The "Anti-Corporate American" Approach For Building A Successful Consulting Business

Every entrepreneur wants their business to be a huge success. But sometimes, even the best entrepreneurs get tired of the rat race in corporate. In this episode, Kim Crowder tells us how to avoid the pitfalls that most people fall into when they try to build a successful consulting business and get started on your path to freedom! Kim is a certified DEI and Six Sigma Leadership CEO, strategist, speaker, and consultant featured numerous times by Forbes. Join us and learn how she took a different approach to build her consulting business and how you can use it too!

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I am excited to be joined by Kim Crowder. Kim, welcome.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Michael.

Kim, you are the CEO and Founder of Kim Crowder Consulting, where you consult on workplace culture, marketing, and leadership. You’ve worked with clients like Adobe, Target, HarperCollins, and many others. Your work has been featured in Forbes, The New York Times, and several other media. I’d love to start off before you got into the world of consulting because it’s now been a few years for you. Give us a high-level introduction to what you were doing before you got into the world of consulting.

My background is in marketing and communications. I have a second degree in Business Administration. I did marketing and communications for many years. In doing that work, I always questioned things around there was no language right for that. That wasn’t a conversation. Maybe I was pushing the envelope a little bit or what it felt like. I wasn’t. When you talk about equity, I’m not pushing the envelope. It did feel like that for people who maybe weren’t used to having to think about it or talk about it or who weren’t comfortable or people who benefited from not talking about it. I always did it from that lens.

I worked in different industries. I worked for Whole Foods Market. I worked in sports and entertainment at the Reliant Stadium. It was Reliant then. It’s NRG now in Houston. I am from Houston. Anybody from Houston, we are big, very much so obnoxious about being from Houston. I did that work for a while and then moved up into the C-Suite.

That was where I got a real sense of how workplace culture is built around the policies and the decisions and every piece of how a workplace culture like that storm brews and becomes this big workplace culture. In that, I was also experiencing my own version of discrimination in that workplace of racism and sexism very much so as a Black woman who had been put in a leadership position maybe without the expectations that I was going to expect to be able to make a change.

It was, “Let’s check a box. Let’s get a Black woman here because the board is driving us nuts about it.” I got in and I started asking for things. I also had a team member who was not comfortable working as my assistant. He was a White man. He was not comfortable with having a Black woman that he had to work with in that way. I was getting it from every side. I then became passionate about it. I started to do the work, for better or for worse.

What happened was I was talking about it out in other conferences and that thing, and then people started saying, “Kim, we see what you are doing. Not only have we heard you, but we’re seeing what you’re doing. Can you do that for us?” A side hustle was birthed. I left that company. I took another job. Within six weeks, I got laid off. I was told it’s hard to find people of diverse backgrounds with the proper skill set. It was like confirmation that this is what the work that I needed to focus on. Voila, here me and my team are.

I want to explore a whole bunch of that and more. Before we do that, you mentioned that you went into the C-Suite position. Now, as a consultant, is there anything that stands out to you, looking from that vantage point and the understanding of you yourself having been there? Is there a dynamic or anything you keep in mind when engaging with people at that decision-making level that you think people may not see often enough? I’m wondering, the dynamic or the distinction or anything that you may use from your own experience of being at that level of business when you are reaching out to prospective clients who are also executives. Anything come to mind or any best practices or approaches that you use?

When you understand the physical, emotional, and spiritual impact of being in a workplace where you are discriminated against, it makes you want to change that. Click To Tweet

I don’t know that I think about it in that much of a premeditated way. Maybe you gave me a new idea. I do, because of that, understand the logic of why folks in that space make decisions. I make sure that I don’t lean there. We don’t focus on this idea that if you’re more diverse, you’ll make more money because then we’re falling back into what connects with slavery. We don’t do it from that perspective, but we do it from a perspective of looking at your retention and turnover rates. You are bleeding money at this point.

What aches enough is that I can turn that knife a little bit that’ll get you to make the decisions that are best for your team members in your workplace. I’m not saying that all CEOs are not thinking with both sides logically and also the emotional place. I’m not saying that, but I am saying that because I’ve been in the C-Suite, I happen to possess the ability to communicate both sides of those, which is why we focus on both quantitative and qualitative data.

What I’m hearing you almost say is a lot of consultants might come at it from the perspective of, “We have a good solution. Here’s what we do. Here’s our methodology or doing the work.” What you’re bringing to the table is you understand the business case, or what’s going to get a decision maker to make an investment or to say yes to an initiative because you’re looking at it from both sides. Knowing that gives you the perspective that is helpful in engaging with people at those levels. Would that be accurate?

I would agree.

Coming back now to your own journey, people started saying, “Kim, we need some help. We’re interested in this.” Were you on stages talking about this or writing about this even while you still had your previous job in that executive role, or did you start getting more out there once you had left that position?

No, I was doing that while I worked in that role. I was writing, doing some ghostwriting for organizations for the website to talk about diversity, equity, inclusion. I was supporting strategy in that way, both on the marketing and communication side, but also on the management side. Particularly for mid-level managers being able to talk about it at that place. One of the things you mentioned was Target and Adobe, those organizations.

That was more focused on individual leaders, particularly around when George Floyd was murdered. Individual leaders, we were offering some courses for leaders to say it’s some workshops. What we had was leaders come in and say, “We want to be a part of it.” That’s what we worked with those leaders in those organizations to move them through, “Here’s what this looks like both in your business and your personal life. Here are some things that you may not have recognized.”

I was doing the work. It was a side hustle. It transitioned into after I got let go in that role, it was, “What do I want to do?” You understand the impact of that, the physical impact of what it is to be in a workplace where you are discriminated against and where you’re watching that happen to other people and saying, “I want to be a part of a movement to change that.”

It sounds like your initial clients when you launch a consulting business, it wasn’t so much you reaching out to people. It was more that people were reaching out to you based on the presentations or talks that you were giving. Is that accurate?

I would say that’s still the case. That’s a knock-on-wood thing to say. We don’t do a lot of reaching out to clients. The benefit of that is partners are coming to us at least willing to move forward. They may not know what all of that encompasses. You get in there and they’re like, “Whoa.” We at least have a base point where our partners are saying, “We’ve read what you’ve written. We’ve heard from you. We’ve signed up for the newsletter. We follow you on LinkedIn or some other social media channel. We’ve watched your interview, so we know the perspective that you and your company come from. Because of that, we want to work with you.” There’s freedom in building the relationship that way instead of knocking on someone’s door and convincing them that we’re the right partner.

Some people might look at it and go, like, “That’s such a great place to be in where you put out content and now people are knocking on your door.” That’s the holy grail of what so many consultants desire. To give people some context, how long have you been writing and speaking on this topic? Let’s go back in time. How long have you been at this?

For several years. For three of those years, it felt like screaming into the void. That’s an important thing to say. That was when I was side-hustling it. There was also a time when I was living off my savings, trying to figure out what the next thing to do was be innovative and flexible, which is the benefit of being an entrepreneur. You’re like, “I need some money. What can I do to make that happen?” I feel like the content and information we were putting in popped in. We also got a footing in our perspective, core values, and mission around this.

Even that takes time. What is our perspective? That’s continuously growing. I felt like it took about three years to get into that space. Once we got there, it locked in. We got the Forbes article, one of the top seven anti-racist educators your company needs now. Being part of a list that Michelle Kim created, particularly for Black diversity, equity, and inclusion practitioners. Those were two things that were major in inviting people into the conversation around the way that we did the work.

Being consistent, showing up on LinkedIn regularly, commenting on other people, and having those meetings with other practitioners or people in HR. Those coffee chats where you’re getting to know other people and then you meet the one person and then they give you three different references and saying, “You need to work with Kim Crowder.” All of that is a process. There’s an organic communal version of that.

As people are in this space where people may get frustrated, like, “I understand that.” You’re like, “I’ve tried everything.” The more you show up on a consistent basis, you would be surprised who sees you. I had no idea that Janice Gassam was watching my social media, who writes for Forbes, and then one day commented on an Instagram post, “I’m writing a story. I’m going to include you.” That story is the one when people google me the most when we say, “How did you find us?” That’s the one that it continuously comes back to.

To summarize, what I’m hearing is, hopefully, for the benefit of everybody joining us, this was not an overnight success story. You put the work in. You showed up consistently. You did and still have a clear point of view. You are putting that out there into the world. You are showing up on different platforms, whether LinkedIn, your email newsletter, engaging other social media, or meeting people. You’re doing things that people might look at by some accounts and say like, “That doesn’t scale.”

The more you show up consistently, you will be surprised by who sees you. Click To Tweet

Being on social media or applying to people’s comments, meeting people one to one. There’s no automation there. It’s like you’re doing the hard work, but you’re doing it consistently. You’re showing up every day. After a period of time, that’s compounding. All of a sudden, a big Forbes article or something clicks into place. Things start moving forward at a much faster clip.

I would say that that approach is almost anti-Corporate America. It is the thing that you can’t automate. It’s also the thing that makes me authentic and that people recognize that I am authentic when they meet me. You don’t know how many people I get on a call with. It still blows my mind. They’re like, “I can’t believe I’m talking to Kim Crowder.” I’m like, “It’s just me.” People have created a level of respect because I’m willing to connect with people and build a community beyond this, “How do I automate a social media post?” We respond. We can’t do it all the time. Those LinkedIn posts go wild. We try to respond where we can. We do private messaging. We do favors for people.

If I see somebody’s story and I’m like, “Your story needs to be told. I know someone in media. Let me connect you with them.” Literally, that is how we build it from a place of community and less so looking at what we can get all the time. We have automations. You have to in business. It’s the wise thing to do. That lives more in our operational piece of it. That human connection up against the type of work we do, you have to have it. You can’t beat it. You can’t separate from it.

You’re speaking my language. This is something we tell a lot of clients we work with, especially when it’s relating to marketing that often people these days are trying to get things to work faster. They want to see results instantly. They want to automate. That’s not what works, especially when you’re dealing with buyers of high-value services. You have to build a relationship. You have to provide a perspective, insights, and ideas so that people respect that and see you as a real expert and authority. That doesn’t come from sending a spam or sales email.

When you look at everything that you’ve done from a marketing/content perspective, is there anything that you feel like, “This is key?” Suppose I was going to counsel somebody on what they need to do to build their brand, get their voice out there, and start generating more attention, but even more importantly, more engagement and, therefore, more conversations. Are there any pieces of advice, best practices, or things that you feel are critical that people need to pay attention to?

The first thing is to keep a level of humility in that you are willing to learn from how other people do what they do well. Even now, I’m looking at the way that some people frame the storytelling that happens on a social media post, or maybe their podcast, which we are releasing one soon, or looking at their newsletter. Being willing to learn is the biggest one over and over, and being okay with refining what that looks like for you. That’s the first one. The second one I would say is, I can’t say it enough, but find your people. Find your community. Be willing to connect with folks on social media to comment on other people’s posts.

The third one is to be comfortable with your point of view. For me, the way that I see it is I have a point of view. I may make a post. Sometimes somebody says, “Have you thought about this?” I’ll come in and say, “I didn’t. I’ll change the post. Thank you for bringing that up.” I’m willing to be comfortable in the way that we talk about things, but also to be willing to hear from other folks. I would say that a major piece of it is to be willing to have that dialogue so that you are, in real-time, creating your content in front of other people.

What’s been the biggest challenge for you to this point in your business?

I’m going to start from day one.

There might be different challenges based on the different chapters of your business. You might have had a challenge in the last 12 months, which is different than the one you had 36 months ago. Feel free to go through maybe a few challenges at different chapters of your business.

For one, it’s honing down on your niche. Who are you as a business? What do you want to do? That one, to me, is still evolving for us. The types of services that we offer, that’s the benefit of being an entrepreneur that you can pivot where necessary. In the beginning, it was trying to hone that down and decide who our niche audience is, where they are, and how we connect with them. I would also say in that time period, it was finding the right team. Michael, I’m sure you’ll say yes. This is for every entrepreneur. It’s not just finding the team. It is trusting your team. It is finding the right people and being comfortable with saying, “Here’s what you do,” and you getting out of the day-to-day as much as possible.

We started with a virtual assistant. We probably went through four iterations of a virtual assistant until we honed down and found the right one. We moved her up and got someone else in. Sometimes it takes time to click to find the right group of people. I feel like now we’re in such a great place. I have access to some of the most brilliant minds in the world. We have folks from all over the country who are part of our team. That’s another thing I would say, have that team in place. That’s a big one so that you can make sure that you have time to create and strategize and you’re not thinking about scheduling your stuff. Even having someone help you schedule is a big one.

I would also say fast forward to not quite now, before that, it is automating your systems as much as possible. Literally, I’m going through it step by step. That was step three. How do we automate our systems? How do we get our standard operating procedures in place? What does that look like so that everyone who comes through the organization knows how things work? I would say that the fifth one is to learn how to communicate. A lot of what communication we do now is written. We aren’t on the phone anymore. We may do Zoom videos, but a lot of communication is written. Understanding the nuance of if you don’t understand what somebody sent, ask about it.

Don’t make any assumptions. That, for me, has been a major one, is to be able to understand that everyone communicates differently. Everyone has a different perspective. What can I do to get curious about someone else’s point of view so that I can take that information back? Even pause, I never feel like I have to answer things in the moment. I say, “Let me come back to you with that. Thank you. That’s helpful to understand. Let me come back to you.” Lastly, I would say you teach clients how to treat you.

I am a forgetful person. I wish I weren’t. I have to write birthdays in my calendar to this day. My mind is always running. I remember I had a client say to me, “You keep asking me the names of people.” They would bring somebody’s name and I would say, “Who is that?” Communicating back, “Could you do me a favor? When you bring up somebody’s name, if you would tell me their position, that would be amazing. Every time you mention them, mention their position as I’m getting to know you.” You think about it as I get to know you. You saying things like that or saying to a client, “Here’s what’s going to be important up front,” and laying that out early in the partnership. If you don’t, what happens is they may feel blindsided when that is the standard later on.

At that point, you’re hitting on setting of expectations. Communication is one part of that. You’re right. Many consultants struggle with not setting expectations early on. They start wondering why the client isn’t paying on time or why the client is asking them to provide a whole bunch of work that is deviating from the initial scope of work. All these things weren’t set. You didn’t communicate with them. You weren’t clear on them. Now, you’re in a place where you’re having to try and clean up the mess that was created because there weren’t clear expectations put in place. That’s an important point that you’re hitting on.

When a marketer feels like a story needs to be told, connect with them. Build from a place of community and less on looking at what we can get all the time. Click To Tweet

I’ve been there. You’re like, “What happened? How do we get here?” Also, to know that your statement of work and your contract is not enough to communicate, that is a beginning. The fact of the matter is that your project sponsor may not have even read your contract. It might have been their legal team. When you do your onboarding meetings, that’s an important time to communicate that. Throughout the processes, things come up and say, “We’re happy to do this. We can move this deadline. Here’s what it’s going to cost around moving the deadline around time and also financially what it’s going to cost. Is that okay with you? Great. We’ll send a change order.” Making sure that you have sign-offs for every step of the process when things change.

Keeping your records always written. If you have a great call, we always take meeting notes. We also say, “Here are the action items based on that as we understand it.” Making sure you have communication in place in writing, because it could come up later on. It’s not a gotcha, it’s just so that we all have a baseline understanding.

This is critical. Often, consultants don’t even have an onboarding process. They show up with the client for that first meeting and get right down to business. Most consultants want to provide value and make an impact. They want to help. You feel like, “I want to start to help the client right away.” What you’re talking about is establishing an onboarding process, a system for onboarding a client, specific things you cover in the meeting, and then a process for handling certain things that might come up. Beyond even the setting of expectations, how do you deal with a situation when a client wants to potentially change something in what you’ve planned? You have a system or a set of processes for that.

You’ve documented those things. It sounds like it’s part of an SOP, Standard Operating Procedure. This is the key part, as you now want to begin bringing more and more team members in or delegate stuff or shift some of those things off of your plate so you can focus on the highest value areas where you can truly create value, now you can guide your team to say, “Here’s the documentation. Here’s how we do this if you bring new team members on.” If you don’t have that stuff documented, and I’m not speaking to you, Kim, you already know this. I’m talking to everybody out there who’s joining us, going like, “Maybe I don’t have that kind of stuff.”

The whole idea of hiring and building a team feels daunting and scary when you don’t have these materials in place because then you feel like and do have to recreate the wheel every time. If you document the stuff, get it in, and bring somebody on, even if that person leaves, you now have an asset in your business because you have these systems and processes that make bringing the next person on so much easier and faster. Anything else around systems, SOPs or things you’ve done inside your own business that you feel like, “This is so powerful or valuable for us to have?”

We do Loom videos. We record our screen. Everyone on the team has access to the Loom account. We communicate often. Things like, “If you’re going to set up that process, can you do a Loom video and then share that out to the team member who’s going to have to execute it moving forward?” It could even be down to, “I have a question. Maybe we can’t hop on a call, but I made a video about it. Can you watch the video? Can we look at it together?” Also, weekly meetings with your team are important. Honestly, we did not do weekly meetings with the team for a while. I did one and I was like, “Why haven’t we been doing this on a weekly basis?” It clears out so much.

You can get lost in the to-dos. Everyone has their own version of it. What that is, is it’s a meeting of the mind, “Here’s what I’m working on. Here’s where things are. Here’s what I need from you.” It doesn’t have to be long, but you can lay out an agenda where everyone knows their role in that and can bring that forward. I would also say automation around that onboarding is important. One of the things that we do when we onboard a client is have an onboarding questionnaire. We turn that into our client brief. As we work with other team members who may work and become part of the partnership later in the process, the project manager and executive assistant are up front, but we may have our data analyst come in later.

What we can do is send in the client brief, “Here’s the client that we’re working on.” What we do is lay out the SOW4, that project for that team member. It’s a specific, “Here’s what your piece looks like,” and making that clear as to, “Here are the expectations around that.” If we email you, we need to hear back from you in 48 hours. If you’re going to miss a deadline, we need to know why. We need to know immediately. If it’s going to cost us to find someone else, then we have to take that out. Thinking about all of those things. The truth of the matter is that you won’t know until you get there. Some things no one can tell you until you’re like, “I’m here. What do I do?”

As soon as you learn it, document it in some way. Put it on paper, make a Loom video so that not only do your team members have access to it, but you have a reminder back to yourself. We also have a video version of onboarding for our clients as well. I have welcome videos. I have videos for our assessments that say, “You might be nervous about this. It goes out to their broader team.” We are, again, building a community, making a connection, and building trust with a broader audience outside of who we’re working with one to one within an organization because oftentimes, that’s not enough.

Talk me through the progression of how you’ve gone about building your team. Are these contractors freelancers? Are they full-time or part-time? I know you said you start off with the VA. How many people are involved now? What does the company makeup look like?

1099s, for the most part, if they’re doing contract work. We have about 25 people at large for the team. We’re expanding that because we like to have at least 2 or 3 people for a particular role.

For the non-US audience, this is 20, 25 people, but mainly contractors, 1099s, they’re not full-time employees. Any specific reason why you’ve gone that path?

The freedom of having contractors is that everybody wants to be here. At some point, we may add 1 or 2 employees that are the day-to-day people. Maybe a salesperson, maybe someone who’s in project management, something like that. The contractors want to be here. They’re passionate about the work. That’s the benefit. I’m not over them. We’re all adults. We’re speaking eye to eye, which I love the freedom it gives people to speak and share and provide their expertise in ways they don’t feel like they can do in a day-to-day Corporate America setting. That’s one.

The concern that some people might have with, let’s say, a model like that, I’m interested to hear how you think about this, is capacity. Let’s say things are ramping up. You’re getting a lot more demand for your services. People want to hire you. You have contractors who, if they’re not dedicating all their time to working with just your company, are working with other clients, too. Do you ever have concerns about whether will we have the capacity to deliver for clients if we don’t have our team’s 100% full-time attention? What do you think about that? How do you plan that? What’s been your experience with it?

We don’t run into that, honest to goodness, which is why I say we have more than one person that can be dedicated to a specific area of focus. We’re growing that. The way that we plan out our clients, we are telling our contractors ahead of time, “Here’s the project.” We could have a project for eight months and we tell our contractors prior to day one, “We want you on this project. Here’s what it looks like. Here’s about when you would come into this. Go ahead and plan it. Get it on your calendar now.” We also go in. We have an SOW. We’re legally bound. They’re legally bound to do the work. We have that in place. There was something else that you asked that I wanted to address. Can you go back to that question again?

In terms of capacity.

Consultants must build a relationship. Provide perspective, insights, and ideas so that people will see you as a real expert and authority that doesn't come from just sending spam. Click To Tweet

The capacity piece. One of the things I am passionate about is multiple strings of income in the way we look at the work we do. I don’t ever want to be in a place where we only do client work. I also do speaking engagements. It brings in money, but it doesn’t include a contractor. We’re also looking at building some services that are more automated, like courses and that thing that people can opt into, maybe if they’re at a lower price point. Also, making sure that what we charge makes sense for us as an organization. Thinking through that, understanding the value of what we bring, and being okay with asking for what we’re worth in that. I can be honest with you. I’m not trying to build the next billion-dollar company.

I’m good with that. You have to decide what you’re good with because what we do now, I’m in Spain right now, we talked about this before. I’m in Madrid for the next three months. After this, I may go somewhere else and then I go home. What it does is it provides me with enough freedom in my life. You have to decide what company you want. I didn’t leave Corporate America to work all the time. I left Corporate America to be able to be a full person. I’m building a business that allows that to happen. You have to be comfortable with how much money you are comfortable making, or if you want to make more money, how do you diversify your offerings in order to make that happen?

The important point you made right now is that there’s no one way to build a successful consulting business. There are many different models that are at everybody’s disposable disposal. It’s all about choosing the model and path that makes sense for you. Some people will have a different perspective or view in building a team and they want full-time people or maybe they don’t even want any people. They just wanted to be a solo independent consultant. Regardless of what you choose, choose something that is going to be right for you.

You look into the future and you say, “This is where I want to be.” Reverse engineer and figure out, “What’s the best way to get there?” Sometimes it will require you to be honest with your fears or concerns and trying to overcome them and not let them hold you back. The point is well taken. Hopefully, everybody takes a minute, pause and thinks to themselves, “Am I currently in the right model? Do I have the most optimized business model and the right path to get me where I want to go? Is there something I could be doing differently that could help me to get there faster?” At the same time, it’s not just about the money. It’s about the lifestyle, the freedom, impact, and doing things that give you fulfillment, enjoyment, and all other good stuff.

A couple of more questions here before we wrap up. One is on the same thread. You built a good-sized team of contractors that you are working with on a regular basis. How has that changed your role? What are you spending the majority of your time on right now? Anything related to that shift of managing these people. Do you have somebody that manages these 20, 25 people? Where are you spending your time?

I have an amazing project manager who is calling the shots on that’s like my general. It’s like the person who is making sure that the projects are moving forward and time-wise and connecting with the contractors. The executive assistant is also creating meetings and following up with people. I also have a team of folks who handle my PR. I have a business coach. I always want to say that, “Get your help where you need it.”

I have an office business manager. What has been most important is understanding the type of folks that we need. The type of skillsets that we need has been imperative for me. What I spend my time on a day to day is sales calls, interviews, and media, as we are doing now. Also, that includes creating the focus of the content for social media and then thinking through strategy for our clients.

At the end of the day, I like to be involved at that level. We have some amazing folks in strategy which get down to the nitty-gritty of it, but I can certainly look at an organization. I typically know in about two weeks what the challenges are within the organization. We can go in and I go in and help piece that puzzle together. How do we tell that full story? That’s the work that I’m doing mostly on a day-to-day basis, but I’m out of the scheduling meetings, sending out the newsletter, and even posting on social media. I’m not connecting with all our contractors on a day-to-day basis. My team is doing that so that I can show up to those meetings fresh and ready to go in front of clients and our group team meetings.

How do you go about finding the right person for the project management piece? It sounds like that’s such a key role where they’re essentially ensuring the excellence and the quality you would deliver if you were doing all the engagements. It was just you working with the client. You could make sure that things are going well. As you have other people involved in projects, that’s a concern that consultants tend to have.

“If I bring somebody in or a group of people in to help me deliver the projects, won’t we lose some of that expertise or the excellence that we would deliver if it was just me or the founders or whatever?” That project management person who oversees everything, how did you find them? Where’d you go to get them? What qualifications or what do you think is important about their role or what they have and what they bring to the table that people should look for?

I got lucky with my project manager. Our project manager was our virtual assistant initially. She came aboard because we were losing our virtual assistant because she was leaving for familial reasons. She found a group like top 2 or 3. We did an interview. We chose this person. Iffy is her name. Iffy was doing the executive assistant role. I was like, “You’re good at this.” Come to find out, Iffy is a certified project manager at work every day. At that time, Iffy was not doing project management at work. She shifted over to another job where she was doing project management full-time. Gold mine. We connected.

Iffy is not afraid to knock on my door and say, “Kim, you need to get it together. You need to move something forward.” We clicked. Not only her skillsets are there, but we like each other. We had that synergy. We hired another project manager, not another one, and they weren’t the right fit. They were great, but they weren’t the right fit. I was like, “Why don’t we move you into it? Are you interested?” Iffy was like, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” We got an executive assistant who is amazing, Dara, as well. The skillsets that Iffy brings, I don’t know how Iffy does it, but she misses nothing. I don’t get it.

She thinks of everything. She said something in a meeting and I was like, “Who thinks like that?” We were looking for CEOs and executive assistants. She was like, “We have an email from everybody from the team. Let me look for their name.” Also, she is a business analyst as well. Her understanding of the holistic way that a business operates has been extremely beneficial. I would say you need somebody who is organized and who is not afraid to push you to challenge, maybe something that’s missing. I know everyone doesn’t love that. I welcome that if it means growth.

If we are being kind and still challenging each other, I’m totally fine with that. Also, I would say find someone you can trust. I trust Iffy. I trust Iffy’s decision-making. I trust the way that Iffy is going to handle our clients. I trust that if something doesn’t happen, I may need to check our processes. One of the things I do is I don’t villainize our team members if something doesn’t get done. I try to focus on the process, “We need to do this so that in the future this can happen so that we take the energy out of people feeling called out in some way if something doesn’t get done.”

Your team is virtual. Right now, you’re in Spain. You’re often traveling. Is Iffy US-based?

Canada. Darra’s in Nigeria. We’ve got people all over the country, all over the world.

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Has that ever been an issue for you in terms of working with a virtual team, or has it been pretty smooth?

It’s been pretty smooth. The only thing that you’ll find is, especially in diversity, equity, inclusion work, in general, you may find cultural differences or ways that in one country leadership may work with folks, and then I come and say, “We don’t work like that. I want you to feel the urgency to say, ‘Kim, I need help. I need support. I don’t understand this.’” Someone may work in another country where that’s not the norm and where they can’t speak that freely. Some of it is getting people comfortable with doing that, or it may even be language differences. For instance, someone may have learned British English as opposed to American English. I go, “Tell me how you worded this. What does this mean?”

I may not understand it, but I try not to get mixed up in the middle of that as little as possible. The only thing that you find with a virtual team is that you have to be intentional about time. What I mean by that is the amount of time you give a project, especially if everybody’s on different time zones, when folks will be able to respond, and when you can have team meetings. You have to be aware in that way. For us, it worked.

I can’t imagine building a business differently than this because the benefit is that we have all of these different points of view from people from everywhere who come in and say, “Have you thought about it this way? Have we ever thought about doing it this way?” If you can find yourself as a founder that embraces that, it only makes you better.

Before we wrap up here, I want to ask at least one other question. There is one question that I do like to ask because I love books and I like to learn what other people are reading and learning from. In the last few months, is there one book, it could be fiction or nonfiction, you have either read or listened to that you think like, “This was such a great book, other people would enjoy it as well?”

That’s a great question. A couple of things, I’ll say this because it could benefit people. I read nonfiction quite a bit. I do it because it takes my mind off of the intensity of the work that we do every day doing diversity, equity, inclusion work, and being involved in workplace social justice that is intense work. You get on social media and all of the news is flying at you and you’re doing interviews. I unwind a lot with nonfiction. Is there a book in particular? I can’t think of one. I’m listening to things that require little brain cells. Take me away. A book that I am reading for educational purposes is Caste. Wilkerson is the author.

When you said nonfiction, are you referring to fiction in terms of you’re reading novels and stories, or is there something inside of nonfiction that you read?

I’m sorry. Fiction. Nonfiction is the Caste. Reading fiction takes me away. It’s fantasy. It gets me out of my day-to-day. That’s important. Nonfiction, I’m reading Caste right now to help me understand societal caste systems that are unspoken in the US. That impacts the work that we do again on the day-to-day. I’m also working on reading more from authors who are either indigenous or who are outside of the US to learn more about history from a global perspective instead of from a US perspective. Oftentimes, that informs our work around culture. Particularly as companies, we work with a lot of companies that have a global presence, not only with their external audiences but also their internal teams.

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A lot of times, companies are not thinking about the impact of that. They’re saying get on board with our Westernized version or our American or US American version of how we do business when they haven’t been doing business like that their whole lives. They may find that they are walking into an inequitable environment by nature of culture. Those are the areas of focus right now. I would say Caste is the book right now that has been the most eye-opening and revolutionary for me in the last few months.

I want to thank you so much for coming on here and sharing a bit of your story, your journey, what you’re up to at your consulting firm with your team. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

KimCrowderConsulting.com. Sign up for our newsletter. We are in the process of rebranding, so you’ll see a beautiful news newsletter soon. Also, social media’s a great way, particularly LinkedIn. We’re active on LinkedIn. Find @KimCrowder on LinkedIn, or you can find @KimCrowderConsulting, either. Instagram, Twitter, we’re in all of those places. If you want to get down to the nuts and bolts and hear some great content that can impact the work that you’re doing around diversity, equity, inclusion, the newsletter is the way to go.

Kim, thanks so much for coming on.

It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

 

Important Links

• Kim Crowder Consulting
• Caste
• @KimCrowder on LinkedIn
• @KimCrowderConsulting on LinkedIn
• Instagram – Kim Crowder
• Twitter – Kim Crowder

 

About Kim Crowder

Kim Crowder Consulting is a boutique studio that uses our data-driven approach to partner with companies to embed equity into their workplace culture, systems, processes, and leadership practices’ DNA. That includes building equitable systems and methods for workplace culture, leadership, branding, and communications. Together, we shift cultures, so workplaces are safe for all identities to be valued, supported, innovative, and thriving by making ethical workplace culture a daily practice beyond individual initiatives.

 

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