One night, D’Andre Good craved home-style food, but all he could find was McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A. The best places were obscured within neighborhoods of color, and until you resided there, there was no way of knowing you were missing out on great food.
Overlooked? Probably. Something needed to be done. In 2021, Good decided to start his own company with his cousin — Urban Goodz, an E-commerce marketplace delivery app for Black-owned and minority-owned businesses. From clothes and food to hair, the company promises to deliver anywhere within 50 miles within an hour of placing the order.
Good took up the challenge to compete with the big names in the industry, relying on hard work and his community. This meant word-of-mouth recommendations and providing service at a fast pace. In the beginning, Good had to bootstrap the business, without a loan to fall back on. His advice: be confident in your own business to convince others to invest in the endeavor.
“Because I’ve gone through my own struggles in my lifetime, and made my mistakes, I just want to show kids who look like me that it’s not where you start, it’s where you finish. We have people that are successful in tech and medicine, there’s way more ways to be successful other than being a rapper or a ball player,” Good said. “It’s alright to be the smart kid.”
A significant reason that encouraged Good to start his own business was the racial reckoning that accompanied the Black Lives Matter movement, which highlighted Black-owned businesses. Good felt that the Black community was exploited, riding on the BLM uproar, as companies benefited from the movement.
Today, his goal is to pay it forward. “We don’t want to just take from our community. We want to actually help build it,” he said.
Here are some things Good and other local small business owners wish they knew before starting out.
Just start, don’t wait for perfection
Good says the first step to owning a business is to first start it, instead of waiting for perfection. “That’s the hardest part of starting a business,” he has observed.
Fund it right: accelerators and loans
Good applied to several accelerator programs, and graduated from the gBETA Accelerator under the mentorship of Muriel Foster, who invested “six figures” into his company and helped him expand his business to Huntsville, Alabama, and Birmingham, Alabama. He is now looking to expand to Memphis and Atlanta.
He noticed that most investors did not belong to a minority community, and felt the need to invest more in communities and in businesses that serve minority communities.
However, not many share this vision.
“The people who hold the purse strings don’t understand the needs of our communities. They don’t understand why we look to keep recirculating dollars within our communities because the playing field isn’t level,” Good said. “They don’t understand the need for another Black Wall Street. You have all these companies and you’re gonna tell me that only 1% of minority-owned businesses are good enough for this? Race plays a major part in it because that’s why the gap is so big.”
On the other hand, Good says people of color need to “be twice as good to do half as good as other people.”
The phenomenon can be quantified. The World Economic Forum suggested that the murder of George Floyd put Black startups in the spotlight. However, it was short-lived. While in 2020, VC funding for Black businesses surged to between $850 million and $1.2 billion, it sharply fell by 45% in 2022. The decline was felt even more strongly by Black women entrepreneurs, whose share of VC funding is disproportionately small, but in 2021 they received only 0.34% of the total venture capital spent in the country. When it comes to entrepreneurship, Black Americans are historically underrepresented. Only 1% of around $215.9 billion in venture capital investments are allocated to Black entrepreneurial ventures, which equates to $2.3 billion, despite an increase in Black business ownership in recent years.
Using social media to generate leads: marketing knows no place or time
Before she had a physical product, Wattree utilized social media to generate leads for her email list, creating free resources that could be downloaded. She stresses the importance of social media and setting up a page that provides valuable content. When people signed up, they organically showed interest in her products.
“I wasn’t selling anything. I just focused on adding value and determining who my target audience was,” she said. “Mine were parents of young children, schools, and teachers.”
She also joined a lot of local groups for homeschool parents, who would express their interest in her products for their children.
Lysa Middleton Phillips, aka Lysa Tha Boss Lady, relied on social media when she started her travel business venture. She began as a travel advisor, which she later transformed into a travel agency. What started as a hobby for traveling while earning an income, has now turned into a full-fledged business. She also teaches potential business owners on how to use social media for marketing.
Phillips says she found most clients on social media. Most of the time, she posts pictures of food or in planes. This, too, was a transition from putting up fliers and giving out business cards to promote her business to being on social media publicly. Her rule: the more people see you as a regular person, the more likely they are to do business with you.
“When you’re on social media and you’re a private person, that’s not conducive to business,” she told the Defender. “You have to have your personal Facebook page public. People need to see that you are a regular person just like them, that you have the same likes, dislikes, wants, and preferences, they don’t want to feel sold to.”
Tap into your community
Phillips (travel advisor) says the main challenge to Black-owned businesses today is the lack of support. Often, it is within the community that the support must be created, she says, and that supporting other businesses will garner you the same support in return.
“We have to be accountable. Are we supporting other businesses? Are we being accessible, amenable, nice?” she said. “A lot of times, we are known for being rude; for poor customer service. When we’re not getting the support that we want or that we desire, it’s because we’re not giving that to other people in the tight-knit small business community.”
Research your business and industry
A potential business owner should also identify issues and propose solutions to them. While pitching to investors, one should be thorough in their research. “Don’t go into the room and let somebody be able to tell you more about your business than what you know or hire people to work for you.”
The preparation to bear rejections is also key, but it takes one “yes” to change the trajectory of a business.
Conversely, Phillips says confidence and posture can be crucial. “A lot of times we don’t succeed because we don’t believe that we can, and we don’t walk with the posture that we are. And if we walk with that posture that we are going to succeed, then people, they have no choice but to accept you that way and approach you that way.”
Learn to play the game
While sitting in his garage one day, Good saw Amazon delivering packages in his neighborhood multiple times a day. Capitalizing on online shopping is the “easiest,” especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, which fueled his decision to modify his business model to deliver materials the same day.
Today, Urban Goodz’s customers comprise mostly women (73%), which he attributes to their “tendency to be more supportive,” and the company now aims to expand its male customer base.
Overcoming challenges through research
As a Black business owner, Markesha Wattree often did not know what she had to research when she first started out. She was an elementary school and ESL teacher who was interested in creating lessons that could boost engagement among her students through games. It finally morphed into a business.
She is now the founder of Juggle Learning LLC, an online business that sells play-based multi-sensory educational learning materials for children upon monitoring data trends in school districts, she spent days going around in circles not sure what to do.
She came across the University of Houston Stimulating Urban Renewal Through Entrepreneurship (SURE) program, a course that allowed her to seek mentorship, develop a business plan, and work alongside other entrepreneurs.
Wattree also recommends SCORE Houston, a resource that offers business advice, business training, tools, and networking opportunities with entrepreneurs and volunteers.
“There’s a market for everything. Find your people and create some value,” she told the Defender.
Moreover, setting up taxes is also of important, including hiring a public accountant or an online consultancy to help file taxes properly.
A business plan
Wattree would plan thoroughly initially, with her business always in mind. She would carry a notepad and write down every valuable piece of advice from people she met or networked with.
While she stresses the importance of a plan, she suggests leaving room for adjustments: an advice she received from her mentor.
“It’s okay if you don’t have it all figured out right now. You’re not going to,” she said. “It’s impossible for it to be perfect at the beginning, you’re gonna make some changes to it, run into situations.”
Wattree had her own process: she accepted that knowing everything is impossible, but research can make up for the unknown, especially government websites.
Her priority was to set up her business properly, so she invested in a company that established her LLC with add-on resources.
