ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd (2018)

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Okay, so on to the show. And first of all, I just want to wish everybody a happy holiday season and thank you for being such incredible supporters of the show this year. Our team is taking a much needed Break, but this week we wanted to revisit the story of Janice Bryant Howroyd. And as you'll hear, there are a lot of reasons why her story. Is kind of the perfect way to end the year. This episode first ran about two years ago, and I think you will love it.

I'll tell you candidly, and I'm not proud of it, there were times when I would gift my intelligence to other members of my team and have them go in and make a presentation or them make the pitch so that the client wouldn't have to interact directly with me as an African American or as a female. Because you thought They wouldn't want to. In some instances I thought it, in other instances I knew it.

From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. Guy Raz and on the show today How a temporary gig as a secretary inspired Janice Bryant Howrow to build an employment agency that turned into an empire. And made Janice the first African American woman in history.

own a billion dollar business. So, hiring employees is one of the hardest things about running a business. If you've listened to this show long enough, you've heard founders talk about how. When their company started to scale, hiring enough good people consumed so much of their time. Because Hiring requires patience and research and, yes, luck. Even the best applicants sometimes flail after they start.

And this was an insight that Janice Bryant Howroyd came across early in her career after working as a secretary for her brother in law. It was the late 1970s and her brother in law, Tom Noonan, needed an assistant for his growing role at Billboard Magazine in Hollywood. Janice noticed that lots of other executives in Hollywood needed clerical help too, and they needed it fast. They just Didn't have the time to find the right people. So with all of her money, which was$1,500, Janice rented a small space in front of a rug shop in Beverly Hills, and she started an employment agency.

At the time, Janice was a young African American woman starting out in an industry dominated by older white men. Now today Her company, Act One Group, does an estimated billion dollars a year in sales. Act One handles hiring and recruiting for all kinds of industries, and it also provides a lot of back-end services like employee screening and payroll. But when it began, it was just one office.

One phone? And Janice. She opened that first office in a city she barely knew when she first arrived to LA in her mid-20s. Janice had spent most of her life in a very different place from Hollywood. She grew up in the nineteen fifties and sixties in a big family in the small town of Tarborough, North Carolina.

I grew up on the other side of the tracks, and that's literally the case because we did have a train that ran through our town. We were uh a town that was incorporated in the seventeen hundreds, so a train track in the middle of the town did indicate some level of prosperity. Now we were segregated, make no make no mistake about that, but we had that southern etiquette that went along with it. So there was a politeness that occurred amongst people, but we also were very aware of the injustices. How many how many brothers and sisters did you have growing up? Five brothers, five sisters, all type A's. So eleven kids in your house.

Yeah, you say that like that sounds so much to you. Yeah, it does. It sounds like a lot of kids. It sounds like a a chaotic house. Oh my no, you don't know my mom and dad if you thought there was chaos going on in the Bryant household. As a matter of fact, we had a system where uh the older uh siblings would take care of the younger ones and when I say take care, I mean they were responsible that we did chores appropriately, we had personal grooming taken care of, they checked us for an helped us with and that homework was done. And so Sandy got me. She was firstborn, I was fourthborn. And when she went all the way off to Greensboro, North Carolina, which by drive time is about um four hours. It felt like the end of the world had happened for me. I it everything just felt so empty to me. Yet there were still twelve people left in the house every day if we had no guests come over.

Did your parents I mean, was there ever a sense that You know, that they were struggling, or did it always feel like you had everything you needed as a kid? Guy, I remember sitting in a class and I had what Oprah later coined aha moment and I remember sitting in class and thinking, Wow. We are poor.

had no concept of poverty growing up. None at all. We always had enough for us and some to share. And that meant clothing, that meant Food and that also meant emotional support. When you were um when you were little, did you Would you dream about

What you would be when you grew up or Did you already have big ambitions as a kid or or were they kind of like, Yeah, you know, I'll I'll see what happens. Now see. Print media was really the thing that taught me so much. And books print.

period. My mom bought encyclopedias and then she paid them off over time. She also had periodicals that came to our house. There was a magazine called Scipia. There was Ebony was popular, Jet magazine was popular back then. And so I knew a lot about the world and I knew a lot about what black people were doing. And so I had role models who uh fulfilled thoughts about what I might do when I grew up. Um, but as a very young child I remember admiring my mom so much, which I continue to do to this day. She even then I could sense, even though I couldn't put label to it, was quite an efficient person and she ran our home like a business. And what did your dad do? My dad was a foreman. He was a foreman in a die factory. You know, we're a textile community in North Carolina. And Dad was very integrated in our lives. He made sure that we had our Thursday family meetings, Thursday was payday, and we all had to gather around and we discussed what we'd done, what we would be doing.

Uh, in business we say we discussed the gaps and we brought forward the solutions and my family dad just said, Let's see where we are and where we're going, kids. That was always his open comment to us. Janice, when you were when you were a a girl, when you were a kid Did you see entrepreneurs around you either in your community or or in your family? Retrospectively I saw them growing up. I did not know that's what I was looking at. I remember Grandma Dora walking around Tarbora in high heel shoes coming over to our house and they ran a barbecue shop and they had a home that had a beautiful dining room in it, but their dining room was to serve their customers. Oh, they ran it out of their home?

Yeah, and white people would come over to eat. theater, uh, which was a big deal that they were coming over to have dinner there, lunch theater. But I didn't look at that as entrepreneurship back then. That's just what grandma did, you know? I also saw her run um she fed people to go bags. where they would come and buy their lunches or dinners at the back and she would charge based on who was working and who was out of work. And she had that sense of justice in her mind about how to run her business and Um, I think it paid off because she did quite well.

So so Jas, I read that um when you were in high school Your mom and dad decided to send you to a an all white high school. You were gonna be the first African American student. At that school.

What do you remember about About your first day going in there. Well Mom and dad. didn't send me we decided as a family that that would happen. Our community wanted to have our best and brightest go to the white school to lessen any fear around whether or not the school would uh dilapidate in any way by our uh attending it.

And I was one of the first and And I remember my first day going into my English class and I thought oh English has always been one of my better subjects and I'm gonna fail because I couldn't understand my English teacher. She had a twang that sounded so Different to me from my side of Tarboro. Mind you, we're talking about a distance that I could walk to school from my home. Wow. Uh

But she sounded so different, the communities were truly divided in that way. Yeah. And We had a teacher who stood up on the desk that day, the first day I went into his history class, and explained so eloquently if you can even see the paradox of that, how blacks are so suited to slavery.

Well. I remember chewing so hard. saying, God, please don't let me cry. If you just let me get out of here without crying, I'll never come back. That's how intimidated, how fearful and how foreign I felt. in a US history class.

Did you wanna stop going to that school? I mean I could imagine being sixteen year old fifteen, sixteen year old kid and and feeling that level of hostility and then hearing a teacher. Say that. Somebody with power.

Just To say that. I absolutely did want to stop going and I told my dad I didn't want to go back and dad gave me three options. He said you can Come back here and compete against Other

black kids who are gonna need scholarships to go to school. He could go up and he could floor the teacher. And uh Seek retaliation. Or I could go back and I could understand and this is something that if you say to many black people, they will finish this sentence for you. It's not what they call you. It's what you answer to. And that was my first big lesson from dad.

that I should not listen to what they call me. I could only be what I answer to in life. Hm. So you Uh you graduated high school and then you went off uh you went off to college, uh to North Carolina AT

Um, what do you what do you remember about that time? I loved that campus and that's where my older siblings had gone. It s it was such a wonderful time to be at North Carolina A and T when I graduated. Everybody was full of promise and ideas about what we could do. So much of my adult framing happened on that campus and by the time I started my own business, I was able to reach back on what I had learned in my home, which is where I gained most of my business education, was in my home, and the ability to to meet new people and not as strangers that I learned at A and T. That was so wonderful.

Yeah. And what did you do when you graduated? Yeah. First I worked in the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC

I worked here for about a year and a half and I went home to visit Mom and That's the same. And I remember

One morning. My mom and dad. When we were kids, early morning was always their time. I told you dad left for work really early in the mornings and their date time was ear morning. And they dated in the kitchen in the little bay window where she has the table there to this day. And I got up to walk through the hall. And I saw them kissing and hugging just just like teenagers. And I thought, ooh. You know, I'm an adult by then, right?

That was the last time my mom saw my dad alive. Um And I Many

Have thought. If you have to say goodbye. What a wonderful way for her to know. that the last time he saw her alive, he held her and loved her so richly, and she him. Did you have a heart attack?

My dad had taken two young men out. on the waters in North Carolina, shrimp boat fishing. They want a shrimp boat. And a storm came up. Mm.

Um My dad was taken in the storm. Wow. And so I remember my mom took to her beat for a couple of weeks and I have booked a

And I remember um I told my mom, I'll stay here with you, Mom. and help you. My mom had been married since she was a teenager. She'd never had any other boyfriend and

I knew there would be some heavy adjustment for her. And She said, um no I'm gonna have to learn to live on my own. I better do it now. And then um

She said the last thing dad won't want. is for me to stop you living your dream.'Cause we certainly um We certainly have lived hours. Well.

So you you leave North Carolina I mean what a What a what a moment. Um in your life, in your mom's life, in your family's life.

I mean this is like Late seventies. Yeah. And so you come to LA to visit your sister and it was it was supposed to be just a quick visit to to h to see her a couple of days or a weeks or something like that? Had a couple of weeks planned. It was gonna be a good visit. Two weeks back then was a long time. Still is.

Yeah. Just a kid. I mean you were in your mid twenties, right? Or early twenties at that point. I was hot and popping. Ha ha ha. Although let me tell you, when I got to uh LA, I didn't think so on the East Coast. I thought I was all of that. When I got to LA and I saw all these women who worked without pantyhose on. They carry purses with somebody else's name on it. Louis Vuitton. And um I was calling it Louis Vuitton. And um

They were all all all the black people, all the black women I saw were were were like fabulous, gorgeous women and I felt like this little Never headed colored girl coming out of North Carolina amongst all these fabulous people. No, I didn't feel all hot and popping then. What was your first impression of of LA at that time? And this is like The late seventies it was palm trees.

Gorgeous, gorgeous palm trees and you know, you go up and drive all the way up and look out over the city, and it was just so beautiful, so beautiful. LA was wide open. It it truly was a fairy tale. tail kind of existence for me and I want it in on it. You want it to stay. I I didn't at first. I needed to sustain my stay financially because my sister kept saying stay. I'm the first family member she's got out here from home. So Sandy and and her husband Tommy uh he he worked at at At Billboard Magazine, is that right?

He did. He had worked at Motown for years and uh helped move Motown out to LA and then he went to Billboard. You know, his career had been in the music industry. I remember seeing his name scroll the year he died at the Grammy's and Tommy invented what they call the Hot One Hundreds chart. Oh the billboard hot one hundred, yeah. Yes. To this day I keep meeting people who just have such great memories of him, and certainly I do. He was an incredible incredible, incredible first generation Irishman. So you

You go out to LA to see your sister and her husband, your brother in law, Tommy says Hey, you know, I I ha I may have some temp work for you at at at Billboard and and and that's what you did? You kinda went to his office and Work kinda worked for him. Yeah, she and Tommy were going to a Nimic conference in Italy and um When he came back I had reorganized things, put things in uh form as I saw they should be, and he thought I had worked magic. I thought I did what I was supposed to do and he said, You know, you don't uh you you you really are good, Janice. You should not go back without

proving you can make it on your own. And he was the one who seeded the idea that I should hang my own shingle. You were looking for work. Essentially says, Hey Janice, why don't you just open up a business and uh you've got your job. You've got your own job. He absolutely did. It was that simple for him. He later told me he saw so much enterprise, entrepreneurship in me that I wasn't seeing in myself.

So what was the business idea that I actually started as a full time agency. W meaning what? Uh we were finding I I found people full time jobs. You were like a headhunter, sort of. Yeah.

At the admin level. So what once you decided that you were gonna start this company, this agency to help place people in in jobs. Uh what was your first move? Wha I mean where where did you get an office? How did you how did you start it? I made a deal with a guy who owned a rug shop and I set up office in front of front of the rug shop. It was the rush. It was very, very beautiful. In Beverly Hills. In Beverly Hills. Yeah. Location, location, location. You wanted a Beverly Hills address to say I'm I had a friend who hooked me up with someone who had a Beverly Hills location. I was not looking at real estate that way, but it worked out perfectly. The stars were aligned for me. And what did you call it? What'd you call the company?

Act one. As in act one, like when you're in a movie. That kind of act one? You know, because it's located here in uh Los Angeles uh area, uh many people thought that, but for me it was more around the biblical sense, the book of Acts. Yeah. Uhhuh. So you get get this off of space and what you put in a desk and a phone and And then you just it was there. Didn't have to, it was there. And it worked out very well for me, but I'll tell you something, when I did get my own office th I remember the first day

I got a Fax machine. Do you know who Judy Jetson is? Sure, of course. Yeah. Thought I was Judy Jetson. Technology hit hard for me. Yes, that was incredible for me. And it also taught me the power of technology. And I think that's why over the years my company has evolved more around how we build human friendly technology. than anything else. When you started act one

Did you need a lot of A lot of start up money to get it going. Yeah. I borrowed money from my mom and I had saved nine hundred and borrowed six hundred from her. But so you had fifteen hundred dollars to start this business. Yeah.

And that was gonna get you the office, uh a lease on the office. And I guess a phone. But he here's what I'm I'm trying to understand. You're so young and You just You essentially just got there. So

How did you even start? How did you even find people To To recruit to say, Hey, I you know, you're looking for work, I can help you. Well, finding people to place was not an issue during that time. Uh finding the jobs was. And the core of our business remains to date as it was when I was one desk. And thus understanding the power of the interview. Understand I mean you Talked with me for a few minutes now. You know a lot about me and you know a lot of resources to go to gain more information. And that's the way the interview worked as well. So the power of that interview enabled me to make sure that I understood the individual who was looking for work. I knew where they'd already worked, I knew if they were already employed that once they

Left, there was gonna be an opening there, and because of the rich network that I was able to achieve in the social side of how I lived with my brother and sister, I knew people who were looking for assistance, people who were looking for people to hire, and built it on that. In the early days, I call it the womb. Word of mouth, baby. I got I got most of my leads toward opportunities to fill positions and most of the leads toward applicants by word of mouth. So your business model was You'd help companies fill these jobs.

mostly clerical jobs and they would pay you a fee and how were you able to guarantee that the person you were offering was gonna work out. Oh my goodness, there were so many different guarantees that were offered in our industry back then. I haven't thought about this for years, but that's the risk you take on making sure that you're making a good placement. And that's why I say we had to focus on the applicant because you you offered people money back if they didn't work out. then you know you had you you had a reduction in that fee you got and you got you had to pay that money back if they didn't last. So nobody wanted to do that. Were you

Were you profitable pretty quickly, or did it take some time? Um Actually Thinking back on it? Hitting profitability in a year

Things Pretty good, but living through it it didn't. But remember I was in a very low overhead business.

And I was in a business that had high transaction. I was as good as my effort allowed me to be. Yeah. In those early days as you you know, as you start to grow, um Things were things were like kind of Well

I met my husband at an industry conference, uh, Bernie, and I saw this guy and he was really handsome to me. He had this presence about himself, and he also spoke with this English accent. But he liked me a lot more than I did him. I noticed him. I can't say I didn't notice him, but he liked me a lot more than I liked him. And he He chased me for a bit and um I found out that he was the founder of Apple One. And Apple One was a temporary employment agency? Apple one was Apple One was a really respected temporary employ uh and full time placement agency, uh doing business in California. So you married essentially your competitor. How did you keep Like work and personal life separate.

I think it would be the same as if we had been physicians or scientists we are going to share a love of the industry and talk about it and we're still competent, capable people building a business. And so when was it clear to you that This wasn't just gonna become sustainable, but this could actually become really big business. Was it was it w within a year? Was it within two years?

Was it After that? No, no, no. I would say it was about um Oh, I wanna say six or seven years in, and I remember a lady named Gwen Moore. Gwen Moore was an elected official congresswoman. out of

California here. And she had been very active in championing and I believe she was one of the original authors of legislation that require public utility companies in California to have diversity spend. because she said your rate payers are diverse, so you should be doing business with them. And she contacted me.

And she said, I want to come see you. And she met with me and she told me that I had an obligation to get certified. To to do what? as a minority woman owned company. And I didn't want to do that. I was doing very well, thank you. And she said, No, it's not about you doing better. Although you will.

She said it's about you creating the opportunity for others who won't get a shot. She said, we need some strong businesses that are run by women and run by minorities to certify and go in and do business as such to open the door for others. And even when she was arguing the point as eloquent as clear as she is, I wasn't getting the point because Uh initially I thought that certification was a strip search. I needed to open up my business to total exposure to someone to in return have them come back and say, yes, you are a minority, yes, you are a woman, and yes, you are running this business. And it just did not align with how I felt that I wanted to uh be measured.

When we come back in just a moment. Why Janice wound up changing her mind about that, and how she turned Act One Into a billion dollar business. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. From NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's 1992, and Janice Bryant Howroyd's LA-based employment agency, Act 1, is doing pretty well.

And after some back and forth, she eventually decides to get certified as a woman and minority owned enterprise. Becoming certified opened up many new client opportunities for me because now companies could look at me as look at my business as an opportunity to meet numbers and quotas that they had around uh inclusion, diversity and inclusion. And if it became a choice between me and another company who was not certified, I was gonna get that opportunity. I'd never known that existed before I got certified. And so That's when I started to expand into contract business. Before then, I was doing business on handshakes or on service agreements. But once I started to go after different types of business, I needed to do it in contracts and had to learn a lot about the process. And one of the failures I've seen occur in my own business as in others is that we create

great relationships with people in companies and definitely we should do that. But people are moving all of the time. And the agreement you have with a person if may not align with the agreement you have in that contract. And when that person is gone, that contract is still standing. And so you've got to understand the difference between that. And that was one of the biggest lessons I had to learn once I started to expand my business from focusing on one on one transactions into contract. I mean I just keep thinking, I mean it seems like you were growing pretty fast, so your head must have been spinning. Well, let me tell you two things about that. One, the big thing for me was not so much the exponential growth as it was the adoption of doing the

Tent work. and bringing temp into the fold. Temp work. you're paying people long before the client pays you. And so there's another element of risk in there. You're also the employer of that worker. And so you assume the employer risk. So you've got two dynamic new and very strong differences uh in place here. And you're competing against larger entities who are going in and able because of their scale to offer a much better pricing and you are For for me and many companies like me, woman owned, you were the minority company or you were the diverse company, so you were getting one tenth of that business against one larger vendor, and I still had to meet the same pricing as the larger company to do that efficiently, to do that sustainably.

I needed to integrate technology in a different way and I didn't find any over the shelf technology. So that's when I started to hire people and we built our own technology solutions. And I guess we should just mention here, Janice, that um that some of the solutions that you came up with internally, they these actually became A huge part of your business. Yeah. So our technology suite is called Acceleration, and it really was about that detailed reporting we were able to give to clients that they weren't getting anywhere else. And so I had a client up north who had a very bad experience with a publicly held company call me on a Friday morning and ask if I would come up. So I actually ran over to the airport with my brother, another employee, and the three of us went up north at Northern California to the client. And we found out that they had an issue where this publicly held company was not negotiating well with them and had walked out and they had several hundred temps who had to be paid. And we had to get all of that work together

transition those people and on Monday morning all of the work was done, everyone was paid and they had reports on their desk. Wow. I got a call from the lady who was head of HR and said, My goodness, Janice, how were you able to do this? And I explained that we used for her what we use in our own company technologies that enable us to do that. And she said, We've been working with this company for twelve years and they've never been able to give us a detail of reporting that you have here. And they started to want, um conversations around how to buy my technology. And my brother Carlton said, Janice Let's pause. Don't sell them the technology, sell them the service.

Yeah. I said, Carlton, what are you he said, No Don't sell your technology to them. Sell them the service. And we went up and had a different conversation with them and they became our first acceleration customer. And I guess I sh I should mention here, Janice, that that you mentioned your brother, several members of your family actually work for for the company for Act One.

Absolutely. My sister Sandy was my first employee. And since then I went on to hire seven other siblings into my business. And they have just been incredible for all of those emotional and those uh value support systems that you need in place as you're growing a business up. Everyone needs that. I needed that, and I had that in siblings. Now, one of the things that I insisted from my family members before they could come into my company is that they either had to work for three years in a larger company somewhere else, or have three promotions before they could come to work for me. I wanted to make sure that they brought into my business some learning, not just the abilities to sustain for three years, but the ability to have learned and have grown within someone else's organization and then bring that value into mine. I I guess at at a certain point, this is like two thousand seven, two thousand eight

Your business is w worth well over half a billion dollars by that point. And you decide to merge. With Bernard's business with your husband's business. Tell me why why did that happen? Did that just was it just a sort of the natural point to kind of bring your businesses together?

When Bernie and I were leaving a conference in San Diego. We decided to take the scenic route. Back to LA.

And we were having a discussion about our children. And I remember My brother has said to me, Carlton. has said.

You know, Janish, you and Bernie have something that nobody else in this industry has. And I asked him what he meant. He said well you guys work from completely different sets of strengths oftentimes. And if you were to combine that, that could be dynamic in the industry. Mm-hmm. And I thought that was nice and I mentioned it to Bernie.

And Bernie said, That makes sense. I said, But it's not enough to to to merge our companies and we talked more and then I said You know Bernie. I think the thing that would make it interesting for me. Is that our son not have to decide which one of us he wants to work for. Mm.

Because by then our son was looking at our industry as a future for himself. And he had worked in my company, he had worked in his dad's company as a kid, and I said, Bernie, I don't think he should have to make a choice. And it is a lot better secession planning. for us to go ahead and do this now. Let's not have him have to do it later. And that was the decision, that was the thoug around how we would blend the companies.

you know, looking back as as your company grew, I mean for for a long time you were A minority within a minority. You you're a small company with Big competitors, um You were woman of color in an industry that was I'm assuming dominated by by white men, um

Did you run into circumstances, a lot of circumstances where you You were judged because of who you are or Or or where things were made Much harder because of who you are. Very often, very often um I I I ran into that. I'll tell you candidly, and I'm not proud of it, there were times when I would gift my intelligence to

other members of my team and have them go in and make a presentation or them make the pitch so that the client wouldn't have to in interact directly with me as an African American or as a female. Hm if they saw An African American woman making the pitch. They They wouldn't want to work with you?

I think the questioning and the scrutiny would be different. There would be more question of can we then how will we? Right. Whereas if I sent someone different on my team in, the questions around how are we gonna do this happened a lot quicker in the conversation. And there are women who will tell you today that's still the case. How how have you sort of grown as a leader? over that time. I mean, were there things that you did

earlier on that were mistakes that you learned from and you thought well Th you know, that that was not the way to go. Certainly I've made mistakes. Uh the bigger of my mistakes were the mistakes I made where I have held myself back. because of things that were uh latent from my childhood and sometimes very active, you know, in businesses around the isms, whether that be racism or sexism or whatever. But those have been where I think my bigger errors have been made. When you you say when you held yourself back by

For example by not taking those meetings or by sending somebody else in your What other ways to did you hold yourself back? Um Holding myself back from uh

taking risks around expanding or investments that weren't right in the core of what I'm doing. But I always I always saw myself as, you know, driving in my lane and understanding where my lane was. Yeah. I mean I mean it sounds like even though you have had incredible success, you By nature you're not a sort of a kamikaze risk taker.

Well, I'm not gonna be the bull in the China shop, if that's what you're saying. I'm not gonna r rus through and, you know, break things on the way toward a higher goal. Uh Perhaps the one decision I would change if uh in my career would be that I would forgive myself for being smart and being female a lot sooner. Everything else I think has been integrated toward the good of a solid business that has a strong future.

Today, act one Is Either the largest or or certainly one of the largest privately held women and minority owned workforce management companies in the US. Your you and your family own this company, I believe, a hundred percent outright. This is a billion dollar business. I mean that's

That's amazing. I mean It's I mean, just think about that for a moment. You came to LA for a two or three week trip And built a

billion dollar business. It's a blessing. This is what we built. This is what All of the people who've really believed in me and trusted in me have built. And in our company we teach that there are five things you can't teach people.

You can't teach people experience. Mm you can't teach people Common sense. You can't teach people confidence. You cannot teach people

anything if they don't want to learn it and you can't teach them anything if they know it all. And I think when I look at Where you see the amazement in building a billion dollar uh enterprise. I think it's because those things that you can't teach. I've learned.

Hm. How much of All that you've achieved do you The hard work you put in and

your determination and your skill and and how much Of luck. I don't think luck had anything to do with it. I do believe that I've been blessed.

And I have received those blessings by honoring them with hard work. All of the challenges. Oh All of the People.

All of the clients and applicants. My life has been a colidoscope. Gopic opportunity. I I keep going back to to that moment where you're Your mom.

in mourning told you to leave, told you to go. She did. that your dad would want you to to pursue whatever it was that you were gonna pursue. And you didn't

Know what that was gonna be. Right. Can you imagine what your dad Would make of this? Like His daughter

Running the largest Women and minority owned. Business. I mean W what do you think he would

he would say or or or think. I absolutely can't imagine what dad would say or what dad would think. My dad is the one who told us it was our attitude, not our aptitude. My dad was the one who told us education is freedom. My dad was the one who taught us that we wake up on purpose, you know? And and and and I I think about him so often and you can't not think about him when you're with mom. I was um voted princess in high school, and I remember asking for a new gown to wear on a float, and Dad said, Oh, we can't afford it. We work so hard for you guys and I remember my mom putting her hand on my dad's hand and said, No, Daddy They called each other Mommy and Daddy. She said, No, Daddy Don't tell Janice we work hard for our kids. We work hard because of the decisions we made.

Yeah. And I've kept that in my mind as I built my business and I've made a point never to tell my children, I don't work hard to give them what they want. I work hard because of the decision I've made. You know, and for me It's a joy. It's a joy to do what I do.

That's Janice Bryant Howroyd, founder and CEO of Act One Group. And unfortunately, we've got a sad update to this story. Earlier this year, Janice's husband, Bernard, passed away. He'd been suffering from Alzheimer's for several years. And in an interview after his passing, Janice said, quote,

I would never say Bernie was the most perfect creature. but he was the most perfect husband and He loved me well. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org.

And if you want to follow us on Twitter, we're at How I Built This or at GuyRoz. And on Instagram, it's at guy.ros. Please also remember to visit donate.npr.org slash built. give directly to a local NPR member station. This episode was produced by James Delhussey with music composed by Raptine Arablui.

Thanks also to Farrah Safari, Liz Metzger, Dereth Gales, Julia Carney, JC Howard, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Roz, and you've been listening. This is NPR.

Yeah.

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