1526 – Attracting Talent to Outperform Your Competition with BCT Partners’ Dr. Randall Pinkett

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0:59with us right now it's dr randall pinkett dr dr randall you're the chairman and ceo of bct partners you're found on the web at bctpartners.com dr randall thank you so much for joining us hey josh thank you for having me on the program i'm excited to be here and i'm looking forward to the conversation. And I should point out, this is kind of fun fact. This is not your first time on a program. In fact, I think you were on one that had a lot more viewers than mine. You were, this is a while ago, but you were actually on The Apprentice. And not only were you on The apprentice, you won. Yeah, this is the story I'll be telling my grandchildren, that granddad went on a reality TV show and granddad won, so I didn't embarrass the family name.

1:57Well, that's great. I'd love to ask you about that a little bit more later on, but give us an overview. What is BCT Partners. Yeah, BCT Partners, we're celebrating 23 years in business. And our mission is to harness the power of insights, innovation, and diversity to transform lives, accelerate equity, and create lasting change. So we're an equity-centered consulting firm. We have been recognized by Forbes as one of America's best management consulting firms for four years in a row. We're on the Inc. 500 of America's fastest growing privately held companies. 2022, I was named, along with my co-founder Lawrence Hibbert, EY Entrepreneurs of the Year.

2:45And our work has never been in greater demand as organizations are trying to best understand how they can achieve equity in their workforce, in their workplace, as it relates to their marketplace and also in the communities where they live and work. So that's BCT in a nutshell. You mentioned that there's never been more demand. Why is there so much demand today? Well, after the events of 2020, where we saw protests and social unrest across the globe, combined with a COVID-19 global health pandemic, both of those events in isolation, led to conversations around equity, whether it was societal equity or whether it was health equity, which is another area of our focus.

3:38But the two combined really created a watershed moment. And if I look back on our company's history over 23 years, and a lot of small, medium-sized business owners can relate to this, most societal calamities have had a negative effect on us, whether it was the housing bust, the dot-com boom, government shutdowns, massive layoffs in the private sector, like all those events, 9-11, all those events had a negative effect. 2020 was the first time in our existence that two societal events actually increased the demand. And so they say success is not where opportunity meets luck. It's where opportunity meets preparation.

4:27So when the opportunity came, we were prepared. Yeah. And how did you step into this work? So I've got three co-founders, three business partners. We started when we were in college, Josh. Yeah, we were 21 and 20. I was 21. Jeffrey was 21. Lawrence and Dallas were 20. and let me just fast forward. I'm 51. So 30 years later, Josh, we're still together in business. And more importantly, we still get along. And so when we started in business in college on the campus of Rutgers University, we were engineering students who wanted to apply our engineering talents to solve societal problems. And so we founded our first venture, which evolved and grew into what is now BCT.

5:25And so we have this unique mix of technology capabilities, data analytic capabilities, and that is in many ways a reflection of our engineering origins. So we leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence and natural language processing and IT and virtual reality. But we leveraged these tools to generate very powerful insights about the growing diversity in our society to help our clients achieve the equity I described. So we got in it almost by accident. We caught the entrepreneurial bug, started a company out of our dorm, and 30 years later looked up and said, wow, we're running a multimillion-dollar business.

6:08Well, that's not too bad. Why is it so critical and important and valuable to approach DEI from a data-driven perspective? I love the question, Josh. Well, I hope you do. That's a big softball for you. I love the question, Josh. I love it. That's the biggest softball I've ever been served. So I just released my fifth book, Data-Driven DEI, Data-Driven Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. And it's in some ways the sum total, the culmination of all the work we've done at BCT at this intersection of technology and data and diversity, equity and inclusion. And the reason that intersection is so important is because DEI is one of those areas that can fall victim to subjectivity.

7:04People layering on their opinions of what they think are or are not issues within their organizations or issues that they may need to address in terms of their own personal journey. That's why at BCT, we're all about getting the data and getting the evidence so we can put metrics against where we are to baseline our understanding of culture and behavior and climate and hiring and recruiting and advancement and then set measurable goals for what we hope to accomplish. And like any other discipline, manufacturing, sales, marketing, operations, finance, accounting, we put metrics on all of those disciplines.

7:50DI, in our estimation, is and should be no different. That we should put data behind understanding where we are and put data behind where we believe we can go and then measuring ourselves at every step along the way. And that's how you get measurable improvements in DI. Yeah. And what does the, so when you're working with a client and you start talking facts and start taking, talking hard data, what are some of the most surprising things that like, yep, they're good. Get ready. They're good. Like everyone's always maybe a little bit like you see the eyebrows go up, you see the light bulbs kind of go on.

8:30What are some of the big discoveries that you commonly see over and over and over again that your approach very authentically reveals? Something I hear over and over again is it's a well-intentioned statement, but it's also a sign that a person or an organization has a blind spot. And it's communicated as follows. I don't see gender. I don't see race. Our organization is blind to these matters. And that's a well-intentioned statement because what it's intending to say is race or gender or disability or nationality are not factors in how people experience our organization. And I understand that people believe that they treat people fairly and they intend to treat people fairly.

9:30but just because I have good intent doesn't mean I might not have a negative impact. And so when the data reveals, and this is a softball here, Josh, that you've got all white men on your executive team. I don't need data for that one. But when the data reveals that when we measure your culture and your climate and how people experience it, that people are having very different experiences. It may be that Latina women are experiencing the highest levels of harassment or bullying than any other group in your organization. And it's those types of light bulbs, to your question, that peel away the veneer that says, oh, guess what?

10:07While it may be your intent to not see race or gender or ethnicity or disability, the fact is your organization does have differential experiences for differential groups. Now that we know this from the data, let's figure out what we can do. Dr. Randall, I want to talk specifically for SMB founders right now. And let's say that they have an organization and there's just five of them at this point. And it may get to 10, 15, 20 and down the road. But right now, they're just kind of looking around the table like, well, you know, we're a pretty small organization right now. What sorts of things do you believe that, because one thing I know, and I've read on this, and I'm a big fan of, you know, DEI needs to start at the beginning.

10:58Like, you have to make that a part of your culture early on. And there are major, major consequences if you don't, I guess, from my perspective, right, if you don't, you know, make that a part of your culture early on. It gets real challenging down the road if you don't start early. That's my perspective. I would love your take on that. I think you nailed it, Josh. The reason why this is important for the five-person, 10-person, I might even say two-person organization who's saying, I've got other priorities right now. And I've been there. I've done five ventures over 30 years with the same five partners.

11:36And what I've learned over that trajectory is you have to begin with the end in mind. Which means if you're not building in values and principles that are centered around wanting and envisioning a diverse organization, an inclusive culture, equitable policies and practices, it is significantly harder to reverse engineer that into your culture. We know that culture eats strategy for lunch. We know this. And therefore, if the tenets of DEI aren't engineered into your culture from day one, then you're going to have to do significant amounts of work to try to retrofit that into your culture. And if you believe, as I believe in what the data tells us, that DEI leads to greater net income, it leads to better recruitment and retention.

12:30It leads to the ability to attract talent in an increasingly diverse world and to outperform your competition. That's an alarm of tremendous proportions. And you would want to sound that alarm right now. Respond to it now. Yeah. I have to ask you about this, but I want to ask you about your experience on The Apprentice. You know, there are media opportunities and there are opportunities like, let's say, for example, a leader might produce something and it might go viral, right? You, for example, being able to appear on The Apprentice, yeah, it's a reality show. Yeah, I think some people might raise their eyebrow at it and say, well, that's silly.

13:13However, that's platform. And how did that platform allow you in, you know, just thinking, you know, empathically for someone that's listening, just you may have an opportunity to participate in something that gives you great visibility how did that experience impact your ability to create a bigger impact in the world? So I'll answer first with a quick story. I received an honorary doctorate from New Jersey Institute of Technology here in my home state of New Jersey. And there were five people who received honorary degrees at that ceremony. And they were announcing these honorees and their accolades.

13:58And it was, you know, created a cure for cancer, you know, and the audience was like, okay. And literally one of the honorees invented the catalytic converter for cars. And the audience was like, okay. And they're running down all these accolades. And then they say, and Dr. Randall Pinkett, Rhodes Scholar, they're like, MIT, PhD, they're like, five academic degrees. They're like, winner of the apprentice. The crowd went wild.

14:31And so I tell that story for perhaps obvious reasons to your question. It created a platform unlike any platform. And I had a pretty good platform. I mean, wrote scholar, five academic degrees, Rutgers, Oxford, MIT, five ventures. but there's something about what I call celebrity capital, which is its own form of capital. You got social capital, financial capital, human capital, cultural capital. I'm going to term it celebrity capital. And in today's social media, go viral, clickbait world that we live in, if there's an opportunity for you to get exposure, call it five minutes of fame, and hopefully you can extend it into 10.

15:19I say to a small, medium-sized business owner, seize it. I know lots of SMB owners who are not naturally inclined or in some ways even dismissive of public appearances and media appearances and their personal brand. But I'm going to tell you, Josh, I can put a price tag on what 14 weeks on a nationally televised reality television program that hit 14 million viewers every week did for me and did for my company. And arguably, we might not be having this conversation right now were it not for The Apprentice. Yeah. I mean, you certainly, BCG partners well over 100 employees. Your client roster is enormous.

16:09Can you talk maybe just a little bit about BCT partners and how you engage and who should be reaching out? Yeah. So as an equity-centered organization, we help our clients in four arenas. First is the workforce. And that is you're hiring, you're recruiting, who's coming into the organization. If you're looking to cast the widest possible net for the best possible talent, you hire BCT. Second is the workplace. That's your culture, your climate. Do people feel included? Do they feel like they belong? And if you're looking to create a high-performance culture that fosters innovation and psychological safety and is results-driven, you call it BCT.

16:53Third is the marketplace. Every client of ours has a marketplace. That might be their customer. It might be their stakeholders. It might be local residents for a nonprofit. But for a small or medium-sized business, you know your client. You know who is in your marketplace, who you're trying to target. And an equity lens in this context says that you want to understand your customer at a very granular level to be able to disaggregate your understanding of who you're targeting, what are their cultural needs and preferences, and how can you best understand service and provide for them. You want to do that?

17:32You call BCT. And then lastly, after the workforce, workplace, marketplace is the community. Every company lives and works in a community. You likely recruit from that community. Hopefully, you invest in that community. Hopefully, you're partnering with that community. And equity lens says, how can you, in some ways, get a social return on investment? That says you align your social practices with your business practices to get what we would call the double bottom line. financial return, and social return. You want that double bottom line? You call it BCT. Yeah. You've worked, some of your clients, Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services, the State of New York, Department of Education, the SBA, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, HP, United Way, Bill Melinda Gates Foundation.

18:24You've worked with some of the best. Now, I suspect that you also work with small, medium-sized businesses as well. We do. We do. In fact, people see that client list and they assume that we don't work with small to medium sized businesses. And I affectionately remind them, first of all, we are a small to medium sized business. So we talk the talk and walk the walk. And second, I can guarantee you, and again, your listeners and watchers can appreciate this. I guarantee you, when we first got started at the ages of 21 and 20, we were not working with those organizations. So we have built our business working with small to medium-sized companies, and we retain that identity to this day.

19:06I love that. Dr. Randall Pinkett, again, CEO of BCT Partners on the web at bctpartners.com. What is the next step for someone that's been listening to our conversation? What do they click on? Where do they go? So how do they, they're like, I want to know more. What should they do? Yeah, so I'll give you a few pointers. You can go to randallpinkett.com. That's Randall with one L to learn more about me. Go to bctpartners.com to learn more about the great work we're doing around diversity, equity, and inclusion. And then lastly, go to datadriven dei.com. We just launched the website. The book just came out recently.

19:45And on the website are a plethora of resources. Free tools you can actually download and apply today to develop your personal diversity, equity, and inclusion plan or your company's diversity, equity, and inclusion plan. And to your earlier conversation, for small to medium-sized businesses who may not have much to invest, go to the site to get some free resources, free tools, and what we call what works models that have proven to work for other organizations that could likely work for your organization. You know, I didn't mention all of the books. Again, let me just make sure that to our friend that's listening right now, let me give you the websites again.

20:27And again, if you're listening to a podcast app, just kind of click around, click on the cover art, click on the little information button. We've got all the links directly to these three websites. It's number one, bctpartners.com, randallpinkett.com. And that's Randall with one L, pinkett with two Ts.com. And then I like this great domain, data-driven, D-E-I.com. Dr. Randall Pinkett, again, chairman, CEO, BCT Partners. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for the conversation. And thank you so much for the impact you have in the world. Thank you, Josh. Appreciate you and your voice and your program.

21:02Thank you.

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