A New Way of Thinking for Minority Business

I was posed an interesting question recently concerning the changing landscape of minority business in America. The question was, if you could offer just one piece of advice to minority entrepreneurs today as they continue to make inroads in the larger business community, what would it be?

In some respects this question is almost impossible to answer as there are so many philosophies and strategies that could be discussed in this regard. But if forced to come up with just one piece of advice, I would simply say “Think Bigger”.

Minority business owners, and in truth small business owners as a whole, simply cannot keep conducting business in the same traditional manners and expect to succeed in today’s (and more importantly tomorrow’s) highly competitive global market. While I recognize that many minority and small business owners may not view their business operations from a global perspective, the reality is that small business owners are competing and operating in a global business market whether they truly realize it or not.

Advances in technology, the internet, and the continuing progress of developing nations abroad have all converged to essentially make the world a much smaller place, and now allow a small company in Brazil or China (just to name two) to effectively compete for business in America alongside a local small business. This relative “shrinking” of the world market, along with a host of other factors such as corporate consolidations, regionalism, etc., have created a far more complex and competitive landscape for business owners today. 

The firms that succeed going forward will be those that have the ability to respond to larger and more complex opportunities that arise both in America and around the world. These new opportunities will necessitate additional resources in infrastructure and capacity that most traditional smaller firms are simply ill-equipped to handle. If minority and small business owners are going to be in a position to quickly respond to these changing opportunities, a new set of growth strategies (and a “new way of thinking”) will be necessary to grow the types of businesses that are scalable, adaptive to any number of strategic alliances (joint ventures, acquisitions, etc.), and fundamentally leverage resources from a number of partners to collectively accomplish more than any single traditional firm could likely accomplish alone.

This new way of thinking and its associated strategies are the primary focus of JumpStart Inclusion Advisors, and will be discussed in detail in our minority business series entitled “The Anatomy of a High Potential Company…Growing Your Business to $15 Million in Sales and Beyond”. Now is the time to start preparing for a challenging, yet very exciting new day!

To learn more about the event series taking place this spring, visit our events page.

Darrin is Chief Economic Inclusion Officer of JumpStart and President of JumpStart Inclusion Advisors. He founded and ran his own strategic planning and management assistance firm and spent 16 years in the commercial banking and finance industry. Darrin has an MBA from Baldwin-Wallace College and an undergraduate degree from Mount Union College. He has led a series of workshops and seminars on matters of economic development and diversity.