Vivian's Door Business Center

Vivian's Door is an economic justice non-profit with a mission to help Black businesses build wealth for themselves and residents in their communities who are marginalized, face systemic poverty, and experience low levels of venture capital. We target small-underserved businesses within the Greater Mobile Region, the Alabama Black Belt, and the Gulf Coast region through economic development tools (e.g., a mobile app, business training, and targeted marketing) to increase the economic resilience of low-income small business owners. Vivian's Door provides opportunities to build an extensive network of low-income businesses, consumers, anchor institutions, large corporate partners, and municipal agencies—all working towards a systemic change in community support. We feel it is important to improve all aspects of the distressed business—mentoring the owner on needed operational skills, understanding the Marketplace, and making connections, as this creates long-term success with generational wealth-building.

We provide formalized training and a digital presence to help minority-owned and distressed businesses connect to an ecosystem of opportunities and resources. Our team works with individual participants to fully understand the scope of their needs, proactively establish program timelines, and ensure our program performance meets or exceeds requirements. Over the past 18 months, with the positive reputation Vivian's Door has garnered, the volume of businesses seeking help has increased tenfold. Most requests for information are setting up a business, creating a business plan, and finding resources for funding, marketing, legal, and accounting. Our staff needs to grow to support the demand and coordinate our mentoring services. 

Alabama is a particularly difficult environment for small businesses to operate. For centuries, racism and economic inequality created barriers and hindered economic opportunity for these businesses throughout the South. Alabama consistently ranks high in the "Business Facilities" report, including a No. 3 finish for the business climate in 2019. However, according to a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Alabama has the highest predatory lending rates in the country. Furthermore, Alabama has the highest bankruptcy rates and the second-highest rate of borrowers who are close to maxing out their credit card limit, according to 2020 data from Prosperity Now. In terms of both income inequality and underbanked households, Alabama ranks 47th out of 51 states.

Alabama has also experienced many disasters in recent years that have weakened local industry and contributed to economic shock and struggle for many residents – particularly for low-income and minorities. For example, the area experienced a COVID-19 economic recession, five major hurricanes (Sally, Zeta, Irma, Ivan, and Katrina), and a major man-made disaster (Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill) in 2004. The preceding has exacerbated existing challenges related to workforce training, underemployment, and equity of economic opportunity. While there have been some efforts to address these needs, there remains a demand for economic resiliency efforts that support existing initiatives to help shape the region's future. Vivian's Door proposes one such initiative, as it advances the findings of the CEDS published by the South Alabama Regional Planning Commission. 

1. Vivian's Door conducts several events each year that brings our clients to the attention of the anchor institutions.

Capital Convening: A networking event to provide better ways to build relationships with bankers and deploy capital to underserved businesses. Matchmaker with Anchor Institutions.

Pitch Competitions: The final class for the StreetWise MBA™ course is a pitch competition between participants and is judged by business experts, which include local lenders and financial advisors.

Townhall Meetings: Coordinate and facilitate rural community-based Townhall Meetings to engage the community leaders and small businesses in networking and information gathering. These events will facilitate local and federal agency resources available to support the growth and sustainment of these community small businesses.

2. Vivian's Door increases small business capacity through formal training, mentoring, and procurement readiness.

Training: Interise's StreetWise 'MBA' ™ builds the capacity of small business owners. Business owners learn the strategic and technical foundations for running their businesses more efficiently and strategically. As the business owners acquire new knowledge and know-how, they incorporate it into a three-year growth plan called the Strategic Growth Action Plan™.

Mentoring: Participating MBEs will have access to business advisors and mentors who collaborate and assist the business owner with overcoming capacity-constraint challenges.

Procurement Readiness: Interise's LEAP Systems Mapping Process integrates participants into the community supplier and procurement systems to create a cycle where purchasing benefits the contractor and leads to local wealth and job creation. 

The Southern Alabama counties experience a significant black-white poverty gap. For example, in Lowndes County, the white poverty rate is 8.1 percent, while the Black or African American poverty rate is 33.0 percent. Many circumstances can produce poverty-level income. Sometimes the causes are personal, such as poor health, or other reasons result from economic events, such as a factory shutdown or natural disasters that result in shutdowns. But much poverty is less event-specific and more related to the effect of long-established factors such as the legacy of race discrimination or low-wage regional and rural economies in which even full-time workers may receive only poverty-level incomes. Education is frequently a key factor in being lifted out of poverty. And indeed, in virtually every county, the poverty rate decreases as educational attainment rises. But counties with dynamic economies do better provide higher-paying jobs at all education levels.

2020 Census data notes an estimated 327,176 firms/employers in Alabama, with 118,856 firms/employers in our target region, and 37,839 (31.8%) of these businesses are owned by minorities. Yet, they do not receive a proportionate number of available contracts and work opportunities. On average, African American business owners nationwide earn 39% less than similarly situated non-minority males. According to January 2020 Prosperity Now Scorecard, revenue by People of Color businesses in Alabama was $127,320 compared to $598,063 by businesses owned by Whites. Alabama has also been a hotspot of systemic racism since before the Clotilda brought the last slave ship to the port of Mobile. The preceding has exacerbated existing challenges related to a lack of workforce training, underemployment, and inequity of economic opportunity.

Alabama

We deliver business training and mentoring solutions that help our clients implement entrepreneurial ideas and grow business enterprises. We deliver the concepts and connections that boost small businesses and help them start and grow with the right resources, mentors, guidance, and education. We open doors, expose businesses to influencers, and create the opportunities they need to reach for the stars, realize economic prosperity, and obtain their business goals. We also strive to facilitate community development and economic success through local minority business growth and development, scale, and reinvestment in their communities. Our team focuses on grassroots community engagement with the development of Vivian’s Door eMarketplace Mobile App, providing resources and opportunities that benefit consumers and business owners alike.

The Context of the Problem: Black businesses in the region experienced limited access to materials and many systemic programs, causing an enormous wealth gap. Black businesses have been shortchanged out of the materials needed to be successful in building their economic health through system policies that excluded and disqualified them.

Factors Known or assumed to be fueling or complicating the Problem:

Systemic economic policies have disenfranchised people of color businesses which held them back from business growth and success (i.e., slavery, redlining, Jim Crow, etc.). Marginalized and underserved neighborhoods, many of which are currently undergoing gentrification.

Factors Known or assumed to be Levers for Change or Impact:

We help ambitious entrepreneurs leverage the resources necessary to create sustainable and profitable business enterprises. In so doing, we seek to create jobs and wealth in these traditionally underserved and marginalized communities. Our outreach efforts target traditionally underserved women and minority business markets.

Proposed Strategy to Achieve Progress Against This Challenge:

Vivian’s Door will focus on developing entrepreneurs and business leaders with our business training/networking models and youth programs. We feel it is important to improve all aspects of the distressed business—mentoring the owner on needed operational skills, understanding the marketplace, and making connections, creating long-term success with generational wealth-building. Our project will consist of formalized training for participants and a web-based tool to help minority-owned and distressed businesses connect to an entrepreneurial ecosystem of opportunities and resources. We provide creative training and hands-on experience for underserved community youths, teaching them valuable lessons of learning to become self-sufficient and how to prepare for a future.

Envisioned Results:

Short-Term: Serve 100 businesses through extensive training, mentoring, and coaching with participants setting a three-year strategic goal and identifying and obtaining resources needed to achieve goals.

Continue Youth boot camps and internships reaching 60 youth per year, providing entrepreneurial skills and general business training.

Long-Term: Select and train 80 businesses per year to create growth plans and build their businesses with mentors, funding partners, and resource partners.  

We have 85 current clients and we anticipate a 10% increase each year so for this next year we will serve 94 clients with a total of 575 for five years. 

Stakeholders include:

o   Small business owners: Become procurement ready; learn about the procurement process, create jobs, and become economically resilient.

o   Procurement: Increases supplier diversity, facilitates the supply chain, and engages with the community.

o   Capital providers: Lend established small businesses the capital necessary for procurement opportunities.

o   Capacity builders: Provide knowledge and know-how for procurement success, and help small businesses grow and build wealth. 

We conduct several community events and impactful Business services.

1. Coordinate and facilitate rural community-based Townhall Meetings to engage the community leaders and small businesses in networking and information gathering. These events will facilitate local and federal agency resources available to support the growth and sustainment of these community small businesses. 

2.  Entrepreneurial Conference: This event brings together a diverse group of entrepreneurs to learn about the program and connect with the resources needed for growth. Attendees include entrepreneurs, investors, training program professionals, and others through whom attendees can connect, expand their network, and learn new strategies for cultivating a diverse pipeline of suppliers.

3.  Quarterly Networking Events: These will center on open forums with business advisors, guest experts, and procurement professionals doing 20-minute presentations in an open environment fostering connections and collaborations. Each event will feature roundtable discussions bringing together industry peers to share success stories and generate growth opportunities.

4. Monthly Lunch and Learns: These are informal networking events providing opportunities for Entrepreneurs to present their Elevator Pitch, a sixty-second introduction of their business to a group of their peers and community leaders.

5. Annual Community Market Festival: This is an engagement opportunity for local businesses to showcase their wares and establish connections within the community. Ultimately, these connections lead to business growth.

6.  Mental Health Mondays: These events are led by two mental health professionals facilitating the program covering various topics from Positive Self-Talk to The Art of Delegation. We had 50 people sign up for the program.

7. The Vivian's Door web app, developed by the Applicant, is the technological means to make connections between underserved small businesses, anchor institutions, and consumers. The app is a centralized clearinghouse catalog of local small businesses, scholarships, training resources, mentorship, and networking opportunities. The Vivian's Door App addresses shortcomings through our market analysis. No other organization is currently delivering the type of services these distressed, marginalized, and underserved communities need, including training, coaching, and networking, to allow them to grow and employ more community members. Moreover, no other efforts exist in the region to centralize information for and about minority-owned businesses in Mobile. The Vivian's Door App will truly meet a pressing need in an extremely impactful way.

8. Interise's LEAP Systems Mapping Process — The LEAP process positions MBEs to participate in community procurement activities with anchor institutions like universities, hospitals, corporations, and local governments. LEAP does so by leveraging the three major employers in low- and moderate-income communities: small businesses, government agencies, and anchor institutions. Of the three, the one that is the net new job creator is established, small employers. LEAP helps these small employers integrate into the anchor institution supplier and procurement systems and thereby contributes to a virtuous cycle where local purchasing generates mutual benefit and leads to local wealth, job creation, and economic resilience.

At Vivian's Door, we understand that the critical reasons minority businesses fail come from a lack of high-quality management education and capital, the need for mentors to pick them up when they begin to falter, limited access to the right connections, weak support networks, and a lack of clients and contracts.

We also learned that when you can scale and grow, you can uplift yourself and your staff and reinvest in your community. After brainstorming ideas, we created a solution to address ALL these needs— Vivian's Door! We embrace the ideas that all parties at all levels interact and freely share knowledge, connections, and information in a fun and interactive way.

We provide an end-to-end process that equips Black business owners with corporate connections, vital financial information and resources, and the knowledge to grow their businesses successfully. In other words, Black dollars stay longer and continue to circulate in the Black community.

o   Improve operational efficiencies - We improve operational efficiencies through training and mentoring networks with other MBEs, partners, business experts, and pro bono support networks.

o   Increase resources – We increase resources by removing barriers and opening the pipeline using the above tools.

o   Build scale – We build scale through training, access to capital, and getting these businesses plugged into anchor institutions and government contracting.

o   Management risk and increase liability thresholds – We leverage management risk by helping them to partner with primes and anchor institutions effectively.

o   Strengthen management teams – We strengthen their management teams through training, mentoring networks, business experts.

o   Access and secure financing, equity, and venture capital raise online capital – We open both traditional and non-traditional creative means to build capital and create financing opportunities.

o   Increase profits and owner equity – We increase profits by building contract volume with larger dollar sales, decreasing expenses. Implement and integrate new technology and equipment – We automate processes by implementing technology solutions to increase operational efficiency. 

Janice Malone, Executive Director has a BSBA in Management from Chapman University, with over twenty years of executive leadership experience in information technology, analyzing and solving business problems, marketing, business and project management, training and supporting users, and writing technical, financial, and research documents. She is an award-winning enterprising Woman of Color small business owner and a former executive director of BNI for South Alabama and Northwest Florida, where she grew that organization to over 1400 members. She is a Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses graduate and an SBA Emerging Leaders Graduate.

JaVaughnae Malone is responsible for marketing, communications, publications and website, social media, and overall creative content.  JaVaughnae holds a B.A. in Radio, Television, and from the University of Southern Mississippi. She is pursuing an M.S. in Entrepreneurship from Oklahoma State University. She is the Founder of 88 Melanin Ave and is a professional blogger and an entrepreneur with over ten years of corporate marketing experience.

David Edgerton holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University and a Master’s in Business Administration, Marketing from the University of Minnesota and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Human Resources Management from Concordia University, St. Paul, MN. David Edgerton Jr. is an experienced business professional, a passionate adjunct instructor, and a diversity advocate. He has over 21 years of corporate experience and over 11 years of experience as an adjunct instructor in business education.

We want to sustain our programs between government grant periods. These funds will help keep our staff on payroll and allow us to Implement one more training cycle per year.