About Richard
I have a copy of a birth certificate that states that Richard Corydon Perkey, a male, was born on November 29, 1957, at Wayne County Memorial Hospital in Clawson, Michigan to Charles Rensen Perkey and Virginia Brooks Perkey.
I am pretty sure that was me, but how do we really know?
(Well, maybe when you look at the pictures of my dad and me, the resemblance is uncanny. This, despite the fact that whenever I wished Chuck Perkey “Happy Father's Day!” he would deadpan “I will pass that along if I ever see the guy!")
Dad moved my mom Ginnie, my sister Randee, and my brother Chip to Chester, Virginia** in 1961. Dad was going to run a lumberyard that a gentleman in Detroit had purchased.
Boy, I guess the conversation with Ginnie was kind of awkward when Dad found out that the deal to buy the lumberyard had fallen through! Dad was jobless and had moved the family 600 miles away from the closest relative. Oops!
**Less than ten miles away lived the cutest little girl in the world, Jill Denise Stewart. Thirty years later - I married her.
From Lynchburg to Westwood...Almost
I was five years old when Dad landed a great sales job with a company out of Philadelphia. The company wanted Dad to move to Lynchburg, Virginia, as it was the geographical center of his sales territory.
So off we went to Lynchburg!
My “go to” place to play was at a neighbor who lived three houses up the street. They had paved their driveway and put up a basketball goal. I was instantly hooked, and soon every waking moment I wasn't in school, I was at the neighbor’s house, shooting hoops, and ruining their lawn.
When I was 9, Randee’s boyfriend opened my eyes to the excitement of college basketball. He was the biggest fan of the UCLA Bruins in Lynchburg VA. Thus, I became the second biggest fan of UCLA in Lynchburg.
I no longer needed a career aspiration! My life's goal was to play college basketball for John Wooden! (Unfortunately, the word never got back to John Wooden…)
From Reading the Game to Reading the Room
There is a direct line between my college basketball career and my career in executive search.
When you are a D1 basketball walk-on, you have three primary roles:
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Be a member of the “Scout Team” whereby you impersonate the players on the opposing team that you are about to play;
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Get great grades to pull up the aggregate GPA of team, and
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Serve as the host for all the great basketball players who our head coach hoped to sign…
How well did I perform these roles?
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As for my ability to impersonate opposing players- I was a 10 times better Tate Armstrong, Clyde” The Glide” Austin, and Skip Brown than I was a Rich Perkey!
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I was incredibly fortunate that I was a Davidson Basketball teammate of really smart guys like Ernie Reigel, Danny Hock, and Carter Todd, who were all great students, as my GPA barely qualified as a positive integer;
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I was great at the recruiting role. It gave me purpose on the team, and it meant that I was contributing to the future of the program. At a point in time that I was about to quit Davidson Basketball forever- it was my ability to help with recruiting that made the coaching staff want me to stay on the team!
400+
Search engagements
30+
Years in Executive Search
1980
Graduated Davidson College
1
Published novel
A basketball story. A coming-of-age story. Rich's story.
Rich's first novel, Seeking the Big Time, draws loosely from his own journey to Davidson College and his unlikely path from campus grounds crew to Division I basketball.
The story follows Dickie Perkey, a young aspiring basketball player determined to reach the big time. After arriving at Davidson, he discovers that achieving the dream he has spent years chasing may look very different from what he imagined.
Beneath the basketball story is a larger question—one that has followed Rich throughout his own life: What does “making it” really mean?
Seeking the Big Time is Rich's debut novel, published by Koehler Books in November 2026.
Still Curious about what comes next
Today, Rich lives in Atlanta and continues to work with organizations and leaders navigating important decisions about leadership and the future.
Whether he's helping a board think through its next CEO, advising a leadership team, talking with an executive about the next chapter of a career, or working on his next story,
Rich remains interested in the same thing he's been interested in all along: people, potential, and what happens when the two come together.