(lively music)
- [Vernon] There's a lotta things that you don't know.
It's not like you take this handbook,
and you follow the steps,
and then you're a successful business owner.
That's now it works.
(lively music)
- I'm accustomed to doing one problem
at a time.
And now you have 20.
But
I love it when you tell me what I can't do.
It makes me work harder.
(lively music)
- Like, what are the struggles you had as a entrepreneur?
- Struggle? (laughing)
I still feel like I'm in the struggle.
- America has always been associated with making it,
but is this opportunity accessible to all?
I'm Scott Shigeoka, GoDaddy's entrepreneur in residence,
and I'm on a journey across the country meeting the people
who are building it.
They're defying the odds, and their stories show us
what it means to be Made in America.
(piano music)
(lively music)
I'm fourth generation Japanese American.
My whole family grew up in Hawaii.
I come from, like, a line of entrepreneurs.
I tend to be really positive and see failure
or setbacks as an opportunity to grow.
And I think that's a core part of being
an entrepreneur, right?
We all have this grit.
I think there's this way of thinking,
this perseverance, this mindset that entrepreneurs have,
and they think, "Why not me?"
And, yeah, why not you?
That's why I'm excited to explore this role
as entrepreneur in residence, to think back
to my journey, and what it was like
for me to set up a business, and to share and learn
from others who are on that same journey too.
I think entrepreneurs are creators.
They're inventors.
The majority of entrepreneurs aren't the people
that are in suits.
They are everyday Americans like you and I
who are creating something new.
The goal of the series is
to highlight everyday entrepreneurs.
I think we have a perception of what an entrepreneur is,
but we're trying to expand that definition.
There are entrepreneurs everywhere in our country,
and that's why we're here in Memphis.
Memphis has a thriving ecosystem of entrepreneurs.
There's a lot going on here in Memphis.
(lively music)
- [Morris] There's a lot of talent in Memphis,
people looking for opportunity, hungry.
- [Woman] Growing up in Memphis, you can always see
a lot of different family-owned small business
that goes back for so many years.
- [Scott] Tell me about your upbringing in Memphis.
What was that like?
- Oh, well I was born and raised in the projects.
You know what the projects are?
- Tell me about it.
- The projects where a lot of us African Americans live.
My mom was poor.
You know, we were poor.
- My grandparents were actual slaves.
They lived on a plantation.
One of the stories my dad always told me about was
how he used to kill bullfrogs in the swamp
and go sell them on the corner for a nickel apiece,
frog legs, and he was making more money
than his mom and dad was on the farm.
That kind of started off a psychology
of being able to go out and make money a different way.
He was the first African American
to have a distribution deal with Goodyear and Michelin.
So I grew up working for him and learning the principles,
the values that I would never have gotten anywhere else.
- There's this idea that the generations
that came before us, we carry their trauma, their joy.
Like all the things they went through,
we have it in us too.
(lively music)
- Memphis has the blood of Dr. Martin Luther King
on our hands, no matter how many years pass.
(lively music)
He came here for equal pay for the sanitation workers.
We know the history.
You know I know I stand on his shoulders,
among many other African Americans
and non-African Americans who were in the fight.
And those entrepreneurs, like Ida B. Wells,
who started a haircare line back then
and was like straightening hair.
- Memphis is a place where struggle has been present.
People have gone through that adversity
and have come out on the other side here.
I mean this is the epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement.
This is a place where people have pushed
for equality, have pushed for something new.
But we also need to think about Memphis
in the national context.
(solemn music)
- [Connie] Local community businesses should be supported,
because they really are the backbone
and the lifeline to this country.
- We have to remember that it's not just Tennessee.
It not just Memphis that's going through this.
D.C. is a place where brilliant minds come together
to think about these really big problems.
- You mentioned Memphis, Tennessee.
In communities where job creation has not been robust,
this is how you bring jobs into those communities.
- [Scott] But to the everyday American, like,
why does this matter?
Like, why should I care about supporting small businesses?
- Right, right, figuring out not just how
to help them spark, but really this question
of how we help them grow and realize
their potential is really, really important
from a national economic perspective.
Small business is where innovation happens.
- They are providing over 31% of all the jobs
in this country.
- Why is it important to serve these underserved groups
- [Joyce] Right.
- to become entrepreneurs?
- One of the challenges we've seen
in the last couple decades is that actually rates
of entrepreneurship are declining.
What's interesting is if you look underneath the data
the places where we're seeing higher relative rates
of small-business creation are among women,
are among people of color, are among immigrants,
so these are the folks who are starting businesses
in a time when we're seeing that generally declining.
So they're pretty precious, and you wanna invest
in them, but they're also the people we know
who've had the biggest barriers.
- Coming from where I come from,
receiving a business loan of any amount is unheard of.
My mom didn't finish high school.
My father didn't finish high school.
I'm the only one of my mother's children
to graduate college.
- Friends and family are the most widely used source
of startup capital, so that's not really bootstraps.
(laughing) That's not you.
That's somebody else who you're lucky enough to know.
People often finance their businesses.
They use savings, or they use a home equity line of credit.
African Americans in particular,
they've been redlined out of neighborhoods
where they've seen a lot of housing appreciation.
If you look at the history of different kinds
of predatory lending in the U.S.,
whether it's things like payday loans,
or of things like subprime mortgages,
it's often communities of color that are
most intensively targeted with those products.
So you sort of roll all these things together,
and it's one if the reasons why
we see it's really challenging for people of color.
- I didn't come from anyone who ever thought
about starting a business, so I didn't have a blueprint
to go by.
And that's why I'm really excited for the class.
- Do you have a website yet?
- [Woman] No.
- Okay.
- Welcome everybody to our social media marketing
bootcamp today.
So excited to have all of you here.
I'm Cynthia Terry with Communities Unlimited.
I'm the the director of our entrepreneurship program,
and our goal is for you to be successful.
- In the U.S. we have these entities called community
development financial institutions,
and they're particularly targeting people
who aren't served by traditional lending.
- Banks don't look at people in terms of their character.
They look for assets, and wealth,
and all of those things.
- [Cynthia] What's different about
what Communities Unlimited does
for small businesses is the combination
of the small business lending,
as well as the business and management skills training
that we provide.
- Communities Unlimited helped me
from start to finish to get my product to the shelf.
I'm telling you, everybody told me no.
The banks, lenders, everybody told me no.
Communities Unlimited gave me my first yes.
(laughing)
- One of the reasons we decided to partner
with GoDaddy was so we could offer this training
to help more businesses get their websites built
to be exposed to more customers than they are
without the internet.
(piano music)
- What a lot of people don't understand is
sometimes your website is your hardest working employee.
- I actually grew up as a child
of a self-employed mother.
When I think about the opportunities now,
one of the biggest changes to affect business owners
I think is the internet.
- What is the difference for your business
between the Instagram to Facebook?
What is this? - Instagram.
- My name is Consuelo Rosales and I have a cleaning company.
A few of the struggles that I have,
at this time it's language and reach more customers.
I want to show my boys that we can have
a different kind of life.
(piano music)
I would like to leave something for my grandchildren.
I want them to not have to struggle like
I have had to struggle.
- Whites hold 13 times more wealth than a black family.
But when we compare average wealth of a black business owner
against a white business owner,
it goes from 13 times more wealth
to only three times more wealth.
I mean, just think what that does and what that says.
By giving people an opportunity to access credit,
access capital, access markets,
you're able to shrink the racial wealth gap
that allows people to create wealth
in their own homes, in their families.
- What a small business owner means to me is autonomy,
being able to make your own way.
♪ There's no stoppin' me ♪
- For all you all that I met, like,
I'm so grateful to be here.
Like, seriously, you all have inspired me
in so many ways, and as a fellow entrepreneur,
I know the struggle, so I just wanna say,
like, keep on goin'.
They're really empowering themselves to step
into something new for their families
and for their future.
(laughing)
It is their drive, it is who they are
that is so inspiring and so contagious.
And it makes me believe that there is hope.
We're seeing folks from house cleaners
to boutique owners using entrepreneurship
as a way out into something new.
To me, Made in America is bravery.
It's courage.
It's joy.
It's passion.
It's possibility.
It's empowerment.
I'm really excited to dive into some
of the stories that we've heard right here in Memphis.
- I'm optimistic that at some point
in this country we'll get things right.
We'll be able to create economic opportunities for all.
- You can be a successful business owner,
entrepreneur, and live the same life,
maybe a better life than some of the images
that we see on TV.
Something has to change the culture.
- I'm really excited to grow my business.
Really, really. (laughing)
- If I can do it.
Oh my goodness, so can you.
(lively music)
- Stay with me as I cross America sharing the stories
of communities who don't have the same access
that others do.
And I'm gonna do my best to support them
in every way I can, and I know I'm gonna learn a ton
along the way too.
My first stop in Memphis will be hanging
with new mom and fashion boutique owner, Sequoia.
She's shaking up her business model
and taking her fashion boutique mobile.
I hope you join me.