August is National Black Business Month, a time to recognize the contributions of African-American entrepreneurs?

According to the latest Census data.

There are nearly 141,000 black owned businesses in the U.S. One Detroit contributor and American Black Journal host Stephen Henderson talked with two African-American and women business owners, Linda Hendricks, co-founder of the Detroit Dance Center, and Anthony Acuna, CEO of Elyria Apothecary, about the unique challenges faced by black entrepreneurs.

I want to talk about what some of the day to day reminders, I guess, that you get about the challenges that exist because of who you are, the things that might be easier for or other people who who started own businesses than than they are for you.

You know, it's interesting because in business you don't know what you don't know.

And so you come across that hurdle and then you have to start figuring it out.

And I don't have just like a dedicated group of people that I can go and say like, this is what I'm dealing with.

How can you help me?

Or Where do I go?

It's like I talk to one person and they introduce me to another person.

And so it's like the time to resolve issues.

The more that I'm like learning about business and getting familiar with decreases.

But you have to be intentionally in those spaces to even get that access.

And so really just like understanding what you need in business and how you can make it work for you, even if it is something as a tangible dollar.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, this idea that you need the support of other people, other people who own businesses, other people who know what it's like to start a business.

Linda, talk about how that challenge looks.

If you're an African-American woman and trying to to make it, trying to make a business work.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, you know, one good thing about me and my business partners is that we are career professionals first and dancers second.

We have that passion for dance.

We love to dance, but we do other things myself.

I am an internal auditor, have been so for over 20 years.

My partner, Jasmine, is a chemistry teacher, so she works on all the curriculum development and then Dominique is a project manager.

So with those things, we're able to work the business, put out processes and procedures and operations and know about customer service.

However, we struggled a lot with that marketing.

So being able to use that Comcast grant to, you know, to join other groups that are similar with, you know, doing dance studios and how do you get students in and, you know, bring in the babies that you can help them grow up with your studio and everything like that.

So, you know, that has been a struggle.

And then on a personal level, because we are minority women, we're also mothers.

So our husbands have had to take on the role of day because we teach classes in the evenings.

So my husband is, you know, running around picking up the kids from school, dropping them off.

And and he comes home late at night saying, oh, I'm pooped.

I'm like, oh, recently anything.

So that's a challenge of just being able to definitely have that support system, you know, being able to operate in the evenings when, you know, most family or even women are at home, be it taking care of family or running errands or, you know, just, you know, being the family.

Uber, I.

Want to have you give some advice to people out there who might be thinking about starting their own business and maybe apprehensive about the idea, maybe don't think that it will work or that they'll have the support.

Yeah, absolutely.

Understand your why?

Why are you going into business?

Often I found that people have said they're going into business because they don't want to work for another person.

But what they don't realize is that when you go into business, you get a lot more managers.

You're answering to your customers, you're answering to your employees.

Your vendors, everyone.

And so really, like, understand what value are you bringing?

Why are you and what difference are you trying to make with your business?

Understand your business, know your numbers, know like I said, like know the value that you bring.

And really, like, make sure that you're organized you have your ducks in a row.

But also don't think that you have to know everything.

Don't wait for perfection to get to where you want to be.

People fail so many times that as long as you get up after every single one of those failures, you've learned something new where you can then go and take it to the next thing that you do.