Black Entrepreneur Summit
The Black Entrepreneur Summit (BE Summit) serves as a stimulus for black marketers, businesses, and entrepreneurs around the New York City area. The event’s purpose is to help build strategies, relationships, and expertise to accelerate the growth of Black businesses.
This event displayed and brought together innovate thinkers, business owners, industry thought leaders and industry influencers for a full day of learning, networking and growing theirs and other like businesses. The BE Summit was broken up into different panel discussions and breakout sessions that were both immersive and taught valuable lessons on how to build growth within black-owned businesses and black communities.
How to build an irresistible brand was the 1st-panel discussion that included Kendall Glaspie of Big Review TV, Tammy Williams of Imena Collective, Nicole Williams of Nicole Williams Collective and Mia Hall speaker, writer, sports, and career strategist. Hall introduced the idea and spoke on how businesses and brands need to be “strategic and intentional”. The point was to encourage the black community of entrepreneurs to be more proactive and intentional about how to grow and expand our businesses. Everything we do in our businesses has to be planned and recorded to make sure mistakes are not made and that growth is not only studied but intended and calculated to make the best of our efforts. Adding to this topic, Williams discussed that in order to be proactive and intentional, black entrepreneurs have to be very clear on their vision and mission. There is already a stigma with Black-Owned businesses and for the world to support and to also take these businesses seriously there must be a strong vision and mission. This also creates longevity for the businesses as well. From what we’ve learned in the BIC program, we know that if a business is to ever get lost in their strategy with upcoming campaigns, promotions, or launches, that business can go back to their vision and mission to find their grounding and to find where they want to go with the multiple activities.
One thing that Tammy Williams stated on this panel is, “Be mindful that you attract people who are attracted to you.” That entire statement really summoned up the entire conference as to led to multiple discussions and workshops of people in the room who were like-minded and wanted to be around like-minded individuals like themselves wanting to prosper and succeed. Williams also talked about how we have to be true and authentic to our brands and businesses. This would only attract people who are true and authentic to their brands as well. Hall and Williams really discussed and talked about how brands and businesses need to really start the process of finding themselves and building themselves by cultivating and building relationships with others. This would allow them to really look at the need, look at their approach, and then to really look at their results to see if they are making the impact that these brands and businesses really wanted and intended to make at the beginning of their journeys. A key theme that stood out during this entire panel discussion is that as black-owned brands and businesses, we have to make sure that we are solving a problem and that these businesses know why they are getting into the business they are getting into.
Once the main panel discussion was done, there was a breakout session. In this session hosted by Kendra Web-Scott of Ideazio. The discussion tethered on the lines of the panel discussion before it and talked about how once you have your business vision and mission solid, then you focus on growing your business with email and social media. The two most used mediums of this new digital era. A key insight from this discussion was learning that e-mail has 3 times the conversion rate as social media. If you thought about this insight, it makes a lot of sense. Social media has become very saturated with Ads from personal brands and corporate brands that sometimes as a user, it’s hard to separate what you want to learn about and be a part of vs what we do not. But with E-mail and social media, as black-owned businesses trying to disrupt or tackle the industry, the content has to be elevated. Content creating has to let your personality and the personality of your brand shine. The content has to be something that people care about and that goes back to solving the problem and making yourself, your brand and your business authentic and relatable to the people of the problem you essential are trying to solve.
This entire experience was informative, insightful, and inspiring. The information was valuable in-depth and key insights were stated. The last note from Nicole Williams was “Stay in front of your consumer.” Throughout everything you do or intend to do with your brand and your business, stay in front of your consumer. Give them the information to make their brands shine. This is a key way to stay relatable to your brands and always in their eyes, with them wanting more. These insights and thoughts can and should be applied to brands and businesses all over. As black-owned brands and businesses, the lessons that came from the Black Entrepreneur Summit are those that should be taught to more individuals. I suggest this as a definite conference to attend.
