Today we’d like to introduce you to Robert Gary Dodds.
Hi Robert Gary, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My MG Consulting and Authors websites, listed below, offer a brief overview of my background and provide an early introduction to who I am.
Born in England, I built an international career that led me to serve as Head of Human Resources for both regional and global luxury hotel companies across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, and the United States.
My wife is Jamaican, and after retiring from the hospitality industry on December 31, 2014, after overseeing 169 hotels in the Middle East & Africa—now eleven years ago last month—I embarked on a new chapter. Since then, I have launched three businesses and, together with my team, provided consulting services throughout all the regions mentioned above, as well as in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada; written two biographic works; and am writing a third, with four books lined up.
1. MG Consulting (USA) LLC. ©️
Specializing in HR & training for luxury hospitality companies globally.
2. Bespoke Executive Search ©️ Specializing in senior executive search in the luxury hospitality industry globally.
3. Robert Gary Dodds TM
I am the published author of two historical biographies, with a third currently in progress and scheduled for publication in the fall of 2026. Following that, I will be releasing in the next few years two children’s books, a cookbook, and a work on personal loss of children, and those that made it, across cultures—a testament to love’s enduring continuity.
Post-international career entrepreneurship:
Having launched both consultancies in 2015 and 2016, respectively, I was later approached by a U.S. publisher to write the biography of a well-known Jamaican–British television personality and international royal commentator.
I was invited in 2018 to undertake a biography of a Scottish Hamilton. I devoted four years to this work, conducting extensive research, interviews, and lineage validation, tracing 1,145 years of this remarkable family’s history through DNA evidence.
The project grew into a collection of biographical vignettes featuring both famous and lesser-known Hamiltons who have shaped history. It also included the fascinating task of connecting a modern-day Alexander Hamilton to the American Founding Father, supported by DNA, genealogy, and even topographical analysis—all tracing the Hamilton male bloodline back to approximately 880 A.D.
I am now working on my next book, a coffee table-sized one with a double-page spread, with one side of each page of around 60 stunning portraits by the world-renowned artist Barbara Kaczmarowska-Hamilton. On each portrait’s facing page, there is a brief biographic story of the sitter and lovely anecdotes and stories she recalls from their conversations. Her portraits range from royalty and aristocrats across the world to presidents and famous people in their countries, like Buzz Aldrin, the American astronaut. From popes and prime ministers to celebrities from around the world.
The book is due for publication in the fall of 2026.
I am also working on two children’s books, both already mapped out, and a cookbook with a Michelin Award-winning chef and children.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
When I retired in January 2015, I believed I was stepping away from a long and fulfilling career that had taken me around the world—leading human resources and training for luxury hotel groups in Europe, the Middle East & Africa, and Asia Pacific. Yet within months, the quiet I had expected gave way to new invitations. Companies from around the globe reached out for guidance, and one assignment naturally led to another. The first saw me being asked to spend a month in Singapore to assess a luxury hospitality company’s regional corporate office, including leadership psychometric assessments and team dynamics. Then, conduct the HR team’s SWOT analysis and create new common operating terms and conditions for executives. By the end of that first year, I had established an HR consultancy, and a year later, a senior executive search firm. I added two colleagues who joined me as partners, and together we built a network that stretched from the Caribbean and Europe to the Middle East & Africa, and Asia Pacific.
Then, in 2026, an unexpected opportunity arrived—a publisher asked me to write the life story of a renowned royal biographer whose unusual upbringing and extraordinary experiences had often captured UK television audiences. I stepped into the world of authorship as a true novice. The publisher, direct yet undeniably right about matters of style, pushed me to relearn the fundamentals of writing. It forced me to slow down, listen, unlearn old habits, and rebuild my approach from the ground up.
The task was daunting. The research spanned continents and required interviews and documents scattered across archives, libraries, and private collections. I traveled twice to the UK and twice to Jamaica, all while the publisher maintained a firm nine-month deadline and my consulting businesses still needed oversight. Balancing it all required more than time management; it demanded clarity—choosing the right focus at the right moment and trusting that the work would take shape. And it did. The following year, the book launched with media attention at an event held in an old Jamaican plantation house, a poignant setting that added depth to the story we had captured.
By December 2024, I decided it was time to narrow my focus. I stepped back from most consulting work, taking on only occasional projects for long-standing clients, so that I could devote my energy to the books I was already writing and the new ones yet to come. I realized that I carried into authorship the very skills that had shaped my career: storytelling, sociability, cultural awareness, and the instinct to understand people deeply. Years spent assessing personalities, interviewing senior leaders, and conducting meticulous research had prepared me perfectly for this new chapter of life—one built not on corporate structures but on human stories.
And as the world changed, so did the work. What once required digging through dusty government archives and newspaper collections now lives online, accessible from a single screen. Interviews that once demanded international travel now take place freely over FaceTime, WhatsApp, or Zoom, collapsing distance and opening doors that would once have been out of reach. It has been a journey shaped by time, opportunity, and the constant need to refocus—proof that learning does not stop at retirement but often begins anew.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I suppose, from my international career leading human resources for luxury hotel companies across four continents, I was known for my understanding and sensitivity to multiple cultures and religions worldwide. For my integrity, work ethic, and ability to translate corporate business goals into supportive HR strategies, as in my last role, I delivered to 169 multi-million-dollar businesses across scores of different legal jurisdictions, where I was seen as a specialist in labor law.
As a newfound passion in retirement, writing has taught me an extraordinary amount—from navigating the entire process of working first with one publisher and then another to understanding my own strengths and shortcomings as a writer. It revealed the need to sharpen my storytelling, to adopt a more detached and disciplined style, and to write with greater succinctness while maintaining clear, deliberate syntax.
A retired head of book editing and review of a global publishing house, before showing an interest in the writer, reviewed my first book, then my draft manuscript for the last book, and commented that I had made a seismic shift from struggling and eventually creating a readable work to a well-written, flowing, and gripping set of stories. Sometimes, having a true expert pull your writing apart and point out how to rebuild your style and approach is what we need, as painful as it is at the time, to wake up and grow into a true writer.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
Know your strengths and areas that need improvement.
Do not try to be perfect at everything.
Acknowledge what you are truly brilliant at and what you are not. Then, each day, focus on what you are best at, and utilize others and research technology to get the things that are not your forte done.
In starting a business, the above apply as much as they do to establishing a writing career and selecting and working with a publisher.
Listen to your heart and gut, and when it comes to writing, find the right publisher, not just with the right marketing access locally, nationally, or globally (depending on what you wish to write about and its audience), but with the right people on their team that will work with you from your commencement to launch, who you find to be professional yet personal and fun, and who you have a working relationship with based on trust and kindness, where your personality and characters align.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.RGDodds-Author.com and www.MGCusaLLC.com
- Instagram: @rgdoddsauthor
- Facebook: Email: RGDoddsAuthor@gmail.com
