Ep. 11: Supporting Black Businesses

All right, welcome back to another episode of Black Girl Fly. I'm your girl Tenisha Nicole. And I'm Tashaunda Dixon. And today we'll be talking about supporting black businesses. Now more than ever, we're seeing Black Lives Matter movement just now explode across the nation and across the globe. And we're really realizing that it's more important than ever to support our own communities. So where do I go with this to shine? So I think that there's such a breath of information or content that we could cover here. But I think more than anything, this really attention to the deficit or the I want to say lesser position of black people in America has really opened our eyes to so much more.

So it started Of course with putting police brutality and George Floyd. But more than ever, I think we are now acknowledging all of the discrepancies that are going on for black people in America. I know most recently I heard a lot about health care. Yeah. The maternity maternal health with the young lady who was who she died after a C section. Yeah, and all of these things. I think it's important to say all of these things have been problem for a long time, but we've never paid attention. And and so one of the things that we talked about in the episode we really talked about Black Lives Matter is what we can do to help move our community forward. And one of the greatest things that we can do is to support black businesses. So me being a business owner, I've actually had many encounters, but more than ever, we have to acknowledge how important it is to invest in our community. Yeah, and I feel like there's so many at least now we hear so many excuses or like reasons why it's so hard to support black business. It says, and so I don't know, let's just talk about some of those reasons and perhaps give some suggestions or some thoughts on how we can, you know, tackle those or like, overcome them. Yeah. So I would say there's tons of reasons. Over the last couple days, I've actually been doing a lot of learning just about money, and about how money flows. And what happens. For one, I will tell you that black people, on average, have a substantially lesser pie or piece of the pie of the American dollar. If you look at what we make, you will know that most of the wealth comes in small businesses, small businesses actually make up of like 99% of the businesses that exist in the world. But there isn't there like I want to say like $3 trillion within the black community there is and there is but the problem is, we don't keep it in our community. There was actually one study that showed that the average dollar stays in the black community for six hours. As opposed to Asians, Asians were the highest of keeping the money in their community, they actually keep dollars in their community for 30 days, 30 days, hours, versus 30 days. And so what you're seeing though, is you're seeing that black people are earning more than ever, right? Black people have that $3 trillion to account for, but we spend it back out of the community. And so with that being said, black businesses fail more often than any other race, we have more of a capital, we always fail because we don't have enough money to support the business. We don't have a contingency fund. So what you'll see is with COVID, and what happened in COVID, is more black businesses failed than any other business. And it's because we didn't have the cash reserves, the cash reserves or the infrastructure like because there was actually free money being passed around and open and because people hadn't, you know, they opened their bank Count, they didn't open a business bank account. They didn't, you know, there wasn't tracking their expenses. Like that was one of the things you had to show like, what were your expenses? And what were your revenues? If you can't show that you haven't been keeping track? You can't get any money. Yeah. And so I would really say that supporting black businesses is probably the the building block, that will lead to some other initiatives. So the other things that we can do invest in infrastructure, right, like invest in marketing, invest in a platform. The other thing that we saw is that there was no digital footprint for a lot of black businesses in this environment. We're not set up for the e commerce platform that we you know, we're forced to be in so if you didn't have an online presence, there was no way for you to get your goods to your customers and for your customer. And you were shut down you Yeah, you were shut down, literally. Yeah. And and so what I what I tell you is that we as a community, we have to acknowledge how important businesses in our sustainability, right so we all I know a lot of people there's this huge movement for growing your own fruits and vegetables and being able to sustain yourself in nature. But what about the state in your community? What about sustaining your financial ability? There's actually a tons of research that shows that the average business owner has a higher net worth than an employee. And I think that's an important note because I'm of the mindset and philosophy right now that everyone needs to have a business entity No matter if you want to be a full time entrepreneur or not. Because there's so many things that you can take advantage of, if you have a business you know, I mean, you do have to be doing some type of business but reality is most people are having you know, most people have a side hustle. Most people have something and we are in a digital age, you can automate things, businesses now could take you 30 minutes, being a supplier on Amazon, although Amazon takes a lot of money and fully doing your business though, but literally, you can drop off supplies with an Amazon Distribution Center. And they do everything else. And the marketing is already done. Like, they do everything else and you can maintain you could love your full time job, but still have this income on the side. And when you do that it opens up so many just thinking about the tax implications of having a business and the benefits there. Yeah, huge. Yeah. And we'll we should do an episode where we go into like many of the I mean, the specifics of the tax benefits, but there are so many advantages of being an actual business like, you know, for instance, being able to draw down your income so you're paying less in taxes, like is a huge benefit. Yep, exactly. So yeah, I think we just really have to think about business differently. But we're specifically talking about black businesses because, you know, like, we live in Charlotte, and I don't know, do you think it's been hard to support black businesses are not hard to find. I feel like lately I've been finding them by accident. Like I like yeah, the tree cutter guy was the Like business in the stump grinder, so I get that. But how many white businesses did you go through before you found those guys? Or? Honestly, you found the trees hunter guy. That's because I look for a black name. Oh, I didn't realize that. But I like them. But it's hard though because there's not a heavy presence. There's not commercials all the time about how to see them. Even back in the day. We used to go hand out flyers. I'm not getting any flyers. They don't get flyers and we don't know the area that well. So we don't even know like what neighborhoods to go to that would have the businesses Yes, support. I went to like a facial place the other day. And that was a black business and I had no idea that it was from the name or even from like their social media or anything. So I feel like sometimes they're also masking that. Yeah, that is a good point. Because I will tell you that comes from being scrutinized more. I've had so many incidents is where I was. I was supporting, or people were trying to support me, family in particular. And so I owned a nail salon for one and I actually had a family member who was diehard nail enthusiast always had her nails done toes, fingers, everything always together. And so she comes to my nail salon, and the I had a tech that was really like precise and very, like, it needs to be like this and all this and she did her nails and so my cousin looked at her nails and she goes, Well, I don't like this one little thing right here. And I was like, Okay, well we can we can fix it, like even say, hey, you can come sit down for free and we'll make it happen, whatever. And I was a couple months later, that same person had gone to another nail salon, an Asian nail salon, and I looked at her nails and they were terrible. And when I asked her about it, she was like, I can't go to you because I had that one little speck and I was like but I offer to fix it for free. Do you want it? And I'm looking at your nails now and your nails suck. And she would go on to go back to those Asians. And I was like, This is ridiculous. Yeah, bias. And I know you're asking me yesterday, you're like, what do you do you think you treat black businesses different? And like, in my head? I want to say no, but like, I don't I mean, that's because I'm being my own advocate. But I'm like, Is that true? Yeah. Like, am I tougher on the black businesses there? So So I would say, so a couple things could go for that. And I'm not trying to say go to people who have a lesser quality. But I do think that when you in a environment where you can relate to a person, you have something in common, you have you instantly build rapport. It's actually a sales tactic, by the way. So when you are trying to sell someone your sport, the person you're supposed to do is try to build rapport really fast. And they say that you build rapport by finding a commonality. The example that I actually heard recently was, if you're out of the country, if you're in London, and a person is in a barn that hear another English accent, and they're you know, American, they'll immediately feel good feelings about that person because they're also. And so I think that there are a lot of psychological things that play in why you feel more okay with critiquing someone who's more like you in that regard. And not only that, though, do we have had a history? So you mentioned it before, we've had a history where black businesses don't have infrastructure. They don't spend money on marketing. They don't perfect their craft or they're, they're subpar to the counterparts. We had a business that was subpar to our counterparts. Yeah. And we were still in their business. Yeah, we were still running it. And really, when I think about what we did, we didn't have the capital that we needed to put everything in place that would have made it better. One thing is so funny though, because I have a colleague who she has a like a membership business where it's not a membership club, essentially. And she has partnered with one of the big banks to like, remember membership is female entrepreneurs. So black specifically. And so she partner with the big bank to get these ladies access to funding. And I think there were like 30 members or so that first year. And I remember getting her annual report and she said, none of the women wanted to take advantage of Wow. Wow. And almost like, That's crazy. They were offering like, I think $150,000 and none of them wanted to take on that risk for their business. Wow. So why do you think that was? Did? Did you get to the root cause or understand why they didn't want to take that on? I didn't, I didn't ask her. That's something that I probably do want to ask her. But I do see. I mean, at least I feel like black people in general don't want to take on extra debt. I know a lot of black people who don't have credit cards, right, who pay cash for everything. And I think we're so used to bootstrapping our businesses like we work with what we have Yeah, I wouldn't say I had a similar experience with a marketing professional. I actually had a friend who was in marketing and she was like, it is so hard to find clients because black people don't believe they need the market. And, and what she said was, they don't think of it as a true business expense. So you know, there's there's rent, there's lights, there's water, there's, you know, those things and and they perceive that marketing expense as something separate from the business expense that I mean, I definitely struggle with that. Like I always want to invest in marketing, but I feel like it's a frivolous like, you know, is not the necessary like, we need to get our product, you know, manufactured and like actually together. It's like an extra add on so and so is your product just gonna sit in the closet, right? That's what we're doing. Like is a hit word of mouth like we don't I feel like I mean, I'm generalizing here but I definitely feel like for me, that's an it's usually an afterthought. For Yeah, so So I would say that supporting black businesses now we have a number of professionals, we have a number of people who no business, especially in the black community, and all the people I spoke to is like you have to market you have to react to these facts. And so I think that what I'm hearing is not only do we support black businesses, by spending our dollar with the black businesses, but we also teach them about business about you know, most people who go into business, they don't go into business, because they're business professionals. They go into business because they love something. Yeah. I have an aunt who makes the best cakes ever. And she just loves baking. Yeah, she loves baking, no business background, no anything, but she loves to bake. And she's good at it. And so she has this business, but she didn't have that education. And so I think when I see supporting black businesses, it's about buying black. It's about teaching black businesses how to be successful. Yeah. So just a reminder, I think is key and something that I want everybody to know, today $1 stays in the black community for six hours. And what are the other stats in the Asian community? It is 30 days in the Jewish community, it's 20 days. And then the white community, it's 17 days, six hours, guys, we can do better. And we need to do better because what we do with this will really be about how our, our legacy how our children's children move forward in community. And you can't do that without the resources, right? You can't do that without the money. And we have the money. You know, it's clear we have the free trial yet. Just spin it where it matters. Yeah, definitely. So until next time, y'all. I'm Tanisha Nicole, and I'm Tashaunda Dixon and we are black girl fly Transcribed by https://otter.ai