And when he was come in, he saith unto them, Why make ye this ado, and weep? the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. But when he had put them all out, he taketh the father and the mother of the damsel, and them that were with him, and entereth in where the damsel was lying. And he took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.
—Mark 5:39–42 KJV
Has the 609 come in yet?” my mother asked. “What about 607?” We were sitting outside on the patio of my home in Texas, enjoying the mild spring weather and watching my dogs frolic in our backyard. Although my mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the time she asked these questions, they made perfect sense to me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I believe all the properties are up to date.”
“That’s good,” she said, smiling to herself. “What a blessing they have been.”
I agreed with her, knowing that her observation was a huge understatement. You see, up until the time she passed away, my mother owned seven rental properties back in West Virginia where we lived when I was growing up. She had always identified each one and called it by the house number of its street address.
Now, my mother had owned these properties for years. She had the foresight when she was a younger woman to invest her resources in anticipation of a day when her income would be fixed or limited, and her wisdom clearly paid off. Despite the devastating debilitation of the disease that dulled her razor-sharp mind, my mother still remembered each property and its specifics much better than I could.
My mother was forward thinking and determined to take her well-being and the future of her family into her own hands. She had always been a progressive thinker and was never limited to one stream of income. In addition to teaching school, she would sell Avon from our home, raise vegetables that I would peddle door to door, and do anything else she could to help my dad support our family. From the meager income she and my father generated from their tireless endeavors, my mother managed to put away a little money until she had a nest egg ready to hatch for the purchase of her first rental property. Once she purchased this little house up the street from our home, she began saving again until she had enough to buy another. Eventually she had several houses through which she had padded her future.
I’ll never forget being a boy and sitting in our living room one afternoon as she met with a married couple from a neighborhood several miles from where she had first bought property. They owned a little cottage for sale down the street from where they lived. They had agreed to close the deal and sign the papers for my mother’s purchase that day. The three of them had negotiated terms already, and the owners had agreed to carry the loan my mother needed for the purchase. While the husband was on board with this arrangement, his wife, who didn’t really want to sell the property, had a major attitude. After expressing her reluctance to sell yet again, she muttered, “That’s all right… we’ll get that place back like we always do.”
The tension was palpable, but no one said anything as her husband signed the papers and handed the pen to my mother. Maintaining her poker face, Mama signed her name with a flourish, looked up and smiled, and said, “Yeah, when hell freezes over!” I didn’t crack a smile then, but I wanted to! After they left, my mother looked at me as we both burst out laughing. She said, “They will never get that house back!” She was right, too! That couple died several years later, and true to her word, my mother owned that property for the rest of her life, having quickly paid it off free and clear to establish it as a steady stream of income for decades to come.
Although my mother drew a retirement pension from the Kanawha County Board of Education from her years as a teacher, a career she had before becoming the Equal Employment officer for the state of West Virginia, she had created various income streams for her retirement along with her monthly Social Security check. Mother had made strategic decisions much earlier in her life that were game changers, alleviating the normal pressure associated with fixed-income and retirement plans for most people her age. She had not wanted to count on a bank or the government to control her future earnings and standard of living so she made decisions in 1964 that continued to provide for her in the thirty-five years that followed.
The young working wife and mother she was then made sacrifices and took calculated risks in order to provide for the old woman she would someday become. Following her example, I’ve done some investing at various times throughout my adult life, buying and selling real estate. What was initially just a mother and son laughing together became a sense of the importance of taking control of my financial future.
My mother modeled a method that gave me the inclination to think for myself and to take the wheel of my destiny and drive in the direction of my dreams. As I reflect on it now, my mother was doing all of this at a time when most people thought a woman’s place was in the kitchen! She was an entrepreneur who discovered she could soar.
My mother understood that if you’re going to be an effective entrepreneur, in fact if you’re going to be a good steward of today, you must know now how to prepare for the future. Those who do are far more likely to thrive while others are left to survive!
Woman, Hear You Roar
I’m not the only entrepreneur inspired by the example of my parents. For many generations, fathers and mothers have passed on habits to help their children unlock their power and creativity by employing more than one method of reliance. Growing up, many of us who were raised in underserved communities watched as our mother and father juggled two, three, even four jobs, doing whatever it took to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. Some of them pursued their dreams even while keeping their day job to pay the bills.
Singer-songwriter Valerie June describes the impact of watching her father run two small businesses, one a music production and promotion company and the other a construction and demolition business, on her own career:
Looking back, I see that my father’s companies were his form of art, and I find myself still learning lessons from the years we worked side by side. Music promotion was his passion, but construction was his source of financial stability. So many times on the path toward manifesting my own musical dream, I have leaned on the work foundation he and my mother laid for us. The things we are passionate about are fueled by mundane tasks. All is necessary. (“The First Time I… Lost a Parent,” New York Times, here, March 12, 2017)
For many of us, our ability to fly emerged not only from the wings our parents gave us but also from the social season and cultural climate. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, women continued to gain ground in the workplace. In addition to absorbing the example my mother set, growing up I witnessed many women in our community who juggled multiple entrepreneurial endeavors with similar dexterity. In fact, the accountant my parents used for their tax returns and for my mother’s real estate deals was Mrs. Theodora Rutherford, a smart black woman who ran her own small business from her home office in Institute, West Virginia.
This was the era when the feminist movement was emerging. Women had burned their bras and ignited their business savvy. They started driving, went back to school, and left the first high-heeled footprints on a glass ceiling that would shatter from the force of tenacious women moving from cookbooks to textbooks. These women became the trend-setting matriarchs prying the lid off the entombment of females in our society and burying male chauvinism in its place!
Women had entered the workforce out of necessity during World War II, and many continued to work afterward as they discovered new abilities and latent talents. Neither the world nor the family would ever be quite the same again. We would spend the next fifty years or more redefining what it meant to be a woman, a mother, and a sister. What was thought to be a temporary trend eventually morphed into a lifestyle.
While television programs kept Aunt Bee cooking in the kitchen and Carol Brady cruising in the car pool, their real-life counterparts were stepping beyond the domestic boundaries of their domiciles into offices, factories, retail shops, and boardrooms. Feminism was becoming a word heard with more frequency as pioneers like Gloria Steinem, Barbara Walters, and Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to the United States Congress, paved the way.
Women like these trailblazers not only shattered glass ceilings but also became role models for the generations that followed. They made inroads into virtually every sector of industry and entertainment, inspiring countless little girls to look beyond their Barbie dolls and glimpse themselves as astronauts, accountants, actresses, architects—and, of course, entrepreneurs. No wonder then that the number of female-owned businesses grew by 74 percent from 1997 to 2015, a rate one and a half times the national average of growth, according to a study commissioned and published by American Express OPEN (“2015 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report,” http://www.womenable.com/content/userfiles/Amex_OPEN_State_of_WOBs_2015_Executive_Report_finalsm.pdf).
Women now own 30 percent of all businesses in the United States, accounting for more than nine million firms. The study concluded, “The only bright spot in recent years with respect to privately held company job growth has been among women-owned firms.” Supporting this conclusion, women-owned businesses have added an estimated 340,000 jobs to the economy since 2007, while employment at companies owned by men (or with equally shared ownership) has declined.
And African American women control 14 percent of these companies, or roughly 1.3 million businesses, which is more than the number of businesses owned by all minority women in 1997, according to this same American Express report. In fact, the number of businesses owned by African American women had grown 332 percent since 1997, making black females the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the United States. This fact does not surprise me in the least since I grew up watching my mother create something from nothing by honing her natural intelligence and common-sense business acumen.
Never Too Late
Black women spanning a range of ages and stages are the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in our country right now. This thriving group of new risk-takers is comprised not only of young women with a recent college degree in their hands. Nor is it mostly composed of young professionals determined to launch a start-up with a group of their friends. Women of every age are discovering their place and entering the spectrum of entrepreneurial opportunities in the global community of our online world.
People no longer stay with one company in one function for the duration of their professional careers. They can operate within a variety of roles in any given industry or even switch career fields altogether in search of the area where they are able to contribute most passionately. Retirement is no longer an option for others who nonetheless long for a change that will awaken their soul and challenge them in new and unexpected ways. It’s not uncommon to see individuals embarking on their second, third, or fourth acts as they rewrite the narrative of their own success.
One prime-time example is Robbie Montgomery, a native Mississippian who grew up singing in the church choir and learning how to cook from her mother. Being the oldest of nine children, Robbie had to help prepare meals, and in the process she memorized the recipes for the delicious home cooking for which her mama was known. Little did she know that this culinary talent would later resurface when Robbie left home to pursue a professional singing career. Her vocal talent led her to tour as a backup singer for Ike and Tina Turner, and she later did session work with Dr. John, Joe Cocker, Stevie Wonder, and Barbra Streisand.
When a lung condition did not heal properly, Robbie was forced to end her professional music career, which led her to explore her options. She first explored the field of medicine by working as a dialysis technician. But fortunately for anyone who has ever tasted her short ribs or peach cobbler, Robbie’s love of food soon pulled her back to the kitchen and cooking the mouthwatering soul food she had learned to prepare while growing up.
Her story would be a triumphant success if it ended right there, but Miss Robbie’s path intersected with that of another Mississippi girl named Oprah Winfrey. Oprah not only loved Miss Robbie’s cooking but also partnered with her to create a reality television program for the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). Sweetie Pie’s documents the ups and downs, struggles and successes of running a family business as Miss Robbie and her son Tim Norman try to expand their brand and extend their locations.
Recently while I was in Los Angeles shooting my show, I noticed Sweetie Pie’s had just opened a new restaurant in Beverly Hills. A fan of Miss Robbie’s as well as of her cooking, I had just enough time in between leaving the set and catching my flight to stop in. The food was as delicious as ever and made me remember the meals my mother and aunts would cook up for Sunday dinners and family gatherings. I took a pic and immediately posted it on Instagram, happy to fulfill the responsibility we have to help each other survive.
Driving away, I reflected that many people know Miss Robbie’s food but don’t find the lesson in her story. She not only landed on her feet after being forced to switch careers, she also demonstrates the power of leveraging opportunities. It’s one thing to be a patron of a business but another thing to market that business as an ambassador of affirmation.
Robbie Montgomery realized her dream to be a professional singer but watched it disappear when her health deteriorated. Instead of lamenting her loss or dwelling on disappointment, she took a risk to transform something she loved into something others would love as well. She turned her talent into a restaurant and catapulted her restaurant into a reality show that gives her extraordinary exposure and enables her to open multiple locations. Learning the power of resilience and perseverance, she refused to settle for a life of regret. She reimagined herself and reinvented her purpose to create food instead of music.
Start Small, Finish Big
Miss Robbie illustrates what I consider to be a core principle for entrepreneurs: start small in order to finish big. Now, please notice I didn’t say to dream small—on the contrary, I encourage you to cast big dreams that will stretch your imagination and require you to rely on divine inspiration to sustain you. But you must start where you are and use what you have.
When our dreams exceed our resources and our vision transcends our present opportunities, we must remember to start small even as we strive toward success.
Because start-ups often have few resources to underwrite the early years, many entrepreneurs will have to employ a measured approach to their dreams. It isn’t a lack of faith that makes you start small. It is simply the access to capital and the understanding that you may not have the time or necessary resources to devote your full attention to your dream without bankrupting your other responsibilities.
Wisdom necessitates that you consider how much of both time and money you can invest in your dream as you carefully contemplate what is realistically available to you. In short, you cannot play with cards you haven’t been dealt. My mother had saved a little money, but with small children and a steady stream of monthly expenses, she needed an investment that didn’t consume her time when she was already working.
You have to start where you are. Modify your strategy to fit your realities. But whatever you do, don’t remain dormant. You must use what is in your hand! This principle reminds me of the way God instructed Moses when the people of Israel were enslaved in Egypt. God called Moses to confront Pharaoh and to lead his people to the Promised Land, which was a staggering endeavor, but when Moses began making excuses, God told him to start with what he had in his hand.
Moses answered, “What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, ‘The LORD did not appear to you’?”
Then the LORD said to him, “What is that in your hand?”
“A staff,” he replied.
The LORD said, “Throw it on the ground.”
Moses threw it on the ground and it became a snake, and he ran from it. Then the LORD said to him, “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail.” So Moses reached out and took hold of the snake and it turned back into a staff in his hand. (Exodus 4:1–4)
Moses was no stranger to reinventing himself—and in his case it had been a downward spiral. Rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter from a reed basket in the Nile River, Moses was raised as Egyptian royalty, not as a Hebrew slave. Then his temper got the best of him and he killed an Egyptian, forcing Moses to flee into the desert as a fugitive. Perhaps he would have been content to tend sheep and scrape by in the harsh, arid conditions—we don’t know. But what we do know is that Moses wasted no time unfolding a grocery list of canned excuses and fresh fears.
God, however, is not interested in Moses’ excuses—just as he’s not fooled by yours or mine. Instead he simply asks Moses, “What’s that in your hand? Let’s start with what you’ve got!” Moses has a huge task in front of him, but he doesn’t need to wait until the majority accepts him or he has a huge army or he’s a better and less fearful speaker. God basically told Moses to stop waiting and start walking! If you let it, your hesitation will only become a limitation. But starting too big and aiming too high can be just as confining and ultimately destructive.
An old Chinese proverb reminds us that a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. I would say that a million-dollar empire starts with the one thing you already do well, the one talent, ability, skill, or service that others need. Yes, it would be wonderful to begin with hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital from friendly, patient investors. Yes, it would be fantastic to have a team of talented, hardworking, like-minded colleagues who want to share in the journey to realize your dream.
But every journey, no matter how big, starts with one foot in front of the other. The sky may be your limit, but reality is always your runway. If you want to soar, you first have to flap your wings!
Wanting Patience—and Wanting It Now!
No matter your age or stage of life, you can remain fruitful if you’re willing to look inside at what you have in your hand. But starting small and growing your business requires extreme patience, something that’s challenging for all of us but that’s essential for successful business owners. Such patience is easier for some people—and some generations—than others.
My natural children as well as spiritual ones are largely millennials, born between the early 1980s and early 2000s. I absolutely love their passion but have consistently had to fight their impatience. I am a baby boomer, a builder by nature, born in a time when our nation was growing in every field and frontier. But building anything worth having… takes… time. Struggle is to be expected. So many of my younger mentees starting new ventures, from online apps to record labels to nonprofits, underestimate the ramp-up time required for takeoff. Because they grew up watching their heroes in midflight, they’ve rarely seen the mistakes, the missteps, and the misunderstandings that are naturally part of any ascent.
Millennials have seen people explode overnight with viral sensations on YouTube channels and ferociously successful friends on Facebook. They’re accustomed to the Kardashian brand of success in which anyone can follow their dreams and explode into notoriety for it. Yes, there will be those supernovas, and thanks to social media we will know about them in constant updates of their celebrity status, but they are exceptions not exemplars. Success is a process that takes time.
With such shooting stars as their models, many millennials underestimate the ramp-up time required. When their venture doesn’t take off and go straight up like a helicopter, they tend to feel like they’ve failed and want to quit. Delayed doesn’t equate to denied! You must have a long-term financial strategy that can sustain your business’s steady growth without eating up profits and funds needed for maintenance and expansion. Many people, not just millennials, collapse in their first year because they don’t have enough capital to sustain themselves and to invest in the business at the same time.
You may need to start on a part-time basis before launching your venture and seeing if you can afford to hire yourself full-time. My main concern with the helicopter model is that you miss out on pacing yourself and sustaining the hard work that could have ensured your success over time. For example, if you have loans, be sure to count the cost for operating your business but also be reasonable about the time required to become profitable.
I don’t want to imply that impatience only attacks the young because it can strike anyone at any age. But I’m convinced that what we had modeled in front of us growing up usually has a direct influence on our expectations and willingness to delay gratification. And expectations are paramount. If you don’t expect a process and you run into one, then you will think you’re failing when it’s just the current stage of the game. Remember, graduation relies on that which is gradual!
Swimming with the Sharks
I love watching the TV show Shark Tank, where budding entrepreneurs pitch their product, service, or idea to a seasoned panel of experienced investors, mostly successful CEOs. These would-be investors almost always ask participants how many other investors they have and what those investors have earned so far. Not only do the veteran entrepreneurs want to know with whom they will potentially share profits, they only want to invest in something that has maximized its current level. Otherwise, they know it’s going to crash.
Fortunately, you do not have to have wealthy investors or liberal bankers to launch your venture. I suspect now more than ever we have great opportunities to start new businesses with smaller resources than previous dreamers. Harnessing online tools and social media, you can minimize costs while reaching an enormous pool of consumers. I know so many people who have started out small, listed their products on eBay or Etsy or other sites, created a PayPal account, and gained steady momentum. Such opportunities have leveled the playing field for smaller businesses to be born.
Many times, in the early, embryonic stages of launching a new venture, you’re so busy doing the business that you don’t have time to promote the business. But no matter how great your product, how helpful your service, or how impactful your nonprofit, without promotional awareness targeted at your core constituents, you will founder and ultimately fail. The Bible says, “Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house” (Matt. 5:15 KJV).
Having a talent, a skill, a service is not enough. You must be able to manage the business and its growth as well as market it effectively in each stage of development. But promoting and marketing your business may be easier and more cost-effective than ever before. With a few taps on your smartphone, you can send tweets, blogs, banners, and blasts at minimal cost.
If you are in a business where you do something with your own hands—hair care, baking, cosmetology, dentistry, chiropractic—so much energy is involved in doing that there’s little time or energy left for planning. But to pick up speed, you must get your hands free! You must have capacity to train others in order to grow and bring in others to your team. Without taking time to step away from your business for a view at 30,000 feet, you will constantly be flying low to the ground.
Being an entrepreneur is a mind-set, not a money set. So if you’re wanting to launch your business in the hopes of overnight riches, think again. You must passionately love some aspect of your venture or, like any relationship, the infatuation will quickly fade as practical matters remove the romantic veneer. You must be willing to see the big picture even as you connect the daily dots and focus on the details. You must enjoy being a problem-solver, not just a moneymaker.
The Wind at Your Back
Finally, I encourage you to know the weather patterns of your business’s geography. By this I mean make sure you do all the due diligence that can possibly be done to ensure your product or service will be visible, accessible, and convenient to your target audience. In other words, fly with the wind and not against it!
You don’t want to open a luxury jewelry shop in a neighborhood where there are only pawnshops, vacant factories, rundown houses, and payday loan offices. Common sense indicates that such an area is experiencing an economic downturn and resident flight. The people who are still there are probably not in the market for a diamond tennis bracelet or a Patek Philippe watch.
Doing research and making sure it’s up to date and not from three, five, or ten years ago is crucial. Looking at historic patterns can be helpful in identifying trends and the effect certain other variables may have, but mostly you want current data on consumer habits, income levels, and shopping patterns. You want to know what they read, which restaurants they dine in, where they go to church, where they work, how they dress, and what their problems are that you can fix.
Taking flight with your entrepreneurial dreams takes immense courage. Perhaps the most frightening thing I’ve ever done was hire employees and risk, not only my business’s success, but the livelihood of various individuals and their families. No matter how thorough and promising your research may be, any successful flight plan must include faith. Often there is no safety net. You must feel the fear and do what needs doing anyway. Faith doesn’t mean that you ignore facts and figures or discount common sense. Faith needs data in order to see beyond it.
Weather forecasting means considering more than just the immediate vicinity where you want to set up shop. It means looking at the health of the national and international economy as well as personal circumstances and present responsibilities. If you have young children, then you will have to accommodate their presence in your plans, which could mean working from home with them with you, including child care costs in your budget of expenses, or finding creative solutions.
Finally, there will never be a perfect time to take your first step toward launching your new business or entrepreneurial dream. Yes, it’s important to have and to develop a keen sense of timing, but even with Swiss-watch precision, you will still make mistakes, get blindsided by the decisions of others, and face unexpected obstacles.
Reading the direction of the wind, personally and professionally, is both art and science. And while I believe that present conditions are optimal for all of us with entrepreneurial passion, I also think some people have an advantage. In other words, if you’re a woman and want to soar, the wind is blowing your way!