Black Women: The Builders Behind Adenah Bayoh, Arlan Hamilton, Beatrice Dixon and Cathy Hughes

Adenah Bayoh

Founder and CEO, Adenah Bayoh and Companies — Newark, NJ

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Adenah Bayoh's childhood was interrupted by war: after rebels entered her Liberian village, she escaped with her grandmother, spent time in a refugee camp in Sierra Leone, and arrived in the United States at thirteen with no possessions.

She put herself through Fairleigh Dickinson University, worked at McDonald's and then in banking — where, as she tells it, she could see the limits placed on a Black woman's rise — and began buying homes as investments.

Denied bank loans again and again for her restaurant dream, she was finally financed after a lender overheard her pitch, and at twenty-seven she became one of the youngest IHOP franchisees in the country; her Irvington location became one of the Northeast's top performers.

Today she leads Adenah Bayoh and Companies, with a real estate development portfolio reported at $220 million and a family of restaurants including IHOP franchises and her own farm-to-table concept, Cornbread.

"For me, passion is a key ingredient for success in business,"

Bayoh develops where she lives, and her proudest firsts are about access: in 2023 she became the first Black woman in New Jersey to secure a 9% low-income housing tax credit from the NJHMFA, for Southside View, a 100% affordable forty-unit community in Newark's South Ward, and she has redeveloped the former Irvington General Hospital site into housing and retail.

In 2025 New Jersey Future gave her its Smart Growth Leadership Award, honoring development that creates opportunity while strengthening communities.

Black Enterprise — “Meet the New Jersey Woman Who Owns Over $200 Million in Real Estate and Several IHOP Franchises”
New Jersey Future — “Adenah Bayoh - New Jersey” (2025 Smart Growth Awards)
Rutgers Law School CLiME — “Adenah Bayoh”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Vivian Kaye  ·  Arlan Hamilton

Arlan Hamilton

Founder and Managing Partner, Backstage Capital — Los Angeles, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · X

In 2015 Arlan Hamilton was homeless, sleeping on the floor of San Francisco International Airport and couch-surfing, while she taught herself venture capital from library books, YouTube videos and hundreds of unanswered emails.

She had no college degree, no finance background and no network — what she had was outrage at how little venture funding reached women, people of color and LGBTQ founders, and a determination to fix it herself. That year she launched Backstage Capital in Los Angeles, a seed-stage fund built specifically for founders she calls underestimated rather than underrepresented.

The rejections kept coming, but so did the deals: Backstage went on to invest in well over a hundred startups, and Hamilton became the first Black, queer woman to build a venture capital firm of her own — landing on the cover of Fast Company and turning her own story into the bestselling book It's About Damn Time.

"I couldn’t stomach the idea of women having to sit around and just not get asked to the party and not get asked to be part of the next 20 to 50 years. It just didn’t make any sense to me,"

Hamilton's impact now reaches far beyond her own portfolio. Backstage Capital has deployed roughly $20 million into nearly 200 startups led by women, people of color and LGBTQ founders, and a dozen other funds dedicated to overlooked founders have launched in her wake.

Through her books It's About Damn Time and Your First Million, her speaking and her crowdfunding efforts to open venture investing to everyday people, she keeps widening the door she once had to force open herself.

Money — “Arlan Hamilton: How She Started Backstage Capital”
Stanford Technology Ventures Program — “Underestimated” (podcast)
People of Color in Tech — “Backstage Capital Reaches its 6th Year - We look at Arlan Hamilton's Impact”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Adenah Bayoh  ·  Arnita Johnson-Hall

Arnita Johnson-Hall

Founder & CEO, AMB Credit Consultants — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website · Instagram

Arnita Johnson-Hall's comeback started at rock bottom. A single mother in Dallas earning $12 an hour, she was living below the poverty line on Section 8 housing assistance after maxing out 25 credit cards and watching a credit score that began at 700 fall below 400.

When a $60,000-a-year job offer was withdrawn after a credit check, she decided to teach herself how credit actually works, spending hours studying in the public library.

She launched AMB Credit Consultants as a side hustle, and after surviving a domestic violence incident that nearly took her life and landing in roach-infested, high-crime government housing, she vowed to become financially independent for her daughter's sake.

The business that once brought in only $12,000 over five years hit six figures in 2013 and later generated $1.4 million in gross revenue in a single year reported by CNBC.

"This wake-up call led me to study the credit system and launch AMB Credit Consultants, a side hustle that would later become a financial education enterprise. Last year, it brought in $1.4 million in gross revenue."

Johnson-Hall has built her brand on turning her own testimony into teaching.

Through AMB Credit Consultants and her Luxurious Credit platform, she educates women on credit repair, budgeting and financial literacy, drawing openly on her own hardest chapters — including taking on more than $80,000 in credit card debt for holistic treatment after a breast cancer diagnosis, and paying off over $60,000 of it by 2021.

Her message to clients is simple: she has lived the system at its worst, and she can show them the way out of it.

Black Enterprise — “How One Mom Went From Government Housing to Millionaire Status”
AfroTech — “This Woman Went From Public Assistance To Millionaire Status Off A Side Hustle — Here's How She Did It”
xoNecole — “How Arnita Johnson Built a Million-Dollar Consulting Empire”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Arlan Hamilton  ·  Ashley Thomas

Ashley Thomas

Founder, Supreme Drivers Recruiting — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website · Instagram

Ashley Thomas will tell you plainly where she started, because that is the point of her story. Left by her mother on her great-grandmother's doorstep, she was raised by that sharecropper's daughter, who kept her in the Word and, in Ashley's words, invested in her.

She dropped out of school in ninth grade and, at 13, fell into the hands of a pimp and into street life — stripping, exploitation and survival. Believing God had another purpose for her, she walked away and rechannelled that same hustle into legitimate work.

After a friend backed out of a trucking deal and the truck she and her grandmother bought was stolen, she quit her job, recovered it, learned recruiting and discerned drivers.

In 2017 she started the business that became Supreme Drivers Recruiting, described as the nation's first Black woman-owned transportation call centre for truck-driver recruiting — a million-dollar business built without owning trucks.

"My goal is to show them that God used transportation to save my life and that He can do it for them too."

Today Thomas uses that past as a bridge for other people. Her nonprofit, Divorcing The Game, helps current and former exotic dancers, drug dealers and others trapped in street life transition into professional work in trucking, and her book of the same name is offered as a blueprint for getting out.

Her call centre gives agents an entry-level platform reported to gross $5,000 to $12,000 a month while placing drivers in top-paying jobs, with call centres listed in Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, Midland and Arlington. She also speaks out about breaking the stigma around human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

NNPA — “Black Woman Entrepreneur, From the Stripper Pole to Owning a Million Dollar Trucking Business”
Entrepreneur (Black Enterprise) — “Black Woman Entrepreneur, From the Stripper Pole to Owning a Million Dollar Trucking Business”
Black Authors Matter / Medium — “Ashley Thomas Reigns Supreme as the Leading Truck Driver Recruiting Business in The South”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Arnita Johnson-Hall  ·  Ashley Williams-Booker

Ashley Williams-Booker

Founder, Complete Logistics Service — Houston, TX

Official links: Website

Ashley Williams-Booker started out teaching geometry in Houston, with a business administration degree from Texas Southern University. A friend introduced her to trucking, and when she first launched in 2014 she made ten times her teacher earnings.

But the model underneath those earnings was broken: working with box trucks meant she could only take partial loads — $300 or $400 from a load that paid $1,500 in a full 53-foot trailer. Frustrated, she put the business on hold for an entire year.

She came back in 2018, bought two semi-trucks, turned a $50,000 profit, and rebuilt Complete Logistics Service as an asset-based intermodal drayage company, mastering the ports and railroads that move everything from tissue paper to Amazon orders.

"I am not different from my next-door neighbor or from anybody that I’m approached by. I’m just some regular person. I just took time out to invest in myself and invest in my family and you shouldn’t be afraid to do that either."

Today Booker says her company is worth $3.5 million, transports more than 2,500 containers a year, and she has purchased a 10-acre lot in what she calls the mecca of trucking in Houston, adding a warehouse and transloading.

Noticing that women made up less than five percent of her industry, she wrote the book Surviving Intermodal and launched the Surviving Intermodal Mentorship Academy to train others — especially women — to enter and succeed in intermodal drayage.

Black Enterprise — “If at First You Don't Succeed: Meet Former Teacher, Black Owner of $3.5M Intermodal Drayage Service”
SHEEN Magazine — “It's Not a Man's World Anymore: Ashley Williams-Booker is Making Big Boss Moves in a Male Dominated Industry”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Ashley Thomas  ·  Beatrice Dixon

Beatrice Dixon

Founder and CEO, The Honey Pot Company — Atlanta, GA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram

Beatrice Dixon knows what rock bottom feels like — in her own words, she has 'definitely been homeless,' hustling through odd jobs, poverty and racism while searching for relief from bacterial vaginosis that antibiotics could not cure. One night, she says, her late grandmother came to her in a dream and handed her a list of ingredients.

Dixon woke up, repeated the list until she had it memorized, went to work at Whole Foods, and made herself a wash — and within days her symptoms were gone.

From her Atlanta kitchen she built that wash into The Honey Pot Company, the first plant-derived feminine care brand carried in major U.S. retailers, landing at Target in 2017 and growing to millions of customers. In 2024 Compass Diversified acquired a majority stake at a $380 million enterprise value, and Dixon stayed on as CEO and chief innovation officer.

"I went to work at Whole Foods, and I made myself a wash, and it worked,"

Giving back is built into the brand Dixon built. The Honey Pot has partnered with #HappyPeriod to provide menstrual hygiene kits and products to people who are homeless, low-income or living in poverty — a cause personal to a founder who has been homeless herself — and has supported organizations including Days for Girls and AFRIpads.

Dixon has also become an author, publishing The Soul Instinct, and continues to lead the company she founded as CEO and chief innovation officer.

The Story Exchange — “The Honey Pot Seals $380 Million Deal”
Girl Talk HQ — “Entrepreneur Beatrice Dixon Shaking Up The World Of Feminine Hygiene By Launching The First Plant-Based Product Co.”
State of Hip Hop — “Bea Dixon Is Reclaiming Wellness With The Honey Pot Co.”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Ashley Williams-Booker  ·  Carolyn Thurston

Carolyn Thurston

Founder, President & CEO, Wisdom Senior Care — Durham, NC

Official links: Website

Carolyn Thurston grew up an Air Force brat, traveling from country to country and watching how other cultures cherished their elders — often sitting at a senior's feet, wanting to hear their life story.

She dreamed of owning a business from high school, believed a divine voice had already given it a name — Wisdom — and pursued her education against the odds, earning a sociology degree from North Carolina Central University and a nursing degree from Winston-Salem State University.

After working in hospital and in-home care, she was still held back by fear and by having no money. In 2005 she did the one thing she knew she could do: she completed a North Carolina home care application, paid $300, and Wisdom Senior Care was born.

"I was fearful, I didn’t know how, and I certainly didn’t have the money—all these excuses. In 2005, I did the one thing I knew I could do. I completed an application for home care in North Carolina, paid $300, and Wisdom Senior Care was born."

Thurston franchised the company — its first franchise opened in 2017 — and founded Wisdom Health Academy to train caregivers and Wisdom Business Owners as its franchise platform.

She has trained more than 250 senior care agency owners, serves on the Board of Directors of the International Franchise Association, and served as vice chair of its Black Franchise Leadership Council, using that platform to present business ownership as a path to generational wealth. Wisdom earned the IFA's Franchise of the Year recognition in 2018.

Black Enterprise — “A Chance Encounter Gives Rise to Wisdom Senior Care Franchise”
International Franchise Association — “Carolyn Thurston, CFE” (profile)
Franchise Dictionary Magazine — “Wisdom Senior Care: A Shared Vision of Caregiving”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Beatrice Dixon  ·  Cathy Hughes

Cathy Hughes

Founder and Chairwoman, Urban One — Washington, DC

Official links: Website

Cathy Hughes was a divorced single mother when she set out to own a radio station, and banks turned her down thirty-two times before one finally said yes. In 1980 she and her then-husband Dewey bought WOL-AM in Washington, D.C., and founded Radio One.

When hard times hit, she gave up her apartment and moved into the station with her young son Alfred, hosting the morning show herself for eleven years and building the audience around a simple conviction: information is power.

She had already proven her programming genius at Howard University's WHUR, where she became the station's general manager and created the Quiet Storm format.

Station by station, she grew that one struggling AM signal into Urban One, the largest Black-owned broadcast company in America, spanning radio, TV One, Reach Media and iOne Digital — and in 1999 she became the first Black woman to head a publicly traded media company.

"Information is power. It wasn’t just my slogan. I still believe that to this day."

More than four decades on, Hughes remains chairwoman of Urban One while her son Alfred Liggins III serves as CEO, a mother-son legacy almost unheard of in American media. Her lifelong mission has been advocacy for her listeners — news, public affairs and community voices that mainstream outlets ignored — and ensuring diverse creatives have a seat at the table.

Howard University named its school of communications for her, and in 2025 Urban One celebrated forty-five years since she founded Radio One.

The History Makers — “Cathy Hughes's Biography”
Syndeo Institute at The Cable Center — “Cathy Hughes Oral History”
Capitol Communicator — “Cathy Hughes celebrates 45 years since founding Radio One”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Carolyn Thurston  ·  Cheryl McKissack Daniel

Cheryl McKissack Daniel

President and CEO, McKissack & McKissack — New York, NY

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · X

Cheryl McKissack Daniel carries a baton that has been passed hand to hand for more than two centuries. Her family's building lineage traces to Moses McKissack, an enslaved brickmaker whose craft was passed down through generations until Moses McKissack III incorporated McKissack & McKissack in Nashville in 1905.

When her father was felled by illness, her mother Leatrice stepped in and ran the firm; in 2000 Cheryl bought it from her mother, moved it to New York, and took over as president and CEO — walking into rooms where, as a Black woman in construction, she had to prove again and again that her firm could deliver.

Deliver it has: under her leadership McKissack & McKissack, the oldest Black-owned design and construction firm in the United States, has overseen more than $50 billion in projects over the past decade, from the Oculus and Barclays Center to the $9.5 billion New Terminal One at JFK Airport.

"When you have the baton, you don’t want to drop it,"

In 2025 McKissack Daniel told her family's whole story in her debut book, The Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers, written with Nick Chiles — part memoir, part business document about how a firm survives slavery, segregation and systemic barriers across five generations.

She also chairs the New York Building Foundation, the charitable arm of the New York Building Congress, using her seat to push opportunity for minority- and women-owned firms across the building industry.

Marketplace — “Running the oldest Black-owned construction company in the U.S.”
AIA New York / Center for Architecture — “Book Talk - The Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks”
Columbia University CBIPS — “Cheryl McKissack Daniel”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Cathy Hughes  ·  Denise Woodard

Denise Woodard

Founder and CEO, Partake Foods — Jersey City, NJ

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram

Denise Woodard was a Coca-Cola executive when her daughter Vivienne's frightening food allergies changed her life's direction: store shelves offered almost nothing her little girl could safely eat, so Woodard started baking allergy-friendly cookies herself.

She built Partake Foods in the hours around her corporate job — up at 4:30 in the morning, printing delivery routes at her kitchen table, selling cookies out of her car across Brooklyn and Manhattan.

To keep going she drained her 401(k), maxed out her credit cards and sold her engagement ring, and she tracked every investor rejection on a spreadsheet: eighty-six no's.

The yes that changed everything came from Marcy Venture Partners, the fund Jay-Z co-founded, making her the first Black woman to publicly raise more than $1 million for a consumer packaged goods food startup. Partake now sells in more than 11,000 stores nationwide.

"It just felt like nobody had enough conviction in what I was building,"

Woodard built Partake as an inclusion company, not just a cookie company: its board is 80 percent women of color, and it partners with the Food Equality Initiative and No Kid Hungry to get safe food to food-insecure families managing allergies.

In 2020 she founded the Black Futures Fellowship to help HBCU students land internships and jobs in consumer packaged goods. Her newest chapter is an allergen-friendly cookie created for Girl Scouts of the USA — for kids like her own daughter, who sold Girl Scout cookies for years without being able to eat one.

Inc. — “Partake Started With a Mother, a Spreadsheet and a Car”
Arizona State University W. P. Carey News — “Visionary food entrepreneur recognized for strides in culinary inclusion”
Shopify — “Partake Foods: Denise Woodard’s Jay-Z Investment”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Cheryl McKissack Daniel  ·  Deryl McKissack

Deryl McKissack

Founder, Chairwoman and CEO, McKissack & McKissack — Washington, DC

Official links: Website

Deryl McKissack was drafting at her father's drawing boards from age six — Saturdays at the family firm were simply what the McKissack twins did. A fifth-generation builder descended from Moses McKissack, an enslaved master brickmaker, she earned a civil engineering degree from Howard University and cut her teeth at Turner Construction and Dames & Moore.

Then, in 1990, she struck out on her own in Washington, D.C., launching her own McKissack & McKissack with $1,000 and a business plan she wrote herself. She was, as she puts it, one person — Black, female, in a male-dominated industry — with a lot to prove.

She worked a list of three hundred prospects by phone; by the halfway mark she had more work than she had imagined, starting with a $5,000 Georgetown project that became a million dollars of work within six months. Her firm now manages more than $15 billion in projects nationwide.

"We still need more Black talent in our industry. I want to help change the paradigm for minorities and women."

The places her firm has helped build are America's memory itself: McKissack & McKissack managed work on the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, served as architect of record for the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and is part of the Obama Presidential Center.

Determined to widen the industry's doors, McKissack founded AEC Unites, a nonprofit advancing equity and intentional opportunities for Black talent and Black-owned businesses across architecture, engineering and construction, and she supports STEM mentoring for young students.

McKissack & McKissack — “McKissack Leadership - Deryl McKissack”
McKissack & McKissack — “Deryl McKissack Builds on the Foundation of her Family’s Five-Generation Legacy in Construction”
Construction Dive — “Group calls for more Black prime contractors” (AEC Unites)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Denise Woodard  ·  Diedre Windsor

Diedre Windsor

Founder & CEO, Windsor Group LLC — Bethesda, MD

Official links: Website

Diedre Windsor's path to ownership ran through two careers of public service: she enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1986, retired as a Major in 2009, and rose into the Senior Executive Service at the U.S. Department of Justice.

In late 2016 she walked away from that senior federal career to build Windsor Group full time — and then proved how serious she was by personally working the firm's first contract herself.

That first deal was for an executive assistant, essentially a secretarial role, and Windsor filled it personally so the company would have a past-performance record to build on. The firm brought in $103,000 in 2017.

From that modest start, Windsor Group grew to $37 million in revenue in 2023 and $25 million in 2024, landing on the Inc. 5000 list five consecutive years.

"It means staying power. It means we’re doing something right, hiring the right people for the right projects, and paying the right wage to ensure a high retention rate. It’s really about being consistent and proving that a Black woman- and veteran-owned firm can not only survive but thrive in business."

Windsor has built the company's growth into opportunities for others: more than $90 million in revenue on $95 million in prime contracts across 15-plus federal agencies, over 260 professionals employed, and more than 40 subcontractors — many of them small businesses — engaged along the way.

The firm has donated more than $600,000 to charitable organizations supporting veterans, women and underserved communities, and has been recognized on the Washington Business Journal's corporate philanthropists list. As Windsor puts it, if you want to help another small business, put revenue into their business.

Black Enterprise — “Diedre Windsor Talks Company’s $90M Revenue Growth And 5 Consecutive Years On The Inc. 5000 List”
NNPA / AFRO — “AFRO spotlight on Black excellence: Meet Diedre Windsor, the Maryland entrepreneur on the Inc. 5000 list”
WBEC Metro NY & Greater DMV — “Meet Windsor Group LLC CEO Diedre Windsor”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Deryl McKissack  ·  Ellie Diop

Ellie Diop

Founder & CEO, Ellie Talks Money — Los Angeles, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · X

Ellie Diop knows what it means to start over with almost nothing. A single mom of four, she was laid off from a six-figure corporate job, was going through a divorce, and had moved back in with her mother in Los Angeles at 28 after being rejected from more than 50 jobs.

When her $1,200 stimulus check arrived, she bet it on herself: she spent less than $500 on essentials — lighting, a website, graphic design tools — built her own site, and spent 45 days studying Instagram before making her first post.

Within 10 months, Ellie Talks Money had hit seven figures, and Business Insider reported over $2 million in revenue in under a year, built on the corporate sales, marketing and leadership experience she already had.

"I saw a lot of unanswered questions. So many business coaches were either men or single women without kids or women in a relationship without kids. I did not see anyone who could offer my point of view, so I decided to become that person."

Diop has turned that second chance into a classroom for other women. Through Ellie Talks Money and Ellievated Academy, she says she has helped more than 50,000 students secure over $20 million in business funding, and she was invited to testify before the U.S. House Small Business Committee in November 2021 on funding access for entrepreneurs of color.

Her own site now describes a $7 million online business, and her book, Girl, Start That Business!, is her attempt to hand women the roadmap she never had.

Black Enterprise — “Single Mom of 4 Turned Her $1,200 Stimulus Into a $2 Million Coaching Business In Less Than a Year”
Ellie Diop (official site) — “Girl, Start That Business! — About Ellie”
Face2Face Africa — “How this single mom turned her $1,200 stimulus check into a $1m business”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Diedre Windsor  ·  Gail Warrior

Gail Warrior

Founder & CEO, Warrior Group — DeSoto, TX

Official links: Website · Instagram · X

Gail Warrior left a job as an accountant for Mobil to enter one of the most male-dominated industries in America: construction.

She started Warrior Group in 1997 with no startup capital, working out of borrowed office space and staffing the venture with help from friends and family, because she saw that government agencies and schools weren't taking advantage of permanent modular construction — buildings made off-site, then assembled on location. The company's first year brought in about $31,000.

Then came a brutal test: on a $1.8 million Chicago project in 2005, a senior project manager was caught taking kickbacks from a subcontractor doing deficient work, and finishing the job cost Warrior Group a little more than $1 million.

She laid off half her staff, refused a consultant's advice to file bankruptcy, secured a $2 million loan from Texas Women Ventures Fund, and rebuilt.

"I didn’t feel I was getting the respect I deserved, so I took action."

By 2008 Warrior Group's revenue had reached $124 million, up from $42 million the year before, making it one of the largest Black woman-owned businesses in the country, with projects including medical clinics, schools and military barracks.

Giving back is built into the company story: in 2007 Warrior founded the Heart of a Warrior Charitable Foundation, which runs educational enrichment programs — including the Young Warriors Summer Learning Program — for underserved children in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, and she launched the Warrior Small Business Academy to mentor other construction entrepreneurs.

Black Enterprise — “Women In Business: Building A Model Business”
Impact Podcast — “Gail Warrior, Warrior Group, Warrior Elements” (guest bio)
PRLog — “Gail Warrior Honored by Dallas Historical Society”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Ellie Diop  ·  Jameela Allen

Jameela Allen

CEO and Founder, Themba Creative Learning Center — Lanham, MD

Jameela Allen spent a decade as a public-school teacher before she owned a single classroom of her own. Alongside teaching, she founded a nonprofit that provided free enrichment activities to low-income youth — the children she most wanted to reach.

A job as a childcare assistant during her freshman year at West Virginia State University had already lit the fire, so she prepared deliberately: while teaching and running the nonprofit she earned a Master's in Public Administration and added early-childhood courses. In 2007 she opened Themba Creative Learning Center in Lanham, Maryland.

The early years nearly broke her — 12- to 16-hour days, a 'Mom & Pop shop' mentality, poor hiring, and stress and anxiety severe enough to send her repeatedly to the emergency room, fearing a panic attack and a heart attack at once. People told her there was no money in childcare.

A mentor pointed her to industry data showing a $60 billion industry, and she rebuilt on leadership, systems and investment in herself and her team.

"From a young age, I had a profound vision of making a transformative impact in the childcare industry, and owning my own childcare center was the ultimate aspiration."

Themba — an East African word meaning 'trusted' — now operates from an 8,200-square-foot building on two acres in Lanham, with a staff of 30 whom Allen calls her Dream Team, and was honoured by the Prince George's County Chamber of Commerce as a best small business.

Allen, described by Black Enterprise as a seven-figure income earner, now coaches other childcare owners: after a licensing inspector praised Themba's low staff turnover and 90-day onboarding process and urged her to document it, she began preparing coaching modules in 2018 and enrolled her first ten clients just before the pandemic.

Black Enterprise — “Jameela Allen Breaks Down Running A Multimillion-Dollar Childcare Enterprise”
SHEEN Magazine — “Jameela Allen, Multi-Million Dollar Childcare Center Owner Shares On Her Successful Coaching Practice”
Themba Creative Learning Center — Official site (Lanham, MD)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Gail Warrior  ·  Jenell Ross