How 2 entrepreneurs are tackling diversity challenges with their small businesses

This article is part of "Talent Insider," a series containing expert advice to help business owners tackle a variety of hiring challenges.

Brothers John and Mike Burns have started eight businesses focused on culture. These include a multicultural marketing company, an event-production company, and a private global membership community called HQ House. It has locations in Washington, DC, and soon, Nairobi, Kenya. It also has virtual memberships. HQ House aims to connect 1 million Black professionals globally by 2026. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Tim Paradis: What made you start these businesses?

Mike Burns: Both John and I were in corporate America. John was a partner at a law firm. I was a corporate executive at a Fortune 500 company. We were in these roles during the time of COVID, but also the time of social unrest. One of my roles was overseeing global real estate for the organization that I was a part of. We all know that during the time of COVID, the way you had to cut costs was either through cutting people or cutting your footprint, because revenues usually weren't coming in for most companies.

I'll never forget, I was having a call with the CEO and the CFO, and we were talking about real-estate downsizing. And at the same time, on the TV behind me was the George Floyd video. And on my computer were the pictures of my two little Black boys. At that moment, I started thinking: Was the conversation I was having about global real-estate downsizing going to ensure that the situation on that TV was never going to happen for my two little boys? And then, right at that moment, I hung up the phone. I called John, and I said, "Do you want to go out and change the world?" We dropped our notice two weeks later, in the middle of COVID, to start the Burns Brothers.

Paradis: Changing the world is an ambitious goal. How did you know how to approach it?

Mike: What I've found inside corporate America, especially in diversity roles but also in business-leader roles, is that oftentimes we want to act without understanding. So we knew that if we were really going to change the world, it was going to have to be centered around the concept of how to create and maximize understanding.

First, understanding yourself as an individual, and if you understand yourself as an individual, you can better understand others. We knew it was going to be a heavy lift. But we knew whatever we were going to do, it was going to have to be founded on driving, driving, driving, and creating understanding.

And now, if you look at the Burns Brothers as an organization, you can see how we built through leveraging or building on those pillars of understanding.

Paradis: How does what you're doing fit into the broader conversation around DEI?

Mike: We look at diversity, equity, and inclusion very, very differently. A lot of times elsewhere, it will be solely based on external dimensions of diversity. Like, "What are you doing for women? What are you doing for people of color? What are you doing for people of the LGBTQ+ population?" That's all well and good, but what it allows to happen is for people to opt out. Like, "If I'm not part of that group, then it's really not something that I can relate with or connect with."

Also, it actually sometimes is counterproductive, because when you start looking at things through segmentation, you're actually enhancing the concept of differences and separation. But we all know that as human beings, we actually have way more in common.

Experiences may be different, but everyone wants to feel valued. Everyone wants to actually make a difference and an impact. That comes in different shapes and forms. And so what we look at for diversity, equity, and inclusion is to really help people understand the points of commonality.

Then once you understand the points of commonality, how then do you even enhance those through the differences that people bring? So instead of solely focusing on differences and, "How do I engage with the differences?" it's more, "How do I maximize the commonality to create organizational effectiveness or outcomes or maximize team culture and camaraderie?"

I think that's what makes us different. And that's what also makes our work digestible for organizations or people who may be pushing back or who may not feel like this is part of what they should care about or what they should be focused on. And it's been a successful approach.

Paradis: It sounds like this conversation around DEI is maybe too binary sometimes.

Mike: Right. And it can come across as divisive. Because DEI, unfortunately, has been positioned as, "If you do not support this, then you are a bad person." We never do anything around privilege or anti-racism and things like that. Because — and we're not saying they're bad or good — it ends up immediately putting certain people in a certain mindset.

And if change is truly a volume-based game and you need as many people rowing the boat in the same direction, you can't afford to alienate people at the start. You have to make them feel like they're "part of" versus they are "outsiders of."

Paradis: You have businesses around marketing, communications, events, talent management, inclusive learning, and wellness. What about these businesses has a high return on investment when it comes to making progress in this area?

John Burns: I think there are a couple of different things. The ROI is high when you bring these different, very important functions together because they're all very complementary. I think you can never effectively make change if you're only trying to communicate with someone from a digital-marketing campaign. You can only make a limited amount of change if you're only bringing people together for events.

But I think if you bring all of these functions together in a seamless way, that's when you really begin to see the change, the impact, the sustainable messaging, and all those things. I mean, we all know people have different experiences and different messaging and different types of insights ultimately inform their belief system. And so we believe in being very comprehensive with our approach.

Paradis: How do you know what you're doing is working?

John: Obviously, from a marketing and comms perspective, you have KPIs and different metrics that you're tracking. Those are all easy, but I think it's the sentiment and feedback and the personal stories of impact that ultimately, really, are the drivers for us.

Specifically, when we think about our membership club in Washington, the level of relationships that have been forged as a result of people being in a space of safety is immeasurable. The level of refuge that we've been able to create for people to get out of the complexities of having to be performative throughout the day, to come to a space where they can just be themselves — it's something we never believed was even possible. It's so refreshing to see how it's really changing people's lives and circumstances on a daily basis.

Mike: A different example is when you go into a construction site with a whole bunch of blue-collar workers in Alabama, and you're about to help them understand themselves and the biases they carry.

You already have your own biases — believing what they're going to believe. But it's refreshing when you have that 60-year-old white construction worker — a man — come to you after and say, "You know what, I've never even thought about diversity like this. I never even saw this in myself." And then they send you an email two weeks after and ask you questions about how they should engage.

To me, that's how you know that you've made an impact. So if you take John's statement and then you take my statement, over time, if you continue to do this, the type of change and impact you can make in the world is probably unimaginable. But the thing is, we have to understand it's a long-term game.