Speaker 1: Logo: JP Morgan Chase. Text: thriving conversations with founders. What is the mission of your business, Blackstone Consulting? What role does diversity play in that? A black man in a business suit addresses the camera. Text: Joe Blackstone, founder and president, Blackstone Consulting.

Joe Blackstone: When we founded the company, the objective was provide quality service. We were really looking at how do we get into a field where we could potentially have some scalable, repeatable types of service that we could do? The other overriding thing that we had on day one that I really wanted to bring to the company was a diversity play associated with not only ownership of the company, but, you know, who we employed, who were our key managers.

Speaker 1: Text: diversity in Blackstone Consulting's workforce. An animated pie chart shows an overall diversity measurement of 78%. Source: Blackstone Consulting.

Joe Blackstone: One of the things that we really pride ourselves on is that diversity in delivery of service, and we think that that makes us a better company. It makes us much more tolerant. You can't do that at just the hourly levels of the staff that we have. That needs to happen in the C-suite. When you look at our C-suite, there's three women, there's four men and there's five folks that are of color. I think that's really critical to what we convey to our customers. It tells you that we not only believe that it's important that we happen to be a diverse firm, but that we think that that brings value to the customer.

Speaker 1: Text: diversity in Blackstone Consulting's workforce. An animated pie chart shows that 47% of their C-suite is female. A second graph shows a leadership diversity measurement of 71%. Source: Blackstone Consulting.

Joe Blackstone: First and foremost, I think it's really critical that you provide quality service and product. Forget being diverse. What you do is more important than what you look like. It's not enough to be able to say that you're just an African-American-owned and diverse company. You've got to be able to say, I'm diverse in terms of a company, my employees are diverse, my senior management is diverse, the things that we do in the community are effecting a diverse community, the types of things that we're doing from a family foundation perspective are impacting kids that are primarily Black and brown. And then, in addition to that, can we also impact companies that are smaller than our three-quarter-of-a-billion-dollar company? And maybe we have a little part in creating the next three-quarter-of-a-billion-dollar company.

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