Keith Powell, Ricky Robinson Give the C-CRETS to Climbing the Corporate Ladder

Two men have created a platform to help promote people in their corporate careers.

Keith Powell and Ricky Robinson offer career coaching services, online courses and topical content through blogs and a podcast on C-CRETS.com.

According to the website, Powell and Robinson have diligently worked “in the corridors of the C-Suite and mentored hundreds of people along the way.”

In an interview with The Quintessential Gentleman, the two share a little bit of their background.

Powell had a long career in finance before going into private equity and education, while Robinson is a top dog in human resources in an aerospace company. Robinson said the two met at an airport before bouncing around some ideas, ultimately concluding that helping people climb their respective career ladders is a priority.

“…Everybody wants to talk to Ricky and Keith,” Robinson said. “…We ended up starting a podcast because we wanted to reach people through scale. It's almost like, why you go to school and get all of the education is because you want to be able to maximize your potential. Well, we wanted to be able to maximize how many people we could impact. That’s kind of how we started to think about our responsibility … as it relates to people seeing what they aspire to be.”

When it comes to the podcast, C-CRETS, Robinson, and Powell relay their trials and tribulations through corporate America. Other topics divulged are how to deal with family while still trying to hit corporate goals, dealing with coworkers’ personalities and how to ascend in a specific career.

“I knew in my career I thought I was ready, but at the end of the day … I was far from ready moving forward,” Robinson said. “We’re telling people those lessons we learned much later in our career. … Our real goal is to impact generational wealth…”

Still, the longtime friends know it isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation. Rather, they discuss their issues and through mentoring hundreds of people, they have found that many of the same situations they have dealt with in their careers happened to be an instance that most – if not all – are dealing with when it comes to their particular career path.

“We’re all in some ways experiencing the same things as we get to the top,” Powell said. “…We’re trying to break those barriers is what we are all about.”

But to even get to this point, one must land the job first. Robinson said their services teach people how to market themselves to specific corporate jobs. Robinson and Powell also educate folks about interviewing skills, including questions pertaining to how much money one is worth.

And Robinson said that one can make a nice living in corporate America if one has the right mindset and goes out and executes some of the critical foundational philosophies taught through these services.

All these philosophies are taught within the prism of how Powell and Robinson came up and ultimately excelled in their places of work.

Last and certainly not least, near the end of the interview, Powell and Robinson speak on being deliberate and intentional regarding networking. If one wants something that another person you speak to has, it’s imperative to know their career path.

Knowing a career path is great, but the two entrepreneurs also delve into investing in themselves and how that moved them up the corporate ladder.

Check out the full interview.

For more information, go to C-CRETS.com.