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It’s never been easy being an entrepreneur, but, historically, it’s been easier for whites than for minorities. Over the years, programs providing minorities with money and support have helped many go into business for themselves. But whites still enjoy far more success in business. As part of Making Change: Building the Region’s Economy, ideastream’s Cindi Deutschman-Ruiz reports on the state of minority entrepreneurship in Northeast Ohio.
Joe Lopez and Roxanne Quezada Chartouni represent the far sides of a continuum of minority entrepreneurship in the region. Lopez’s commercial/industrial construction business - New Era Builders - is growing so fast, it captured the number 2 spot on this past year’s Weatherhead 100, a list of the fastest-growing local companies. But Chartouni’s photography business, Big Brown Eyes Productions, has stalled - and not for lack of talent. Chartouni has had numerous shows of her work and captured large-scale contracts with the city of Cleveland. But not lately.
So, Chartouni is packing up and moving back to California, where she has several projects already in the works. Chartouni doesn’t believe in giving up, she says, but she wonders if she’s been laboring here with a triple deficit.
Joe Lopez says such barriers are real.
But whatever barriers exist, Lopez has blasted through them. He’s grown his business substantially over the past 16 years (last year’s growth rate was well over 700 percent). How? He says by doing exemplary work, and never overselling or underperforming. Despite his success, Lopez says he still struggles to, as he puts it, take his seat at the table. It’s a shame, he says, in part because his firm and other minority businesses are sticking around, while many white-owned companies flee the city and region.
There’s widespread acknowledgement that minority businesses are vital to the region’s economic health. Stacey Banks-Houston runs the Greater Cleveland Urban League’s Multicultural Small Business Development Center, which serves Cuyahoga County. The SBDC has helped 13 businesses get off the ground since the beginning of the year. She says money continues to be a huge barrier to entrepreneurship, but so is attitude. Prospective entrepreneurs, she says, tend to think no further than their first venture.
Banks-Houston says small thinking is a universal tendency. But a report out this summer has found minorities are less likely than their white counterparts to believe in themselves. Jim Lowry is senior vice president of the Boston Consulting Group and author of The New Agenda for Minority Business Development.
Why? Kent State political science professor Bessie House, who runs KSU’s Center for the Study and Development of Minority Businesses, says there’s a lot of history behind some people’s fatalism.
But you can’t allow fear of failure to stop you, she says.
Lowry, who has studied minority entrepreneurship since the 70s, says minorities need to do more than overcome their fears. They need to seek partnerships, choose growth industries, and keep looking for new challenges, he says.
The key for the region, of course, is for that to happen here. In Cleveland, Cindi Deutschman-Ruiz, 90.3. Resources: |
