Home News Tribune
February 27, 2005
BY KEN TARBOUS
BUSINESS WRITER
“You have to learn to do business in this country colorblind, because money is only green,” said Bernice P. Venable, co-owner of Alphagraphics in Edison.
The majority of African-American professionals and entrepreneurs attending a lively panel discussion at the Home News Tribune on Feb. 10 agreed that, although some unique obstacles still linger, black-owned businesses face the same basic challenges as every other small business in America.
Concerns common to all business owners … learning business dynamics, raising capital, establishing a presence and a reputation, marketing to a customer base, and putting revenue in the till … are foremost in any professional’s mind, the panelists agreed.
Phillip B. Lewis, an accountant from Metuchen, said businesses owned by African-Americans are no different than any other business.
“We’re here to make money,” he said.
But two of the professionals on the panel have experienced in-your-face obstacles.
Renee Anthony, a distinguished New Brunswick attorney who specializes in family, criminal, real-estate and municipal law, said judges, prosecutors, and colleagues outside her home base of Middlesex County present the biggest stumbling blocks.
“If I had a broom and a mop in my hand they’d be fine, but a suit and briefcase … that’s the problem,” she said.
Lisa Herbert, a family physician who runs the Piscataway Medical Group, said some of her first-time patients appear uncomfortable when they find out she is black. But it’s some of the other professionals who pain her.
“There are nurses and physicians in the hospitals who literally sometimes can be very disrespectful, and I’ve had to report some people,” Herbert, 37, said.
Darius V. Griffin, owner of Port Africa on Stelton Road in Piscataway, said he is creating a community destination at his business. Griffin sells authentic African art, and has a hair salon with stylists and a masseuse on site. He also offers math and reading classes to students grades 2 through college level and preparation for standardized tests.
Griffin, out of Lakewood High School and a Rutgers alum who played basketball for the university for four years, said getting a hold of equity is a hurdle.
“The biggest problem, not only with black businesses but businesses in general, is the lack of resources,” Griffin, 45, said.
He criticized the Small Business Administration as ineffective and wanting people to risk too much, putting up their homes as collateral, to get financing.
“The SBA is full of it,” he said. “I’ve gone to all of their functions. I went from town to town, from college to college, following this SBA New Jersey dream. It’s not there.”
SBA New Jersey District Director James A. Kocsi, contacted after the panel meeting, defended the administration’s record. The SBA made 43 loans for $4.6 million to African-American owned businesses from Oct. 1, 2004, to Jan. 31, 2005, Kocsi said by phone.
“We’re not giving away money,” Kocsi said, adding that personal guarantees are common for business loans.
Lewis, president of accounting and tax services firm Phillip B. Lewis & Co., acknowledged that securing funds is a big challenge for a lot of businesses, especially minority businesses that might not have the best credit or the contacts. But he has never had a problem finding money.
“Because of my contacts, because of my business dealings with my clients or friends, I’ve been able to establish a venture capital network,” Lewis, 48, said.
A former Johnson & Johnson employee, Lewis got a $25,000 commitment from a 13-year client he had never met, for a deal that was later abandoned.
He asserted that to be successful, business people must be adept at marketing and networking and identifying opportunities. He emphasized that businesses are built on relationships.
“I’ve been very blessed with excellent friends and contacts,” said Lewis, who has two bachelors from Rutgers.
Lewis travels to sporting events, such as this year’s Rose Bowl in California, and alumni gatherings, making his social life a source of business opportunity.
Carl A. Venable, co-owner and general manager of the Alphagraphics design, print, and copy franchise in Edison … and Bernice’s husband … said an organization’s fortune rises and falls on the work it provides to the general community.
His printing enterprise, which he called “a very personal type of business,” is built on trust, taking another person’s idea and finding solutions.
“Those of us who are seriously in business, we really try very hard to provide a quality product or service to our potential clients,” Venable, an elder statesman of the group, said. “As a business person I think you have to always strive to provide that top-notch quality product or service.”
Darnell Bacon, owner of Commercial Insurance Solutions in East Brunswick, voiced a similar opinion.
“You must be very good at what you do,” said the 53-year-old Bacon, who has an MBA from University of Detroit.
Griffin, of Port Africa, said he knew his customer base, mostly Asian-Indians and whites, before he turned the key on his operation. He was exposed to the art world during his two years in South Africa, and he did his “due diligence,” researching the Central New Jersey marketplace.
When it came to the big business L-word … location … he had to find a place where his clientele would feel comfortable shopping.
“That’s why I chose to open up my doors in an upscale, for lack of a better term, area at Hadley Center in South Plainfield, where we have some type of security,” he said.
There were other reasons for picking his spot, too, he said.
“If I chose to open up my gallery in an urban area such as Newark, Plainfield, New Brunswick … and I’m not saying anything bad about these places … I would have been out of business about a month after I opened up, because blacks are not going to support other blacks. That’s a major problem,” Griffin said. “Yes, I’m paying $26 a square foot, yes I could have gone into an urban area and paid $10 a square foot but I could have been giving my stuff away and white people would not even think about coming in to see it.”
The panelists expressed no specific preference for the race or ethnicity of their clientele but did differ on whether blacks support black-owned businesses or if they even need to do so.
Griffin contended it’s possible blacks have been conditioned by white society.
“When black people see (non-blacks) doing business with a certain business, now all of a sudden they have a stamp of approval,” he said.
And he dismissed the value of Black History Month in educating the masses.
“Hopefully as time goes on, as minorities, we’re going to appreciate not only Black History Month, but all 12 months. It’s not just February that you need to support the black businesses, because they don’t say that we don’t have to pay rent the other 11 months,” Griffin said.
In the diverse economic environment of Central New Jersey he admitted that black customers aren’t essential to survival. “It would be nice to have that sector but you can’t live and die by that.”
Bacon of CIS Brokerage, who sells trucking insurance, said it doesn’t matter what color people are. Ten percent of his clients are African-Americans, he said.
“We really try to serve the mainstream,” he said.
Herbert said her medical practice is located in the racially diverse town of Piscataway.
“I thought when I first started practicing my clientele would be predominantly African-American because I’m an African-American female, but my patient population is half African American,” the doctor said.
Lewis, when seeking out new clients, often jokes, “Why see H&R Block, when you can see H&R Black?” Carl Venable, saying that 95 percent of Alphagraphics clients are not from the minority community, added that self-supportive and self-sufficient black towns that thrived a century ago no longer exist.
“There’s no reason why we don’t have that same drive and mentality to do it all over again,” Venable said. “We have the economic potential, but we haven’t quite coalesced it to work for us.”
“He characterized the issue as a “family discussion” needing to take place in churches and homes.
Reginald Johnson, president of the Metuchen-Edison Area Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), disagreed with the notion that blacks don’t support black-owned businesses.
“There’s a large population of people that really do not know that these businesses are out there. When you look at (the panelists’) businesses, and I’ve been to each of their businesses, you wouldn’t even know that they’re African-American businesses, and that’s good.”
Johnson also cited the destruction of black-owned and operated businesses that had flourished in insular black communities in the days before integration.
“We got away from supporting our own,” he said.
He said a larger problem is the inability for minority owners to get into some mainstream sources of revenue.
Using pay-to-play no-bid government contracts as an example, Johnson said the bigger a business is the more access to money and opportunity it can get.
“This is one avenue that’s pretty much cut off to minority businesses because they’re not in the mix, they don’t have the connections on the political side to take advantage of a situation like this,” he said.
The NAACP monitors government and corporations to see what kind of work and funds they are making available to minority businesses.
Griffin said entrepreneurs must look to identify opportunities with larger business entities.
“Every white major player out there, they’re all looking to partner,” he said.
Bernice Venable, who has a doctorate in education from Rutgers, said she’s filled out every form necessary to partake in corporate diversity programs in a process that is prohibitively difficult.
“You have to find, as the owner of a black company, those mechanisms that are going to help you and I mean not just promise,” Bernice Venable said.
The New York/New Jersey Minority Purchasing Council and the Minority Suppliers Development Council were cited as entities that can help minority-owned businesses certify their protected status and help in finding work set aside for minority-owned firms and individuals.
Carl Venable, who received his MBA from Rutgers, said the “old-boy network” ties are still difficult to break but added some money may not be worth the effort.
“Set-asides can also give you a stigma that is very difficult to overcome …. (people might think) the only way you can survive is by the protection of the government,” he said. “We get some of the crumbs off the table instead of a bigger slice of the pie by playing that game. Some of us who are older think what the government does is a carry-over from the old slave mentality, just in a newer dress.”
He took a pragmatic view in his decision to go into business for himself.
“These are the challenges we are given. You can do one of two things: you can moan about it or you can go ahead and make the best of it and keep going and keep trying to do it.” he said. “There are nights that I lay awake wondering, ‘Are they going to pay me for all this work I’ve done?’ but any business owner goes through that scenario, it’s not a black or female thing.”
Attitudes in the black community must be transformed, Venable said, adding it’s an issue that must be addressed in churches and families.
Blacks need to seize the opportunity to enlighten other blacks about African-American-owned businesses and career options other than jobs in big corporations or the dreams of sports and music stardom, Carl Venable said.
“Because we don’t have a lot of role models in our community, we’re looking for a quick fix, and particularly some of the youngsters in today’s environment don’t see the value of persistence and study and discipline in making that model work,” Carl Venable said.
Alphagraphics has had some problems finding good, reliable help as a result.
“We are running into many young, educated blacks who in a drop of a hat would take a lesser-paying job somewhere down the street than work for a black corporation that’s trying to grow,” Carl Venable said.
Herbert pointed out that unlike her medical colleagues who have family members’ practices to join or take over, she and her family had no prior experience. “A lot of us are first generation business owners, so there’s not a foundation or basis for any of our young people to even have that drive to go into business.”
Bernice Venable feels the African-American community needs to emulate what goes on in other segments of society that support and encourage positive career investigation.
“We don’t have that groundswell, and the other communities, God bless them, you sit around the table, you’re talking to them about business … learning about relatives’ livelihoods,” she said. “We don’t do that enough in our homes at the dinner table. You rarely hear (young blacks) say ‘I want to own my own business.’”
But that lack of guidance has led to poor career choices for many minority youths. A large percentage of New Jersey’s prison population is young black and Latino males who were lured into the lucrative world of illegal drugs, Johnson of the NAACP said.
“That is their business,” Johnson said. “Great minds, they can juggle figures better than I can …. Many are trapped into the fast money and microwave success stories.”
Carl Venable, who grew up in Prince Edward County, Va., during the county’s defiance of court orders to desegregate its schools, said society still needs to go through some changes.
“Whether or not we can succeed at that I think depends on what I call ‘cultural indoctrination’ that we have to try to overcome,” he said. “And maybe we’re hitting our heads up against a brick wall with some cultural things that haven’t yet taken place as much as we think should have by this time in our societal evolution.”
