Rachel Dorsey is a producer, director, writer and growth strategist. Founder of Bone + Gold , broadcasting and media production company . Fewer than 2 % female owned businesses break 1 million . Rachel’s is one of them. She wants to help other women succeed.
Interview by Tijana Ibrahimovic
Edited by Jillian Tofukuji
Tijana: Hey guys. I am here with the Rachel Dorsey, executive producer and a lead strategist at Bone and Gold. Welcome Rachel to Pop-style TV.
Rachel Dorsey: Thank you so much for having me. How fun.
Tijana: So tell me a little bit about your beginnings and your background before Bone and Gold.
Rachel Dorsey: Um, so I started out in marketing in the wine business, and then I moved into nonprofit community building. And that was a hybrid between leadership development, producing events and, uh, and marketing, program.
Um, so that’s how I sort of started out, uh, gaining the skills of building a business. From there. I ended up becoming the director of marketing for a bank, and that was such a, such a bad fit for me because I’m such a creative, but it forced me to learn all about traditional marketing. So now I’m able to pull together my, uh, my skills with traditional marketing, new media marketing, experiential marketing, and PR video production marketing, and put those altogether for my production company now.
Tijana: Amazing. Um, so what do you think you obviously learned pretty quickly that you are a good communicator? Um, when did that happen? When did you learn? You are good at it? When did you realize that? And also, what do you think is the biggest hurdle for people to overcome when it comes to communication?
Rachel Dorsey: Such a good question. I had a boss. Early in my career, who, who actually told me I was a terrible communicator. He told me that. Um, that I really needed to work on it because no one was ever going to take me seriously. And what’s funny about that. So, so I still, I got some training, so I was like, okay, I’m a terrible communicator and I got some training, but, um, he wasn’t actually accurate. I was a good communicator and I could show up in front of a room and, and hold the space and charm the room and get the, get the message across in a very intuitive way. But I didn’t do it the way he did it. And to him his way was right.
Therefore, my way wrong. And so I think the biggest lesson there is that we need to know that we have the skills and talents inside of us. We may need some training. We may need a lot of practice, but just because someone else does it their way doesn’t mean that your way is necessarily wrong.
Tijana: I did want to touch upon Clubhouse because it is such a popular new platform and a lot of people are really enjoying it. So what do you think is. What makes clubhouse so special, so different. And do you think that it will continue to grow once we’re sort of out of this pandemic?
Rachel Dorsey: I have always felt like Twitter I didn’t have enough space. There were not enough characters allowed for Twitter, so it wasn’t for me. And for Instagram, I felt like. I had to show it’s changed now but at the beginning I felt like I had to show this very highly curated, highly polished version of myself, which never felt true and never felt authentic and always felt like, um, like it was going to have a result of making other people feel bad if I showed up in that way and I don’t want to make people feel bad. That’s like the polar opposite of what I’m trying to do in the world. So I really held myself back. I wasn’t sure where I fit in. With clubhouse. It’s like, I, I’m a talker. I’m a listener, I’m a extrapolator and a synthesizer. I think that’s one of the things that perhaps you just pointed out about how I’m different is I’m not just trying to speak to speak. I’m trying to hear a first and then to respond in a way that’s going to be of service. Um, and, and in clubhouse you can do that.
In terms of like how what’s going to happen after the pandemic? I don’t know. I think that part of the reason it’s so successful is the moment in time that we’re in and people are lonely and they’re desperate for connection.
Tijana: Tell me about the difference between working with a big company and a smaller company.Are there advantages, disadvantages to either.
Rachel Dorsey: Bigger brands are more comfortable spending that budget because it is a smaller piece of their overall pie. They trust us more. They are a little more flexible with, um, with the choices that we make and, uh, and smaller brains, even if we are scaled down, it is still what they’re spending with us is still representative representative of a huge piece of their budget.
So they are much more, um, much more not, I don’t want to say invested, but they, they are a little more nervous typically about that spend. And so for us, the way we approach that is to get. Like I, I talk about getting shoulder to shoulder with them. Like our, our success is their success. Their success is our success, and we are as invested if not more in the final deliverable, being exactly what they want.
Tijana: And you also so put in a lot of time to helping women develop their business plans. Um, you did point out an interesting statistic that I’d love for you to share with us again. Um, and what are some of the steps that you would advise
Rachel Dorsey: Fewer than 2% of female owned businesses ever break a million dollars of annual revenue? And, you know, my happens to be one of them. I worked really hard to get it. Um, and luckily we’re there every year, since we, since we broke it, we’ve been there every year, but it’s, it’s never a guarantee. And I really believe that 2% is not enough
So for me, um, you know, I’m hugely passionate about helping women start and grow businesses. I would not have been able to start and grow mine if I didn’t have women that I could look up to.
Tijana: So you’re certainly paying it forward as well. And, um, I know that you have a four step marketing program that you usually share with, uh, women. And, um, you also mentioned some projects that you’re working on. Uh, in the future
Rachel Dorsey:I have this four-step marketing plan. It’s totally free to anybody who DMS me and just says plan. It’s also available on my website, but it’s just a quick little four step thing, and people can walk themselves through it. Um, and it just demystifies it a little bit and makes it makes a very heavy and challenging concept, a lot easier to digest.
The other things that I do, um, I do one-on-one strategic consulting. It’s very, um, people will ask me like, is it a program? And I’m like, well, it’s not really a program. It’s very intuitive. I mostly just show up. And I asked the right questions and it’s sort of a hybrid between mentorship, coaching and strategic consulting. I bring all of those things to the table at once. So sometimes it’s about removing mental roadblocks or emotional roadblocks. More often it’s about demystifying, a process or a strategy so that people can, uh, stop feeling stuck and like take action.
Tijana: I do recommend that everyone checks out of your reels because they’re super fun and everything sounds so simple and is very nicely explained. So thank you for speaking to us, to Pop style TV, and we look forward to catching up with you once you maybe publish a book or some things let’s see what’s next. And see you on clubhouse.