About Richard

Review Client Results and Testimonials

Richard Kirby, Principal

Richard’s Predictive Index Assessment Profile

Expertise Rooted in Real-World Results

With over two decades of expertise in executive consulting and coaching, Richard has over 10,000 hours of real world experience guiding executives and other leaders through complex career planning and business transitions. This has provided him a deep understanding of the unique challenges faced by those seeking higher incomes, greater job satisfaction, and lasting career growth.

Professional Experience and Learning

Richard began his journey in Electrical Engineering while playing drums in a rock cover band on weekends during high school and college. Those early experiences taught him the value of teamwork and the principle that “perfect practice makes perfect.”

After achieving membership in two national engineering honor societies, Richard became a licensed professional engineer. He spent the early part of his career at a Fortune 100 company, holding management roles in engineering, human resources, and marketing. During that time, he developed a deep appreciation for the importance of career planning and mentoring, training and development, process improvement, and repeatable system processes — as well as a firsthand understanding of the pitfalls of working at large companies.

He later transitioned to sales management roles at a pre-IPO Venture Capital funded startup and several other firms with annual revenues ranging from $100 million to $2 billion. These experiences helped him better understand the benefits of effective marketing and sales, including customer relations, referral networking, and relationship building.

From day one, when he was told his employer’s management development program had been discontinued, Richard believed that he would need to learn how to “promote himself” rather than wait for his company or boss to bring him his next career opportunity. He became a student of job search, resume writing, and interviewing and applied it to his own situations. This got him multiple promotions climbing the corporate ladder, until it fell over in the 2001 recession!

In 2001, Richard left the corporate world and in early 2002 he launched his consulting/coaching practice — initially focused solely on corporate executive career planning and job search coaching to land better jobs faster. Through this work with CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CROs, etc. he developed expertise that included “self-marketing” strategies, compensation negotiations, and recruiting relations. He later expanded his practice to include business owner coaching, including recruiting various types of personnel and mentoring them on interview techniques.

Richard believes that (virtually) everyone is underutilized and underpaid. For that reason, after a short assessment of a potential client’s situation, he is almost always convinced that he can help them increase their incomes and advance their careers. And this becomes his overarching personal challenge. While there will occasionally be someone who has luckily fallen into a job that pays them more than they are worth, this is the rare exception. The reason people are underachieving in their careers is not because of intelligence or job performance. It is that few people understand the potential available to them in the job market or how to set achievable aspirational goals, present the best version of themselves, and navigate effectively to capture the dream jobs they want. As he frequently says, “They don’t teach this stuff in MBA school.”

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Postscript/Personal

Richard lives in Roswell, GA, with his wife Cheryl. His hobbies and interests include personal development, golf, music, travel, philosophy, and exercise. His children and grandchildren live in Atlanta, Baltimore, and Berlin (Germany). His early love of musical performance rubbed off on his kids… they sing as well as play sax, keyboards, drums, and classical viola.

Another View of the “K Factor”

Getting a little philosophical, the K Factor is the overarching strategy that drives how Richard works with every client. He seeks to be a Katalyst for their success and his formula (remember, he once was an engineer) is:

. Inspirational + Analytical = Inevitable .

He believes that all the masses of people out there who are underpaid and underutilized can be inspired to believe more in themselves and their abilities to achieve more for themselves and their families. When combined with thoughtful mutual brainstorming and analysis of every critical DECISION necessary to reach their career goal, his experiences have confirmed that intelligent, motivated career seekers can uncover great new opportunities and make more beneficial choices that cause their successes to become inevitable.