Green is the New Black: A Letter to Black Business Owners
The world’s culture is Black, from sneakers and style to music and linguistics. It is clear that Black Lives Matter, as Black ideas, culture, values, and practices are highly profitable. Yet globally, Black business owners still face challenges such as limited access to capital, systemic inequalities, and discrimination. The state of Black-owned businesses can be measured by the amount of financial capital Black-owned businesses receive from traditional financial institutions. Black knowledge and culture leave homes and lands as a public good, only to return as a private product where their monetization is of benefit to someone outside of the Black-African community. This seemingly shows us that Black people and their businesses are only valued for extraction, noting that Black-African people and nation states still find themselves at the bottom of almost every economic scale or metric of success. How Black-owned businesses deal with this marginalized and oppressed position in society is itself important to meeting the future needs of Black-African communities, which are growing at a rate of 2.4%. And, with a median age of 12, the future of the workforce will most certainly find its solutions in Africa.
She Grows It (SGI) is a full-service consulting and investment migration advisory firm headquartered in Washington, DC. Our purpose for being in business is simple, growth. We asked ourselves, where can we see and help achieve the most growth? The answer was among the most marginalized business owners and business demographics. The answer was clear, and the writing was on the wall: Black business owners needed the most help to achieve growth, and the majority of Black-owned businesses are located on the African continent. The UK reports approximately 40,000 Black-owned firms; recent census data shows that there are approximately 3.2 million Black-owned businesses in the United States; and there are approximately 65 million Black-owned enterprises on the African continent. With the majority of Black-owned businesses located on the African continent, SGI decided to also open offices in Dakar, Senegal, Accra, Ghana, and soon Johannesburg, South Africa.
“.... there are approximately 65 million Black-owned enterprises on the African continent.”
Black business owners are some of the most marginalized business owners primarily because of discrimination, which historically has meant low education in civics, limited engagement in economics and financial markets, and inferior access to technological resources. Yet these enterprises still persist, oftentimes doing more with less. Understanding that this was our purpose in business was our moment of clarity, and we knew we were on the right path. We wanted to help all Black-owned businesses, not just the ones in DC, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, or London. We wanted to be available to Black-African business owners all over the world. The growing African diaspora was increasingly taking steps to reconnect, and SGI knew we were the perfect people for the job of leading in reconnecting our community through business. As the community’s consulting firm seeking forward, faster growth, SGI offers products and services that are specific to helping diverse cohorts of Black-owned businesses grow credibly, gain access to capital equitably, and for some, go IPO!
As a consulting-advisory firm, we inform clients that past performance is evidence of credibility that measures the business’s ability to deliver what was promised. And that past performance is what gets businesses their next job, next gig, next check, or next investment. Being able to understand what the business did and how it did it is so important. Whether your enterprise is in farming or hospitality, businesses need to understand their secret sauce in order to replicate it. Replication is important for scale, and scale is ultimately important for investment. Just as much as when things aren't going so well. Businesses need to know what is not working. Is it the process? Is it the people? Is it the policies? What is it that is not working? Refer back to what the business strategy is.
Dr. Ashley Milton and other women business owners at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Hyderabad, India.
Many investors will reject a business because it presents a plan that is not differentiated, lacks a growth strategy, and lacks an implementation plan with projected revenue and expenses. A business strategy helps business owners organize past performance data and chart future growth. A business strategy ensures the enterprise is collecting past performance data on all resource inputs, including human resources, natural resources, and social systems. Businesses without a business strategy are at a disadvantage, often because they lack the data necessary to efficiently adapt to changing dynamics in the business landscape, including the ability to consider and account for past discrimination and marginalization. Without a strategy, the business’s goals and objectives are also unclear, and this will make it hard for the business to track progress toward a goal or a financial end point. Having a business strategy makes the business more investable because it sets the indicators for how you perform. Without a strategy, how did the business perform? What did the business use to measure success? How does the business get the team to follow that, and was it difficult? These are reasons why collecting data on past performance helps the business become more efficient, effective, and ethical in its practice.
The rise of green finance and social impact investing among financial institutions is an attempt to decolonize monetary systems by considering environmental practices and social needs as internal to market equations. Environmental and Social Governance (ESG), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), are qualifiers for Black people, Black environments, Black social systems, and especially Black women. This is important because investment is important for business growth and long-term success, and green is the new black. Inclusion is critical to global markets; without diversity, we will not have the healthy ecosystems that we rely on to provide us with the desired market conditions. We learned this during the COVID-19 pandemic: these are the variables that have been excluded from economic and financial equations since the creation of capitalism. Therefore, we cannot afford to allow financial institutions to greenwash the issues facing Black-African communities and Black-owned businesses. At She Grows It, we offer services and products curated specifically to help Black business owners build strategies that include their “Matter” in the enterprise. Find out more about our consulting services tailored to support the growth, development, and investment readiness of your business.
Author: Ashley D. Milton, PhD