The 2013 Business & Leadership Conference of the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) was one of my favorite events of last year.  I attended just as I was getting started with building the Gay Ambitions brand.  I am thrilled that I had the opportunity to interview Victoria Fulkerson, Sr. Vice President of NGLCC, for the podcast about the 2014 event which will be even bigger and better than the last one.  Victoria was an absolute pleasure to speak with and shares more about what you can expect at this event.

Show Notes and Transcription
Paul: Tell us a little more about yourself and the NGLCC.
Victoria: I’m the Senior Vice President of NGLCC and the NGLCC has been around since 2002. We’re just about 11 years old and our purpose is really as the business voice for the LGBT community.  It’s the largest global non-profit advocacy organization for LGBT businesses where we work to expand contracting  opportunities for LGBT entrepreneurs, help LGBT businesses grow and thrive, and we connect to a network of affiliate chambers across the country and internationally as well.
Paul: That’s exciting and it was started back in 2002 by Justin Nelson and Chance Mitchell who are still with it today and have just taken it to such a broad level.
Victoria: Absolutely, and it’s growing all the time, I think. The last 11 years has really seen a lot of change not only in the LGBT community but in the LGBT business community as well. It’s exciting to be a part of it.  I’ve been in the organization now for about 6 and half years and what we’re seeing is that over 140 major companies work with us. That means that they’re working with us  to seek out suppliers and vendors that are LGBT owned companies to help their businesses and we also have a lot of work going on with government entities and international as well, so definitely, a growing space.
Paul: And the big NGLCC conference is coming up in Vegas soon!
Victoria: Yes, we are very excited to take our conference to Las Vegas this year. We are gonna be at Caesar’s Palace from June 29 to August 1 and we’re expecting more than 700 attendees and that includes LGBT entrepreneurs, corporate sourcing folks, people from government entities and our affiliate chambers and we really bring everyone together for a week of intensive learning, motivating keynote speakers and making new connections for hopefully business growth for all the entrepreneurs.
Paul: Very, very exciting and I might see you there!
One of the things we would like to do about on this podcast is learn about people’s stories and what they have come to learn over the course of their career and I’m wondering if we could start with a failure.  Do you have any failures or lessons learned you could share with us?
Victoria: You know, this is a hard question. I was thinking about this question and I think what came to mind for me was maybe not the time when I failed but when I had maybe a feeling of helplessness, that I was not sure what I could do. What comes to mind is a story about a really good friend of mine who had an accident almost two years ago.  While she was coming home on a motorcycle, we had really terrible storm here in Washington DC and a tree fell on her.  Unfortunately, what happened was it completely paralyzed her.  In that moment, being a very good friend of hers, we spent the entire summer in the emergency room, waiting room and that feeling of helplessness and not really knowing what you can do to help or how you can support it was something that almost feels like a failure, right? The good part of that experience though even though it was terrible situation was that as a result of waiting in the waiting room and figuring out how do we do anything about this, there’s really nothing you can do but I realized actually I could do something to help and that was sort of a crystallizing moment for me where I realized that all of the different areas of my life,