End of Year Reflections: 2021

What a year 2021 has been!

When I started Mattingly Solutions in August of 2019, I never would have anticipated how much we would be able to accomplish in just a little over two years. And that growth has looked like a hockey stick in 2021.

While our revenue increased between 2020 and 2021, I’m even more excited about the growth we’ve experienced on our team, and among our clients (DICK’s Sporting Goods, American Eagle Outfitters, Duracell, NAWBO, Intelsat, & Flexential (just to mention a few) when it comes to building more diverse, equitable, and inclusive organizations.

Our Team

I knew pretty quickly that I was not cut out to be a solopreneur. First, I’m way too much of an extrovert. More importantly, though, is that the benefits of workplace diversity cannot be gained from one person (stay tuned for a future blog about tokenism).

Diversity is only at the group level—one person can never be “diverse.” So, I not only desired to build a team, but for that team to be comprised of people different from me in meaningful ways. To bring diverse skills and perspectives to the table. And lived experience that I cannot—nor should not—speak to.

Between our team and key partners, our team beings diversity in terms of ethnicity, sexual orientation, neurodiversity, geographic location (remote-first hybrid work #FTW), caregiver status, 1st generation, and gender—we could use a little more gender diversity in 2022…despite how much pride I have in being a woman-founded, woman-led organization. #whorunstheworld #womenownedbiz #womeninleadership

I am eternally grateful that the universe brought Sertrice Grice, our co-founder and Chief Consulting Officer, and I together. We met through Blacks in Industrial Organizational Psychology (IO)—a great organization that I joined in early 2020 as an ally member (for any I/Os reading this, be sure to check them out and consider joining yourself!).

When a had a last-minute scheduling conflict for one of our speakers in a Blacks in IO + Mattingly Solutions webinar on allyship, Sertrice quickly stepped up to the plate and hit it out of the park. She and I immediately hit it off and in a few short months later, she made the plunge and left her job to join me on this crazy roller coaster of building and running a DEI and IO consulting startup.

Since then, Sertrice has helped us land and serve some of our biggest clients to date. We’ve also continued co-facilitating talks and workshops (like Vibrant Pittsburgh’s REI summit), as we share a passion for public speaking about topics related to DEI, allyship, and our forthcoming book titled, Inclusalytics: How DEI Leaders Use Data to Drive Their Work.

We also had the privilege of hiring our first Organizational Consultant, Kelsie Colley, who has brought her psychometric and design skills—a very rare and amazing combo—to Mattingly Solutions. She first completely overhauled our social media presence (check our beautiful Instagram account).

Kelsie has since transitioned into a more R&D role, running the validation study of our flagship product, the Mattingly Inclusion and Belonging Assessment (MIBA). Kelsie has also taken on a more client-facing role, flexing her consulting skills and helping our clients take a more data-driven approach to DEI.

Hiring I/O PhD students has been going so well that we brought on not one but TWO new, part-time Consulting Assistants, Sarah Jackson and Julie Chen. Kelsie successfully passed her metaphorical “IO/DEI knowledge translator” torch to Sarah and she’s hit the ground running. She’s now our go-to content creator when it comes to establishing Mattingly Solutions as top thought leaders in the DEI space. Whether it’s posting high-quality content on LinkedIn or Instagram, managing and promoting our Better Humans @ Work (BH@W) video series, or writing newsletters and blogs, Sarah has added so much value to our company in a few short months.

Same goes for Julie and her lab/project management expertise, keeping us on track with a beast of an applied DEI research project we have been managing with one of our biggest clients. Julie’s work has the potential of resulting in industry-wide change when it comes to mitigating racial bias in retail. Stay tuned for more to come with this work in 2022.

I also couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome Camaria Lehman to our team. One of the few non-IOs on staff, Camaria brings her product management and operations expertise to all things here at Mattingly Solutions. She holds her MBA and has worked on high profile teams at Philips and DDI. In her few short months with us, she had contributed much needed strategic and operational direction, systems, processes, and amazing people leadership to get us organized, clear, and ready to take over the world here in 2022.

I would be amiss to not give a well-earned shout out to our sub-contractors, Chrissy Fontanese & Michael Thornhill, who have and will continue to lead our clients closer to their DEI goals. When it comes to our approach to DEI consulting, our hands-on, partnership approach to working with our clients would not be possible without bringing in these amazing pitch hitters to help scale our work.

And last—but certainly not least—are our amazing Mattingly Solutions partners. Gigi Gilliard and I have tag-teamed a number of amazing clients this year, including Human Rights Watch and Ryan Health. She brings the DEI training and facilitation expertise, where we bring the measurement and allyship goods to the table.

Keep an eye out for a new allyship/ targeted group DEI product we’re currently delivering and will be rolling out at scale in 2022, Project H.E.A.L. Allyship may have been the word of the year in 2021, but I really see this proven method of advancing DEI efforts really start coming to life in 2022—especially if Mattingly Solutions has anything to do with it.

Clients & Impact

Each and every day, I feel so honored that we get to do the work that we do here at Mattingly Solutions, helping our clients take a more data-driven approach to DEI specifically and improving the human experience at work more broadly.

We’ve delivered a number DEIx Strategy sessions that result in a robust DEIx Roadmap, tailored to each client, giving them their DEI blueprint for the next year and beyond. We’ve also executed numerous DEIx Advisory Consulting retainers that allow us to partner closely with internal DEI leaders, enabling them to execute their DEI strategy by providing expert guidance and resources.

We’ve completed a wide variety of measurement projects, whether a full DEI workforce survey, focus groups, interviews, pulse surveys and other creative ways to help our clients better use data to drive their work.

Our forthcoming book, Inclusalytics, will provide even more guidance when it comes to the intersection of DEI and data. Our first draft is complete (a HUGE milestone for us) and we’re preparing for a March 2022 release date after we complete the copyediting, design, and proofing process.

Finally, we’ve built and delivered a number of keynotes and workshops that focus on inclusive behaviors and allyship, educating and empowering our clients with the tools they need to make others—especially those from underrepresented groups—feel valued, respected, seen and heard.

We have big plans to broaden our reach to not only our clients, but the DEI space as a whole. We are continuing to publish academic articles and do research, further establishing ourselves as DEI scientist-practitioners.

We’re also super proud of the organic reach of our social media channels and newsletter, gains we plan to double or even triple in 2022. Just check out how much we’ve grown in followers over the last 6 months alone:

Platform	Growth Since May 2021
Facebook	↑ 26%
Instagram	↑ 46%
LinkedIn	↑ 69%
YouTube	↑ 185% (!)
Website visitors	↑ 80%

Be sure to join our newsletter and our social media platforms to follow along with all we have planned in 2022. And thank you for all of our followers and supporters who have cheered us on, referred clients, and amplified our message—we couldn’t have gotten this far without you.

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Dr. Victoria Mattingly is both CEO and co-founder of Mattingly Solutions. Learn more about and connect with Dr. V here.