fails, and where onboarding, mentorship, and feedback design close the gap before it becomes a retention line item.
A management language.
Practical wording for coaching early-career employees where they actually are, not where managers assume they should be. The difference shows up in trust and in performance.
The organizational audit.
Five signals your early-career culture is making this worse, and the three highest-leverage moves that produce measurable change inside the first year.
Where it fits
- All-hands and company kickoffs
- HR and talent leadership conferences
- L&D summits
- New manager training programs
- New hire orientation and onboarding cohorts
- Leadership offsites
- Early-career and ERG programming
- CHRO and CPO peer gatherings
Want to go deeper than a keynote? Kevin and Bryan also run manager workshops and cohort sessions built on the same framework. Ask in the form and we’ll scope it to your org.
Listen
What they sound like
Two clips from a conversation about the book. Under three minutes each. This is the room voice — direct, unsentimental, and funnier than the subject deserves.
02
Your Manager Isn’t Your Professor
The habits that earned your new hires A’s are the ones your managers are fighting.
Who They’ve Worked With
Twenty-five years in the room
Kevin and Bryan co-founded NYC Meeting Facilitators and have run hundreds of leadership retreats, strategic offsites, and organizational turning points for Fortune 100 companies, Forbes top-25 charities, government agencies, and universities. They aren’t reporting on this problem. They’ve been hired to clean it up.
What people say afterward
Kevin and Bryan are happy to put you in touch with past clients directly. Ask in the form.
Your Speakers
Kevin & Bryan
They present together. Twenty years working side by side, and it shows on stage.
Gifted in both strategy and saxophone.
Kevin Gosa
Strategic Facilitator · Co-Founder, NYC Meeting Facilitators
Kevin Gosa is a strategic facilitator and co-founder of NYC Meeting Facilitators, partnering with Fortune 100 companies, nonprofits, and government agencies to navigate high-stakes conversations and unlock organizational potential. He has spent 25 years in the rooms where culture is made — and watched the same early-career dynamics play out across every sector and generation. He previously co-authored Fire the Foosball Table.
Engineered Cadillacs. Fronted a rock band. Bakes cakes.
Bryan Horvath
Entrepreneur · Co-Founder, NYC Meeting Facilitators
Bryan Horvath is a facilitator, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Nonprofit Velocity and NYC Meeting Facilitators. He has advised boards and C-suite leaders domestically and internationally, designed high-stakes offsites for Forbes top-25 charities and Fortune 100 companies, and lectured for MBA programs and business conferences. He’s known for turning big-picture vision into steps a team can actually run on Monday.
The Source Material
Welcome to Work
58 Unwritten Rules for Winning at Work · Octant8 Press
You did everything right. You got the degree, landed the job, showed up ready—and then realized nobody told you how any of this actually works. Not the politics. Not the unspoken expectations. Not why some people rise fast while others stay stuck.
Welcome to Work changes that. Kevin Gosa and Bryan Horvath spent decades in strategy, leadership, and talent development watching talented people stumble over the same blind spots—and wrote the book they wish everyone had from day one. 58 practical, honest rules. No soft-skills platitudes. Just the map they never gave you.
46%
New hires who fail within 18 months
89%
Of those failures are behavioral, not technical
2×
Annual salary: the cost of one departure
45+
Combined years in the room
46% and 89% from Leadership IQ’s study of 20,000+ new hires. We’re happy to walk your team through the underlying research.
Organizations hand this to entire onboarding cohorts. Ask about bulk pricing, licensing, and copies for every attendee in the room.
Take What You Need
The press kit
No form, no gate. You’ll probably need to forward this to somebody.
You like the idea, and now you have to make the case to a CFO, a committee, or an events team that wasn’t on this page. The press kit is built for that: speaker bios, the talk description, format and logistics, the business case with sourcing, and testimonials — laid out to read cleanly when it’s printed or dropped into an email thread.
PDF · Speaker Press Kit
Speaker Press Kit
Bios, talk overview, formats, logistics, and the numbers. Three pages, built to forward.
Need a formal proposal, a W-9, or a certificate of insurance? Say so in the form and you’ll have it within two business days.
Let’s Do It
Check available dates
Takes about a minute. We answer everything within two business days.
Got it.
We’ll be back to you within two business days with dates and a proposal. In the meantime, the press kit is right up there.
Nothing opened? Mail us at hello@welcometowork.co — or .