So, you want to be featured on the pages of Black Enterprise magazine? In fact, it’s been your life long entrepreneurial dream to make the cover. Join the club–every black entrepreneur shares that aspiration. At least it seems that way to me and other members of the editorial team of Black Enterprise. As I’ve already said, the first installments of this blog series will focus on small business owners who aspire to one day see themselves on the pages of Black Enterprise. Here are some basic things that entrepreneurs need to know to have a chance at being considered by our editors.
The best person to send information about your company to is Senior Content Producer Carolyn M. Brown, who edits our Small Biz section. Information sent to me or any other Black Enterprise staff will likely be routed to her. Brown is responsible for developing content and providing information to help small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs build and manage successful, profitable enterprises. She is also responsible helping to coordinate Black Enterprise‘s small business initiatives for our other platforms, including our national networking events. For example, Brown is part of the team that plans our annual Entrepreneurs Conference, and the Elevator Pitch Competition and Black Enterprise Small Business Awards in particular.
Each day, Brown and other staff editors receive an abundance of information from small businesses hoping to be featured in the magazine, in the form of elaborate brochures, expensive press kits, URLs to amazing Web sites and even samples of products. (We love the packages from you entrepreneurs in the baked goods industry.) However, too often, these efforts lack key information that we need to know to even consider an entrepreneur and her business for an article. Here’s a brief summary of what we have to know:
What are your revenues? You’ve heard the saying, What get’s measured, get’s done. As a longtime editor at Black Enterprise, I say what gets measured, gets in. If you want us to seriously consider your business as a subject for a story in Black Enterprise, there’s no way around it–you’re going to have to show us your numbers. We’ll expect to see the following information at minimum: annual revenues for the most recent full calendar year and for two
to four (depending on how long you’ve been in business) preceding calendar years, along with projected annual revenues for the current calendar year. Yes, we do intend to publish your annual revenue figures.Who owns the company? No, really. We’re going to want to know who holds an equity stake in the company, and what percentage of the equity each owner holds. What percentage of the company is owned by blacks? To be considered black-owned by Black Enterprise, at least 51% of the equity of the company must be owned by black people. Not every company featured in Black Enterprise meets that standard, but for certain sections of the magazine, such as our Making It profiles in the Small Biz section, our goal is to showcase black-owned businesses.
Who are your top clients? This is one of the ways we reality-check the sales figures and other information provided by entrepreneurs. Yes, we will want to talk to your clients, as well as other parties who can vouch for the viability of the business and the credibility of the owners.
How many employees do you have? Are they full time, part-time, seasonal, temporary or independent contractors?
You’d think I’d be used to it after more than two decades at Black Enterprise, but I continue to be amazed by entrepreneurs who expect us to write about their business with no financial information about their company. We are a business and financial media company, so we use numbers to tell the story. So with all due respect to your passion for your business idea and your deep desire to give back to the community, if you’re not willing to divulge financial figures and other data to help us to measure the size and performance of your business, you’ll have a hard time convincing us to do an in-depth profile of you and your company.
Most of the businesses covered in Black Enterprise are privately held companies, which means we have to ask you to provide the information we need, and then verify it through our own network of industry experts and analysts. If you want to be featured in Black Enterprise, you have to be willing to share details–including the numbers–of your story with our audience. Doing so will increase your appeal to our editors, and increase the odds that your story will be told in the magazine.
It is helpful to remember that publicizing your company is not our primary objective at Black Enterprise, although that is a major incentive for you to want to have your company featured in the magazine. Our mission is to showcase companies that can serves as examples and inspiration to other entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners who are trying to confront and negotiate the realities of doing business. The more we know about your business, the more are able to determine what lessons from your experiences can be imparted to our clients–the Black Enterprise
audience.There’s a type of pitch well known around the offices of Black Enterprise; we jokingly call it the “black-man-with-a-suit-and-a-job†pitch. The entrepreneur in question will invariably be a reasonably successful person–a nice person who wants to ‘give back’ to the community–and will approach us as if this is a rare and amazing thing. We have to explain to him that reasonably successful black people who want to help their community are, fortunately, a very common thing.
The difference between this and a potentially successful pitch can be subtle. If you can convince us that you have been inventive or particularly strategic about plotting your path to success or responding to a major setback, you could be a great subject for a story. What appeals to our editors is what about a particular individual’s story will help our readers. The story is never the person; it’s the examples and the lessons.
Other posts in this series:
How to Get Into Black Enterprise