On Friday, May 6, at the Loews Hotel Miami, Miami, Florida, Black Enterprise will honor the much deserving billion-dollar businesswoman, Janice Bryant Howroyd, with the highly coveted Black Enterprise A.G. Gaston Award, given to those who have exceeded beyond measure in business and entrepreneurship.
Bryant Howroyd is being honored with this reward as the first African American woman to own a billion-dollar company, Act 1 Group, the largest minority woman-owned employment agency in the United States. Founded in 1978 as a single-office, The Act-1 Group is now an international enterprise, operating in 19 countries, employing more than 1,300 people in 240 satellite offices in the U.S. and eight countries, offering a range of services from employee background checks to executive travel management to clients that include Fortune 500 companies, mid-size and small businesses across multiple industries.
BlackEnterprise.com caught up with Bryant Howroyd at a past Entrepreneurs Summit to solicit her expert advice on success and growth entrepreneurship. Here’s a little of what she had to say. “You have to think and act globally. No matter what the size of your business, no matter what the generation or iteration of your business, you are in a global business,†says Bryant Howroyd. “We all compete globally–no matter what we manufacture, no matter what we deliver as a service or a solution, there is someone else in the world also doing that–and technology has brought us together into a single community.â€
Bryant Howroyd goes on to say that now is the best time to start a business because opportunities are ripe. “Whenever you have an economic situation that is weakened a bit, whenever you find societies are having challenges, you also have the opportunity to bring solutions people may not have thought about before and you can deliver in ways they’ve never been open to receive it,†she explains.
When asked what causes businesses to fail, Bryant Howroyd plainly stated that it is vagueness that causes failed business. “You have to ask the right questions and listen for the right answers,†she advises. “Be where you say you’re going to be and how you say you’re going to be there; communicate with clarity and make sure you have full-circle communication. Those are the simple ABC’s of business and I think they also serve very well in life as well,†she adds.
With the success of Act-1 Group, Bryant Howroyd has been deemed one the country’s wealthiest self-made women with an even larger wealth of knowledge. Join Black Enterprise in honoring Janice Bryant Howroyd’s amazing accomplishments in entrepreneurship at the 2016 Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Summit, May 4—7, Loews Miami Hotel, Miami, Florida, and learn more. REGISTER NOW.
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