African-American women step up in business world

SAN FRANCISCO -- Camille Young worked at big businesses for years until she discovered an idea for her own company during a South Pacific vacation.

Back in New Jersey, she started looking for the food she ate in Fiji, frequenting fresh-juice bars in Manhattan because she couldn't find any near home. "Someone really needs to open a juice bar here," Young recalls thinking.

She quit her bank job last year to open the first of two juice bars in her BaGua Juice chain in Jersey City. She hopes the company will grow to as many as 50 locations.

Young, 34, is one of thousands of African-American women starting businesses, research shows, in a trend that's tipping the balance of economic power in the black community.

As women take entrepreneurship's lead, marketers from banks to tech companies are tapping black women as a new source of revenue. "It's a huge opportunity," says Angela Burt-Murray, editor in chief of Essence, a leading lifestyle magazine for black women.

Black women are launching companies for many of the same reasons spurring other women. They've gained corporate experience, but a glass ceiling keeps them from rising to the CEO's office. They're better educated. Self-employment offers more flexibility to care for children and aging parents.

Start-up costs have fallen as computers and other technologies grow cheaper. And the economy is shifting even more to retail and service businesses well-suited to corporate refugees.

Driving start-up growth

The new research, published last week by the Small Business Administration, shows that women drove much of the growth in black entrepreneurship.

Black women owned 547,341 companies in 2002, up 75% from five years before, when the Census Bureau last counted. The number owned by men rose a smaller 29%, to 571,670, says the study by economist Ying Lowrey in the SBA's Office of Economic Research.

For the first time since the government began counting, black women now likely own more companies than black men, assuming growth rates stayed constant after 2002, says Gwen Martin, director of research at the Center for Women's Business Research.

Black women, like all female owners, still lag behind men by some key measures. The majority of their companies are part-time ventures, often run from home at night or on weekends to supplement daytime pay. Just 5% had employees, vs. 10% for black men. Annual revenue averaged about $39,000, vs. $114,000 for black men, Lowrey's research shows.

Extra pressure

Still, many aim for bigger ventures, such as BaGua Juice; it employs six part-timers.

Young worked for business consulting firms and the Bank of New York after getting degrees from Howard University and New York University's Stern School of Business. She says she was promoted quickly but grew disenchanted with big-business bureaucracy. Some co-workers with less education but more seniority appeared, unfairly to Young, to get passed over for promotion. "Inequality is a very difficult thing to deal with."

Also, as a black woman, she felt extra performance pressure. "You must work harder just to be viewed as average," she says.

Young dipped into her 401(k) retirement account and savings for the $80,000 needed to open her first store on the ground floor of a Jersey City apartment building. She's opened a second in a Goldman Sachs cafeteria. Young, who is single, is living on savings until BaGua is profitable.

Lowrey says one of the most important factors fueling women's entrepreneurship is their "dramatically" rising academic credentials. Among blacks, twice as many women as men earned bachelor's and master's degrees in 2004, the latest government figures show. The gap was narrower 20 years ago. Black women now get about 11% of all bachelor's and master's degrees.

"It just gives them many opportunities to do things on their own," says Martin, at the Center for Women's Business Research.

The non-profit center gets financial support from banks and other big companies seeking to do business with female entrepreneurs.

Mia Jackson, 38, leveraged her education to start a public relations and marketing business in North Bethesda, Md., partly to solve her child-care quandary.

Jackson got a bachelor's in English from Stanford University. She worked in Charles Schwab's ad department before getting laid off in 2001, when the San Francisco-based discount broker trimmed operations amid a recession.

She moved to the Washington area, where she considered working for another company.

But the single mother no longer wanted to deal with the stressful "day-care dash," rushing out at 5 each afternoon to pick up her daughter.

She started Doro Marketing Services five years ago, working alone from a home office. Clients include non-profit groups, small companies and government agencies. She spent about $15,000 from her 401(k) and from profits generated by the business itself for a computer and other essentials.

Jackson often works 50-hour weeks, including weekends. But as her own boss, she works around her daughter's schedule. "Every time I think about going back in the corporate setting, I can't do it."

Caring for aging parents

Tech-company founder Josie Cheri Lamkin launched Gypsy Lane Technologies to resolve another family challenge: elderly parents.

Lamkin, 34, started Gypsy last year after working for health care companies. It sells graphic design and computer training services. She spent about $30,000 to finish an office in her basement, and for two desktop computers, a laptop, software, filing cabinets and furniture.

She launched the business when her father and mother, now 82 and 72, got sick and she needed to spend time at a hospital. Lamkin is the only single adult among her five siblings; responsibility for her parents fell to her.

The time she needed to take off to go to the hospital was a big burden on her employer. Business ownership, she says, "allowed me a lot more flexibility."

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