Cheryl McCants: Building Relationships in Public Relations While Handling Everything BY R.L. WITTER he’s poised, professional, and calm under pressure. She always seems to know exactly what to say or do, regardless of the situation. If you find yourself or your company in crisis, first say a prayer, then call on her and her company to handle it. You might be thinking of Scandal’s Olivia Pope right now. You’re wrong, but you’re not far off. Her name is Cheryl F. McCants and as president and CEO of Impact Consulting Enterprises, she’s got this, that, and everything else handled—or “Cheryled” as her staff likes to say. A New Jersey native, McCants’ curiosity, creativity, and logic skills presented myriad options for her future. As is often said, it’s a blessing and a curse; but McCants saw only the blessing in her gifts and both sampled and enjoyed a variety of options before aiming her laser focus on building the Impact brand. As a teenager, she “wanted to be a biomedical engineer and design the first black bionic woman,” she recalled. “I was studying math… and I read this book called Mathematics and the Imagination, which talks about paradoxes and how certain things can never be figured out,” she explained. “…It intrigued
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me…and then I wondered why there was no black bionic man or woman show, so I was going to go out and create one.” She studied Engineering at Brown University, but switched first to Applied Mathematics, next Economics, then with the help of Dean Barrett Hazeltine, studied at L’Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Upon her stateside return, she graduated with a degree in Business Economics and was fluent in Spanish. And shortly thereafter, Impact Consulting Enterprises was born. She started out subcontracting for a telecommunications company, and it was a great fit. “I love writing; I love telling a story. I love doing things where you are intellectually stimulated, but then you have to connect with people on an ordinary, everyday language platform,” McCants explained. So it made perfect sense that she could read an operational manual for a telecom switching station and boil it down to plain language that laymen could understand and with it, maximize their usage of technology. But that wasn’t all she could do. continued on page 47 March 2017 The Positive Community
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