Black BRAND

B-Force is a four part solution to the challenge of access to capital. Through its workshops, it provides a focus on the business of running a small business - organization, financial, and strategic planning to help business owners develop proper business plans and pro-forma financial statements. Through its technical assistance, it provides free legal, accounting, branding, government contracting, leadership, credit repair, and human resources technical assistance. Through its cohort approach it provides a network of support to a vulnerable business community. Through its standalone programs, it provides leads, sales, and additional resources and platforms to connect participants to the wider entrepreneur ecosystem as well as to contract and funding opportunities. 

Solving the access to capital issue will aid in building generational black wealth. For example, according to the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, 4% of the black business community are employer firms and their average revenue is $62,000, accounting for only a tenth of that of their white counterparts. By helping these business strengthen their internal operations and their financials, and by socializing them to the world of capital access, we are helping them to create a plan, add staff, and scale on their own terms. Because black business owners have not historically accessed capital, they have not historically been able to afford the kinds of advisory services that would adequately prepare them. They have also lacked a supportive, contextualized network in which to build their businesses, free of condescension. 

Black business owners inability to participate in economic development through job creation contributes to higher number of unemployment and criminality in the black community. It also deteriorates business quality, contributing to notably poor customer service and other negative experiences leading patrons and prospective patrons to avoid them. Instead of this issue being understood in its systemic context, Black business owners are stigmatized and many opt to dissociate altogether, negatively impacting the entire black community. In 2019, Black workers unemployment rate was 8.2% compared with 5.3% for the region. Black-owned businesses account for 5.4% of total firms and 2.1% of jobs created in Hampton Roads, despite the fact that Blacks are more than 30% of Hampton Roads' population.

B-Force Accelerator exists as an entrepreneur support program with a vision of widened access to capital and ongoing technical assistance for black business owners. Our organization has provided access to capital programs since its 2016 inception and technical assistance for the last three years. 

B-Force Accelerator's target population is black business owners, to include the working poor. They are currently underserved as evidenced by overrepresentation in business failure and underrepresentation in the number of businesses they own relative to the total population percentage. In order to understand their needs, we survey their businesses, studying their model, processes, and financials. We conduct individual interviews to assess their intent. We partner with local colleges and universities, including Old Dominion University Strome College of Business, Virginia Tech Data Science Center, and Harvard School of Business to collect data on entrepreneurship assistance access, entrepreneurial scope, and pathways to wealth creation. Through these undertakings, we have developed wraparound offerings that attempt to address the total picture. This is why B-Force Accelerator workshops address everything from personal finance and credit repair to business etiquette and relationship banking. We have learned that many of the foundational elements necessary for business success must be addressed before they can be overlaid with business essentials. Another key learning is outreach for us and by us. We started out with an older, white male lead consultant, whose breadth of experience, capacity, and willingness to offer himself as a complimentary resource made him impossible to refuse. After all, we did not have a comparable black business professional willing to offer said services at no cost. When we started to introduce elements that he believed were ancillary to the goals of the business program, such as the aforementioned, he left the program. Because we had an extensive network of content providers, we were able to keep going, but with improved outcomes. Business owners expressed a sense of relief in that they now felt truly understood by the programs facilitators. 

Virginia

Our organization's mission is to promote group economics through professional development and community empowerment. We provide offerings to support those starting business and those in business. However, the distinction B-Force Accelerator has made is that it focuses squarely on sustaining existing businesses and filling that void in our entrepreneurship ecosystem. 

A 2022 study by a Harvard graduate determined that if there were no racial gaps in income in Hampton Roads, the region's GDB would have been $17 billion (16.5%) higher in 2019. A specific recommendation of that study was to adapt a Minority Business Accelerator and channel Black Businesses to the region's key and emergent industrial clusters. 

As a chamber of commerce, our theory of change is that entrepreneurship has the potential not to close the wealth cap but to narrow it significantly. And although it is not our mission to focus exclusively on the development of high-tech industry, we believe with training and technical assistance existing businesses can strengthen and continue to grow, contributing to regional economic impact through job creation and growing the tax base. Making these opportunities available to a community that heretofore lacked access, particularly the black business community, will continue to have a positive impact on the wider community. Preparing the black business community to operate more stable, more profitable businesses means they are better able to serve as vendors and contractors to larger opportunities, thereby growing their sales and growing their reach, and helping to eliminate brain drain in our region.

Currently serving 78 businesses.

Expected to serve an additional 140 businesses this year.

Based on our scaling plan, at the end of 5 years, we will have served 1500 businesses.

Key decisions makers in our community are, in part, the black business owners we serve, whose feedback enables responsive solutions to their most acute challenges. Additional stakeholders include the region's economic drivers/investors, including - Dominion Energy and its Offshore Wind program, Hampton Roads Connector Partners and its Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel Expansion Project, and the various economic development authorities. We meet with these Corporate Partners Quarterly to receive updates about their efforts and encourage their participation in B-Force Accelerator activities. We are also responsive to our consultants who are boots on the ground with clients and whose work with them informs the success of the program. We meet with them weekly to hear about challenges they may face. Finally, we consider our entrepreneur ecosystem members partners, recognizing that no one solution can truly do it all. We share in their programming and invite them to share in ours.

Through our work with a local economic development authority, we learned of an IT challenge businesses were facing. Business owners were dependent upon their phones and other inadequate means to apply for grants. We stood up a B-Force Accelerator Lab, supported by a major grant from a local funder, as a free solution for program participants to access reliable internet, utilize new equipment, and manage their printing/faxing/scanning/copying needs in a safe space. We have transformed this space into an area where business owners can meet with their consultants, and gain support by being around each other. Following the workshop, the lab area has become an environment where business owners congregate with the presenters to ask additional questions in group settings and/or facilitate one-on-ones as needed.

We build trust by meeting business owners where they are. We understand that they are working to operate their businesses and that the opportunity we provide to work on their businesses requires their engagement, but that it also requires our flexibility. Therefore, we are not as focused on how the engagement occurs, rather that it occurs at all. Because we know most of our businesses are one person businesses, we do not expect them to have the capacity to readily respond to email communications. We leverage texting, calendar invites, and face to face visits as needed to ensure they get the needed information. 

First, we'd like to be able to offer funding directly through the Accelerator, either as a grant incentive, or through the creation of a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). In the interim, our goal is to connect B-Force Accelerator participants to $5M in funding over the next three years. 

Second, B-Force Accelerator is a model that can be easily replicated by other black chambers of commerce across the United States. In the next five years, we'd like to see the program rolled out in at least 5 other cities across the country. 

Blair Durham has a background in Psychology, Sociology, and serving the Black community. As an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech, Blair trained for this work by taking every course available in the areas of Black Studies, Women's Studies, and Sociology, to include independent studies, teaching assistant positions, as well as graduate level work. Alongside her academic pursuit, Blair was active on campus as a student leader, helping to pioneer work around equity and inclusion. After undergraduate school, Blair worked in social services, counseling, and as a special education teacher at at Title IX school when she realized she needed to start a nonprofit. 

B-Force Accelerator Program Manager Brian Owens is black founder of a high tech high growth company who underwent a number of both local and national accelerator programs in order to raise $1.4M to scale. While no longer an active co-founder, Brian continues to operate a small music consulting firm and consult for other accelerator programs. 

Our consultants are 99% black business owners who were already supporting small businesses through their work and who have embraced this model to make a meaningful difference in the black community. We facilitate weekly roundtables for consultants to ensure their needs are heard and adapted on an ongoing basis. 

Our program embraces an open door policy and our participants inform the program by sharing their ideas about their needs both with their consultants and the program leadership  on an ongoing basis.

The Truist Foundation Inspire Challenge is an opportunity to share this work with others that have been vetted and are interested in scaling a model that works. Being able to present the work that we are doing is a privilege. The ability to receive additional resources to sure up the work is a secondary benefit. I hopeful that we can continue to receive transformational and catalytic funding to help more business owners grow.

We want to ensure that we can provide legal resources to our businesses. Trademarking, patenting, and ongoing consulting are long range program goals. We'd like to continue to developing our M&E solution and learn more from other practitioners about M&E best practices. As we grow and take in more data, we intend to grow our technology solution to include a networked server and may need assistance to make the best decision.