Starting the business

An unexpected opportunity has presented itself at the moment. I had to walk away from a job that, for all that I wanted to do the work, wasn’t a great cultural fit. I’m committed to working toward equity as much and as fast as systems will allow but one of my underlying assumptions for the work is that systems and organizations are ready to make change. And not all of them are, including those that want to be more inclusive and equitable.

So why not start that consulting business I’ve been talking about for years and go from a side hustle of consulting with people, working groups, and organizations to doing it full time?

Even if this doesn’t end up happening full-time (just yet), the task is to do so full time at some point and this time gives me the chance to do some deep thinking about the kind of business I want to have and what I want to create. There’s so much to unpack and figure out there:

• What kinds of services do we provide (of the many that we could provide)?

• What is the mission of the agency?

• Are we an agency? A group? A firm? An institute?

• What values drive how we do business?

• What’s our competitive advantage?

• Who are our customers? What do they value?

One answer is clear - my career has been driven by honesty and transparency and I envision any company I run doing the same.

So in that spirit, I’ll document the process. We don’t have a name yet, so I won’t publish these yet, but I do want to start by showing in a radically transparent way how we came to be, what we hold central to the work we do, and how that all unfolds.

May the odds be ever in our favor.