2022 Town Hall Recap - Beyond 5 & The State of Entrepreneurship
The 2022 Town Hall convened ecosystem builders to discuss the state of entrepreneurship for New Majority founders at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library.?
The conversation was contextualized by the launch of Beyond 5, the latest study by 1863 Ventures to assess small business survivability. During 2021, a survey was conducted to understand the performance of Black and Brown businesses that operate beyond five years. The research found that New Majority firms survive at least 8.5 years, compared to the median of six years.?
Despite their prevalence and impact, New Majority founders need access to capital, technical assistance, and professional networks to accelerate their businesses. Economic barriers like increasing input costs and rising real estate prices exacerbate wealth/opportunity gaps created from asymmetrical business conditions that advantage non-minority firms that are better capitalized and more likely to be backed by sources of growth capital. Beyond 5 illuminates the targeted business efforts, including mentorship and fundraising resources to support New Majority firms to reach profitability and achieve scale. The Beyond 5 respondents shared the following results:
Special thank you to the business owners, community & research partners, and policy leaders for their added perspective of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, including Patrice R Green , Program Director, Inclusive Economies, Surdna Foundation, and Christopher Wheat , President, JP Morgan Chase Institute.
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Derrick Y. embodied the Beyond 5 research, having founded Mahogany Books, a bookstore by, for, and about people of color in 2007. “Bookstores are not seen as a profitable business to banks,” he said. “So for the longest time, getting access to capital, whether through the SBA, CDFIs–that was the hardest thing to do. Capital was a challenge for the first ten years, and then capacity because when we first started, I was working full-time and running a business, supposedly part-time, but it was full-time as well. The day that I left my job was the day that we were able to ramp up and take advantage of opportunities that were there for us. Capacity continues to be a challenge for us in finding the individuals with the expertise and having the ability to pay for professionals that can provide us with the strategies and insight to take us to the next level.”
George Williams , Media Relations Manager for D.C. Public Library, highlighted the free resources available to entrepreneurs as they start and grow their businesses. “As entrepreneurs, in order to be able to have profit, of course, you need to have income, but you also need to mitigate as many expenses as you can,” he said. “So we think about what we offer at scale that makes sense for an entrepreneur. Let’s start with the basic part: our collections. Libraries like the D.C. Public Library have wonderful people called librarians that if you come in and say, ‘I’m looking to learn more about marketing,’ they will connect you with books which everyone knows about. But what people don’t think about is many of the things we offer online are things like access to business magazines. With your library card, you can get access to Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and a ton of other business services and magazines to help you as an entrepreneur stay up to speed…In the area of connections, we work with groups like the D.C. Department of Local Small Business Development, where we have one-on-one technical assistance meetings to figure out whatever your business issue is. It could be looking for market resources or government contracting services. We also work with groups like Howard University Small Business Development Center. We work with Google and the digital inclusion program through their coaches virtually. The last bucket is co-working. Libraries have meeting rooms, and since more and more people since the pandemic are not necessarily working in an office, but they’re working at home, and they need that sort of third place that’s not easily interrupted, we offer meeting rooms. We have large rooms for 50-100 people. We have smaller rooms for one-on-one. Most of these rooms now come with whiteboards or interactive monitors and free Wi-Fi…We’re finding that libraries around the country offer this. Go to your library.”
Federal Contractors, Inc. President Lisa Deane attested to the solutions being implemented for small business development, including the Inclusive Innovation Equity Impact Fund (IIEIF) stewarded by 1863 Ventures. “The Fund had a huge impact on my business. It allowed me to hire a project manager this year. It actually helped me do my first office, which isn’t too far from Mahogany Books…it definitely helped a lot as far as growing and still being here this year,” she said. “The process of applying to IIEIF was very awakening. It made you really think about your business even more than you do. We did a complete pitch deck that we presented, and it really made me think about the strategic plan and put into there everything about my business, from who I planned to work there, what agencies we were going to go after…it makes you take all of these different components and put them in one place, so not only was it good for applying for the fund but if something else comes up you’re not scrambling trying to put all these components together…You tweak them and bring them current, and you have them. And the follow-up: it wasn’t just we’re going to invest in you, and then we’re gone. It’s the different seminars that we get to participate in and different events. Not only have you invested in me financially, but I feel that I have a separate entity that is working with me if I have an idea or I have a problem. I have someone that I can bounce that idea off. 1863, they know where I am, where I want to go, and where I have been.”
Joe Scantlebury , CEO of Living Cities, added, "We also have to be very insistent that the policy conversation is one around growth and opportunity.” He said, “Many of the entrenched interests and folks who have said ‘Hey, we’re doing fine, we don’t need to go any further, we don’t need to discover anybody new,’ that is just bad economics in every kind of way…We do not get to grow as a nation without including everybody. All the inequities created were created to privilege white economic opportunity. We are now in a place where we can undo those policies without taking them off anybody’s plate. Let’s just make sure we’re intentional about making sure everybody can eat.”
“Entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of our economy–small businesses in particular,” said Assistant Secretary Alejandra Y. Castillo . The head of the Economic Development Administration closed the town hall in conversation with 1863 Ventures Managing Partner Melissa Bradley . “What keeps me up at night," she said, "is to see the amount of dollars coming down the pipe and then to look around the table and say ‘Where are the communities of color?’...The EDA, we build the ecosystem for businesses and communities to thrive. For example, a downtown that’s been forgotten. You know there’s no pipelines or sewage or just the structure–we can build that. We do a lot of construction. We are your classic public works, but we also do tech and innovation. Melissa, you are a member of our National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. We are bringing folks to the table to think about what is the next arc of the economic landscape. Right now, you’re looking at four major pieces of legislation going back to the policy that President Biden has signed into law: the American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Chips and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act–that means $2.4 trillion that is going out the door, which is going to enter communities and new industries.”
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2 年I enjoyed tuning in. Thank you for caring for New Majority Founders????