According to Raymond Hill, the founder and owner of New Jersey-based Sequin City, his business is the only sequin manufacturer in the country, and it’s a true American success story. After being fired from the company where he worked, Hill returned years later to buy the building he had been fired from.
He tells BlackEnterprise, “After being unceremoniously fired, I decided to start my own business, and 10 years later I’m sitting at the same desk that I was sitting at when I was fired. Only this time I own the business.”
He says he had an arrangement with the owner for a commission if the firm did any sales of more than a million dollars.
“Within a year and a half we had reached two and a half million in sales. Each month he would write out those big commission checks and he became angrier and angrier. One day he just walked in and fired me. At the time I thought it was the absolute worst. I had a 2-year-old son and I had just gotten out of hospital. In hindsight it was the best thing that happened because it forced me to do what I had been thinking about all along — and that was start my own business.”
So how did Raymond Hill return five years ago to buy and set up shop in the same building he was fired from? It’s quite a story.
According to Hill, “He didn’t understand that usually a sales manager has very close ties to the customers. When I left the first thing  I did was reach out to my customers and tell them I was no longer there and I was branching out on my own. They said when you’re up and running give us a call. Once we were up and running [my former employer’s] sales just nose-dived because they all came to me.”
Once Hill decided he was breaking out on his own he purchased a 5,000 sq.-ft. property and started Sequin City.
After spending 10 years at the 56th Street location, he faced a dilemma. The landlord was selling, forcing Hill to move.
After searching desperately for a new space, Hill knew deep inside that the best location would be the place he had been fired from, especially
since it had retained the multimillion-dollar equipment necessary to operate the business. Now remember, the former owner had gone out of business because, well, the customers had all gone with Hill. But this was easier said than done. The owner told him straight up that the only way he was getting the place was over his dead body.Dejected and disappointed, Hill spoke to the owner’s son. Turns out the family had been trying to get their father to get rid of the property for years. They made a deal for Hill to buy the place.
But getting a loan to secure the property was impossible. It was the height of the Great Recession and banks were simply not handing out loans. So what happened next?
“I wrote a letter to Gov. Christie and told him we were a profitable business that had been around for more than 10 years and that we were gonna be out of business because we couldn’t get a loan. I told him basically that he was about to get about 20 people who would become wards of the state.”
He
had almost given up hope when he got a call from Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno.“She asked me what can we do for you and I said well, here’s my situation. I can’t get a loan. I have excellent credit, a profitable business,  but I can’t get a loan. So they introduced us to the N.J. Economic Development Authority. They stepped in and essentially helped us secure a $225,000 loan under the Small Business Fund because they guaranteed half the loan and for the first time the N.J. Economic Development Authority and the Small Business Administration partnered to do a loan and I was the test case.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
He also caught another lucky break.
“I was doing business with a major theme park for almost 10 years until they discovered I was a minority. They told me I qualified as a minority-owned business which gave a special rate and place within their organization because they were looking to have minority-owned businesses as suppliers. So I registered as a minority-owned business.”
So what advice does Hill have for others trying to get into this space?
“You’ve got to be ready for hard
work. Get your ducks in a row and take that step. You don’t have to have everything planned out because oftentimes you’re operating on faith. It helps to do your research, to know your competition and the industry.”He also tells BE, “Be willing to put in those long hours. My son was basically born about the time I started my business. I was working 18 hours a day and I would go months without seeing him other than on the weekend. That’s what makes the difference between success and failure. Oftentimes people quit and success is right around the corner.”
So we had to ask if he would do anything differently.
“No. Even the difficult situations served a purpose. Had I not had those difficult situations I can’t say that we would have been as successful as we are.”