#98: Finding Your Niche & Brand in Consulting With Rhodes Perry

#98: Finding Your Niche & Brand in Consulting With Rhodes Perry

 

Jenn T Grace:              You are listening to the Personal Branding for the LGBTQ Professional Podcast, episode 98.

 

Introduction:              Welcome to the Personal Branding for the LGBTQ Professional Podcast; the podcast dedicated to helping LGBTQ professionals and business owners grow their business and careers through the power of leveraging their LGBTQ identities in their personal brand. You'll learn how to market your products and services both broadly, and within the LGBTQ community. You'll hear from incredible guests who are leveraging the power of their identity for good, as well as those who haven't yet started, and everyone in between. And now your host. She teaches straight people how to market to gay people, and gay people how to market themselves. Your professional lesbian, Jenn - with two N's - T Grace.

 

Jenn T Grace:              Hello and welcome to episode 98 of the podcast. I am your host, Jenn Grace, and as this is airing we are right around Thanksgiving time here in the US. And we're at the end of November of 2016, and I'm shocked really at how fast this year has actually flown by. I feel like the first part of the year felt kind of slow and sloggish, and now- I don't know, since September it's just really whizzing by. So I'm excited to be in episode number 98, and it has been multiple years in the making to get here, so this podcast will be turning four at the I guess beginning of January in 2017, it'll be four years that I have been doing this which seems a little bit crazy, but all good nonetheless. I have been keeping up with the promise of having interview, after interview, after interview, and today is no different. And the interview I have today for you is with Rhodes Perry of Rhodes Perry Consulting, and we had just a really kind of awesome conversation about personal branding; shocking since that is indeed the title of the podcast. It was really just kind of being an LGBT advocate, and a change maker, and a change agent, and really how that can be something that you can utilize as a benefit to yourself as you grow a business, or continue to grow your career in whatever avenue that might look like.

                                    So rather than blabber on unnecessarily, I'm just going to dive right into the interview with Rhodes. I really think you're going to love it, and if you would like an introduction to him personally, feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn, on Facebook, Twitter, go to my website, contact me however it is easiest for you to just reach out and get in touch with me. That would be awesome and I would love to put you in touch with him. So without further ado, please enjoy this interview.

                                    Okay so let's just start off with telling the listeners just a little bit about who you are, what you do, how you came to be in your business as it looks today.

 

Rhodes Perry:             Sure. So my name is Rhodes Perry and I'm an LGBT strategy assistance guru. Basically what that means is I'm a management consultant, coach and speaker, and I work largely with clients who are in executive, HR, or diversity positions. And I really help clients transform their organizations into ones where LGBTQ people know that they're valued, and they know that they belong in the workplace. And I work all across the country, most of my clients are based in New York City. I'm actually living on the west coast so I also have a number of clients in the Bay area. And I've been fortunate, and much of the work that I do is informed by my time working in the LGBTQ movement as an advocate and building alliances with other social justice leaders. And I center a lot of that work around improving the lives for LGBTQ people and really focusing on raising awareness around the specific needs of transge