We were lucky to catch up with Latesha Byrd recently and have shared our conversation below.

Latesha, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

After providing career coaching for hundreds of clients, helping them create career strategies, and advocating for what they deserve, I realized there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done inside the organizations for real change to occur. We can advocate for advancement opportunities, higher pay, and a safer workplace, but companies must prioritize employee growth. If not, systemic inequities will continue to widen the professional developmental gap between historically excluded employees and their white, male counterparts. Perfeqta comes in as a trusted partner for these companies to help them accomplish their DEI and talent development goals that in turn support and advance diverse talent.

Perfeqta is made up of 3 words: Performance, equity, and talent – which are the core of the work we do. Our goal is to build high-performing teams and put equity back into talent. In the last year and a half, we’ve worked with amazing organizations like Nerd Wallet, YouTube, Aflac, Zapier, Women Who Code, General Assembly, Redfin, and many others.

Latesha, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started Byrd Career Consulting in 2015 as a career-development-focused company, providing career resources and coaching to people looking to land their dream jobs and leave toxic environments, as well as helping those in need of discovering who they wanted to become professionally. That’s when I started my business and as it grew quickly, I eventually quit my full-time job 3 years later in 2018 to focus on building the business full-time.

When I recognized how many people were in need of community and support rooted in our identities as Black women at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, I launched Career Chasers Members Club to service a wider community of women of color across the globe, which is still running and growing today. I also began supporting organizations internally in 2020 by helping build talent development and DEI programs. That’s when I decided to shift the focus of Byrd Career Consulting to B2B, which is how Perfeqta came about.

At Perfeqta, we help high-growth and mission-driven companies across the globe build healthy, inclusive, and equitable workplaces that people love to work in. I always like to say that Perfeqta works in the business of culture transformation; our goal is to change cultures of organizations from the inside out through coaching, training, and consulting.

The biggest challenge I faced in my career was learning that time is money. So I’ve had to learn the importance of prioritizing, deprioritizing, and reprioritizing my tasks regularly to make sure I’m focused on the right things that a CEO should be focused on. There are so many decisions I have to make on a regular basis, in addition to running the business and managing a team. If I don’t keep my schedule tight, the business suffers.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

At 15, I began working at Mcdonald’s to support our single-parent household. All I knew was that I wanted to create a future for myself that allowed me to thrive, dream, and be able to provide for myself in a way beyond my circumstances.

This instilled a level of drive and ambition in me that carried me well throughout college and my early career, ultimately leading to starting a business at 25. I recently reached 7 years as a full-time entrepreneur.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

My social media following comes from me sharing my journey as I built my businesses. I’ve always been very open about the challenges I’ve faced starting a business at a young age and it resonated with a lot of my followers, especially Black women. People would DM me asking for career development resources and I realized there was an opportunity for me to share those career resources with my followers. Once they started sharing my content, my B2C following grew. When I started Career Chasers Members Club and began taking on career coaching clients, I listened to their needs and began sharing more career empowerment resources with my online community.

Over the last two years, I’ve been able to grow a B2B audience by sharing my journey building Perfeqta and using platforms like LinkedIn to share organic content. I hold LinkedIn Live Shows every two weeks, publish a regular LinkedIn Newsletter, and commit to sharing one post a day that resonates with my network. Just looking at analytics, our LinkedIn Newsletter has over 7,000 subscribers, I’ve gained over 15,000 followers, and some of my posts have gained over 1 million impressions.

My advice to anyone building their social media presence is to be authentic and provide value. Post what feels genuine to you and listen to what your followers are talking about. Try to build on those conversations by inserting your unique POV. And if you’re a business owner, don’t be afraid to share those behind the scenes journey on social media. You never know who’s watching, listening or reading, and that follower could become your biggest client one day! I’m incredibly grateful for the amazing clients that have come to Perfeqta through social media.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.goperfeqta.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/go.perfeqta/
• Facebook: N/A
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lateshabyrd/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/goperfeqta
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@perfeqta9394

Image Credits
JLavii Photography (image 1) Jonathan Benavente