““What do you have in your life? Who do you have in your life? These things are important. Curate that,
because it matters””

“We’re no longer in a landscape where a business owner should take the majority of the profits and have the labor force just work and be happy with that process. You can really run a sustainable, profitable business as well as give back.”

“Sustainability is such a huge topic. Business owners want to know how to do better, but it’s really hard to know where to start when there are so many things to be addressing.”

“I think being able to see people [...] and really being able to support them has really been life giving to me in
a way that I didn’t expect when I started. ”

“Balancing being honest without being taken advantage of, or without shorting myself has been a challenge. You know, I’m a real nice dude when it comes to the sob story or you could just kind of finesse me into being a little more lenient, but I think over the years I’ve learned how to balance both. Like you can really be a nice guy without being taken advantage of and I feel like I’ve learned that over the years.”

“This place has turned into something more than just a coffee shop. It’s an activist coffee shop basically, which just happened that way. You know there are all these injustices and we use the coffee shop as a platform to speak out against all the injustices, marginalized people, racism, sexism, and all the bullshit that is happening now and has been happening.”

“Therapists are usually the type of person that is very giving, they want to serve people. Then they work for these businesses where it’s all about the dollar and the bottom line [...] it’s like a mill. So I had a couple of those experiences and I was like, I’m tired of this, I almost left physical therapy because I just couldn’t wrap my head around how I would enjoy this and make a living and actually make people better.”

“It was my passion and my dream, and no one is going to fight for your passion and your dream as much as you are. So if you’re willing to take the highs and the lows, because there are going to be lows, I would say 100% go for it.”

“I grew up cooking in the kitchen with my grandma. I was the only one that she would allow in the kitchen out of all my siblings and all my cousins, which I have a ton of. That’s when I found the passion for cooking. [...] It was an experience that has driven my life and taught me the passion and the art of putting you heart and soul into whatever you’re cooking and making other people happy.”

“So the name of my business is blackberry, it’s spelt, B L K B R Y, take out all the vowels. I really just named it that way because there was so much missing from what I was seeing in terms of Black maternal healthcare.”

“There’s nothing I love more than being able to feel like my best self in my body. So that just kind of resonates with me and clicks with me when I wake up everyday and put my feet on the floor and figure out how I can help service others.”

“Everyday now I’m so happy I made the decision that I made. You could always talk about, ‘oh I should have done this earlier’ the fact is, you’re doing it now.”

“When I was a little girl, you could often find me sifting through rocks of any type. Really interested in their shapes and colors and their structures. I got really interested in crystal formations and mineral specimens and I think I always just kind of kept that in my back pocket.”

“My dad always said ‘when you set a goal, don’t set an easy goal, easy goals are nothing, just wasting your time. Set high goals, that’s something to be proud of when you reach your goal.’ So I did!”

“I gave corporate America a lot of years of my life, starting at about 16 years old. But I never took time for self. So life happened for me and one day I decided to fly.”

“One of the more empowering pieces of being a business owner is that I can select my vendors and make sure people that look like me are represented and that I can actually showcase them to the world. Particularly the ones that don’t have the exposure that other wines, whisky, and beers have.”

“I think some of it is just having the nerve and taking the risk. And you realize, the huge risk is remorse, that’s the risk, is not trying something and having the opportunity go by.”

“I decided after years of doing adult haircuts that I wanted to do something new. [...] At the time I had my son and I just wanted to get more involved in the community of children. I like to put a smile on his face and I figured, putting a smile on all kid’s faces would be even more rewarding.”

“Come up with small goals and reach those, don’t think too much about the big goals and the
outcome of it. Because if you’re starting something off, you don’t really know how to get to the outcome, so the second you start thinking too much about the outcome, it becomes overwhelming [...] I always say, just start small, start with just a few goals, accomplish those, that will build confidence and then you keep just moving from there.
”

“It’s important to me because I realize the freedom that being an entrepreneur has allotted me and part of why I really enjoy entrepreneurship is because you can provide opportunities for other people.”

“Purpose and career are two different things and I think everyone’s purpose is to serve. We’re not here just to work and make money. But outside of the money, how can you impact the next person, that’s going to make the world change.”

“I did go to business school, but truely the business side came from my grandmother being in business for many many years. [...] As a Black woman with a few kids, you know, back in the 40s, having her own business was just unheard of. [...] When I was 13 years old on the bus, leaving her business, her store, I turned around and knew that day that what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life, which was going to be in business for myself as an entrepreneur. ”

“So when it’s your passion, then it’s your purpose and you can’t deviate from what your purpose is. Your purpose is your purpose, it’s already designed, all you have to do is walk in it.”

“For me, being a girl boss is living the dream, like completely. Being able to be my own boss and create my own schedule and give back to my community.”

“I tend to follow a plant based diet, more for actually moral and spiritual reasons than for dietary reasons. But my personal health challenges have essentially led me on this path.”

“You’re always going to get the naysayers, but you have to have confidence in yourself. One thing about starting your own business, you know, you’re going to get everybody’s feedback, family, relatives, but you need to do what you want to do [...] you have regrets when you do other people’s bidding, ‘no I’m doing whatever I want’, you only got one life, do what you want.”

“Each artist is creating their business in their own way and no pathway looks the same. So I think the more that you can expose yourself to artists of different mediums but also of different business styles, then it can also help you feel like there’s not this linear pathway of doing it where you can have that flexibility to figure it out for yourself.”

“We often talk a lot about the way our communities are changing because of gentrification or because of economic deficiencies and they are changing and that is a very real issue. But if we can power solutions like bringing more diverse entrepreneurs and leaders to the table and building new things from an authentic and culturally competent perspective, then I think we can start to counteract some of those ways in which our communities have changed in the negative sense. And we can create positive transformation that way. And I think that’s really important not only for the future of what our communities look like but for the moral of the folks who are here right now trying to be a part of that, building that from the ground up.”

“I think we are better if we do things together and if we do it in unity we can then help other people to grow businesses and to build businesses especially during this time.”

“Well my philosophy on fitness, being 62, is that we can make a choice in life. To be fit or make the decision to not do anything. [...] So I look at fitness as being a lifestyle that we need to adopt, because if you don’t use it, you will definitely, definitely lose it.”