Tiffany Dufu, founder and CEO of The Cru, has acquired The Mentor Method to accelerate enterprise ... [+]
For women rising up the executive ladder, especially women of color, ambition can be a lonely pursuit. In a 2018 McKinsey/LeanIn.org study of 64,000 employees at 279 companies in North America, 45% of women of color said they were often the only one in the room at work. Such isolation was proving to be costly to their careers and the companies that employed them.
Those findings were hardly a surprise to Tiffany Dufu. In 2018, the leadership advocate and consultant launched The Cru to give women the support they often lack at work — especially Black women like herself. But the Covid-19 pandemic, which initially threatened her startup as funding grew tight, soon proved to be a boon as employers looked for ways to keep professional women engaged as they juggled remote work with growing responsibilities at home.
So Dufu pivoted The Cru from being a peer-coaching and career-support platform for consumers to one aimed at the enterprise customer. With 13 corporate customers and 2,500 members, Dufu recognized she now needs support to take her company to the next level. So she has just acquired The Mentor Method, a startup founded by Black entrepreneur Janice Omadeke to build out her sales team and pipeline.
Dufu is not the first to recognize the importance of creating and empowering communities to help underrepresented employees succeed at work. Employee Resource Groups date back to at least 1970 when Black employees at Xerox created a support network to help each other succeed. Numerous external initiatives from Lean In to Chief also aim to fill that need.
What’s new are the tools and growing recognition that smaller groups can help women feel connected in a way that large networks or one-on-one mentoring might not. The growing success of peer support groups like F3 prove that many men are seeking community and feeling isolated, too.
Dufu is also especially focused on creating an empowering community model for women of color, who now make up 58% of her members. I recently spoke with her about the evolving philosophy and business model of The Cru, and what’s next for the company. Click here to see a video of our full conversation.
