Black Women: The Builders Behind Jenell Ross, Monique Rodriguez, Valerie Daniels-Carter and Vivian Kaye

Jenell Ross

President & Dealer Principal, Bob Ross Auto Group — Centerville, OH

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · X

Jenell Ross grew up inside a dealership — her father, Robert P. Ross Sr., started the family business in 1974 and became the first African American Mercedes-Benz dealer in the United States. She worked in the store from high school onward and was in graduate school when her father died of heart disease on July 6, 1997.

She postponed her M.B.A., completed the National Automobile Dealers Association's Dealer Candidate Academy, and became dealer principal while her mother, Norma J. Ross, served as president and CEO. Together they ran the business until Norma died of breast cancer in 2010.

Ross is recognized as the country's only second-generation African American woman automobile dealer, leading a Buick, GMC and Mercedes-Benz group that marked its 50th anniversary on February 22, 2024.

"They’re listening to me when I tell them the rise in interest rates and with new-vehicle prices at an all-time high, is pushing car and truck buyers away from new vehicles and into the used-vehicle market."

Ross turned her mother's memory into a mission by founding the Norma J. Ross Memorial Foundation in 2010. Branded 'Pink Ribbon Driven,' the foundation funds breast cancer education and awareness, helps people who cannot afford screenings and mammograms, and supports patients through treatment and aftercare, with signature walks, golf outings and dealership health days offering free screenings.

Her industry service has included chairing the American International Automobile Dealers Association and chairing the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland's Cincinnati branch in 2019.

Auto Remarketing — “Past Women in Remarketing honorees still making a difference”
CBT News — “Jenell Ross celebrates 50 years at the helm of the nation's only black woman-owned Buick, GMC, and Mercedes-Benz Dealership”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jameela Allen  ·  Karla M. Cole Green

Karla M. Cole Green

President, James H. Cole Home for Funerals — Detroit, MI

Official links: Website

Karla M. Cole Green grew up inside Detroit history.

Her grandfather, James H. Cole Sr., founded the James H. Cole Home for Funerals in 1919 in Black Bottom, offering affordable, dignified service to Black families who were frequently turned away by white undertakers — the firm still holds 1930s letters from families mailing in $3 payments toward a funeral, promising to keep paying it off.

The funeral home stood next door to Motown, and Karla grew up watching acts rehearse on the front lawn and, in 1967, tanks roll down West Grand Boulevard. She entered the family business in 1975, completed her mortuary studies at the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science in 1979 and earned her mortician's licence the following year.

When her father, James H. Cole Jr., died in 1991, she assumed the presidency — a role she still holds more than three decades later, overseeing day-to-day operations across two Detroit locations.

"We're honored that the NAACP is recognizing our work in the community by serving as the host of the family festival."

Today Cole Green leads the firm alongside her sons Antonio and Brice Green, licensed funeral directors who represent the fourth generation. The centennial release reported 50 employees, about 1,800 families served a year and 12 licensed funeral directors — the most of any funeral home in the area.

In 2019 the family marked 100 years with a year of giving back, and at the Centennial Grande Gala she and her sons announced the James H. Cole Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit encouraging growth and development among Detroit citizens; during the pandemic it provided meals to healthcare workers, firefighters and police, and later school supplies and Christmas giveaways.

James H. Cole Home for Funerals — “A Day In the Life of a Funeral Director”
FuneralVision — “Antonio Green Is Keeping Service Alive at the James H. Cole Home for Funeral Homes in Detroit”
PRWeb — “Detroit-based James H. Cole Home for Funerals Celebrates 100 years”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jenell Ross  ·  Janice Bryant Howroyd

Janice Bryant Howroyd

Founder & CEO, The ActOne Group — Los Angeles, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

We’re inspired because Janice Bryant Howroyd built an empire on a radical premise for a staffing company — that the applicant, not the client, is the center of the universe — and proved that putting the overlooked person first is a billion-dollar strategy. In her own words, it started with a brain, a phone, a phone book and faith.

“If you visit any of our offices, you’ll see that we live by the mantra that 'the applicant is the center of our universe.' It’s always been our belief that if you get that applicant in the right job, then they will be the best representation of who we are as a company.”

One of eleven children from Tarboro, North Carolina, Howroyd was among the first Black students to integrate her high school, graduated from North Carolina A&T, and moved to Los Angeles with $900 to her name.

She talked her way into the staffing business and founded her own agency with that stake in a one-room Beverly Hills office with a phone and a phone book.

The ActOne Group is now the largest minority woman-owned employment agency in the United States — brands including AppleOne, AgileOne and A-Check Global serving some 17,000 clients in 19 countries with more than 2,800 employees — and Black Enterprise credits her as the first African American woman to operate a company generating over $1 billion in annual revenue.

She serves on the North Carolina A&T board of trustees and the Harvard Women’s Leadership board, and was appointed to the President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

AfroTech — “The Howroyd Family Legacy”
AfroTech — “Janice Bryant Howroyd’s Net Worth”
Working Woman Report — “Meet Janice Bryant Howroyd, First African American Woman to Run a $1 Billion Business”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Karla M. Cole Green  ·  Keanna Sanders

Keanna Sanders

Founder and CEO, Sanbridge Early Learning Centers — Baltimore, MD

Official links: Website

Keanna Sanders learned childcare at her grandmother's side. Raised in Baltimore, she was babysitting from childhood — neighbourhood kids, family members, nieces and nephews — and helping her grandmother, a family childcare provider, as a teenager. That love became a profession: by her early twenties she had earned her childcare certifications and graduated with her bachelor's degree.

She launched her first Sanbridge Early Learning Center in Windsor Mill with just eight children and three staff, and the word spread fast. About three years later she bought the real estate under the business, then won a competitive bid to expand onto a college campus at CCBC Catonsville, and kept expanding from there.

The idea underneath it all was personal and practical: parents who work nights, weekends and multiple jobs need care that does not stop at six o'clock — so she built centres that do not stop either.

"My vision is to be the world’s leading childcare provider and provide quality services."

Today Sanbridge serves families across the DMV with a 24-hour facility and other locations open until midnight. Sanders is now building a franchise model to turn Sanbridge into a household name and, in her words, the world's leading childcare provider.

Beyond her centres, she leads Baltimore Dynamic Women, offering mentorship on life skills, business plans and entrepreneurship, and she passes on what she learned about state grants and small-business funding. Her two sons, now 16 and 19, grew up in Sanbridge and work alongside her — the legacy she says she is building for them.

MadameNoire — “Keanna Sanders Is Transforming Childcare To Work For Families”
Black Girls Bond — “Keanna Sanders Builds 24-Hour Childcare Centers to Support Real Families and Lead Black Women in Business”
Sanbridge Early Learning Center — “About Us” (official site)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Janice Bryant Howroyd  ·  Kristy Black

Kristy Black

Founder & Owner, Black Hydrovac — Hamilton, VA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Kristy Black reinvented herself in middle age. After years working in the nonprofit sector — and, as podcast profiles of her note, nearly 20 years in education — COVID closed that chapter of her life.

With a business management degree from Georgia Tech but zero construction industry experience, she looked at northern Virginia's shortage of vacuum excavation companies, liked the newness of the technology, and decided to learn an emerging trade from the ground up.

She launched Black Hydrovac in November 2020 with two secondhand air vac trucks, then added three full-size hydrovac trucks in the company's first year. She is candid that there was no guarantee of success — she did the research, mustered the bravery, and started anyway, visiting job sites herself to learn the work alongside her crews.

"I did a lot of research and a lot of legwork before I started this business and then decided to do it. I had to muster up a whole lot of bravery. I thought, I don’t know if it’s going to work and there probably are a lot of reasons I shouldn’t do this, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m really grateful that it is working."

Black has built the woman- and minority-owned company around people: hiring for attitude, training operators carefully, sending two-person crews for safety, and issuing digital end-of-day reports her clients love.

Podcast and trade coverage describe Black Hydrovac protecting underground infrastructure on mission-critical sites — hyperscale data centers, hospitals, airports, government facilities and the White House — and the company says its teams have avoided tens of thousands of utility strikes. Black runs the company herself and centers its culture on developing skilled tradespeople.

Cleaner — “Kristy Black Built Her Hydroexcavation Company With the Right Kind of People”
Dig Different — “Learning the Hydroexcavation Business on the Go”
Black Hydrovac (official site) — “About — Meet the Black Hydrovac Team”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Keanna Sanders  ·  Lasenta Lewis-Ellis

Lasenta Lewis-Ellis

President & CEO, LLE Construction Group LLC — Columbia, SC

Official links: Website

Lasenta Lewis-Ellis knows the housing insecurity her clients face because she lived it. She grew up on public housing and food stamps, her father spent 20 years in prison, and as a single mother she was living in income-based housing as a welfare recipient while studying architectural engineering technology at Midlands Technical College.

Her drive was personal: she wanted to build her late mother a home, but her mother's home was foreclosed and her mother passed away before Lewis-Ellis could graduate and make it happen.

After she was fired from her job, she treated the loss as a push rather than an ending, and in 2011 she founded LLE Construction Group in Columbia, South Carolina — solving the problem she knew best, managing projects and maintaining buildings for clients.

"I didn’t know what was out there next, but I knew it had to be better than where I was at that moment."

LLE Construction Group focuses on K-12 schools, districts, colleges and facility maintenance, and Lewis-Ellis has also supervised affordable housing construction in Columbia, saying that watching families move into those homes rekindled her. Enterprising Women magazine named her its 2016 Enterprising Woman of the Year in the $1 million to $2 million revenue category.

She mentors students, women and business owners, supports small, women and minority contractors, and returns to Midlands Tech to speak to single parents — telling them she has been exactly where they are.

AfroTech — “How Lasenta Lewis-Ellis' Late Mother's Home Foreclosing Led To Her Creating A Multi-Million Construction Company”
Midlands Technical College — “Lasenta Lewis-Ellis” (success story)
Face2Face Africa — “How this woman survived living in low-income housing to becoming a millionaire contractor”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Kristy Black  ·  Michele Hoskins

Michele Hoskins

Founder, Michele Foods — South Holland, IL

Official links: Website

Michele Hoskins built a national brand out of a recipe with five generations of history behind it. The honey crème syrup was created by her great-great-great-grandmother America Washington, an enslaved cook, and passed down through the family until it reached Hoskins.

Newly divorced, a former schoolteacher raising three daughters and financially strapped, she decided the recipe would be her way forward. She sold all her possessions, moved her daughters into her mother's attic, and spent lean years stirring syrup in a 55-gallon drum in her mother's basement, hand-filling bottles and delivering them to neighborhood groceries herself.

In 1984 Michele Foods was born, and that same year she landed Chicagoland's two largest retail chains, taking the syrups into 400 stores.

"There were no mentors for an African American female entrepreneur in the food industry in those days. I had to learn from my mistakes. Had I not been naïve, I may not have started this journey. All I had going for me was my goal and a commitment to making it work."

Hoskins went on to become the first minority supplier for both Denny's and Walmart, partnering over the years with companies including General Mills and Sara Lee, and her syrups are now sold in more than 8,000 stores nationwide, including Kroger, Publix and Safeway.

She told her story in her book Sweet Expectations: Michele Hoskins' Recipe for Success, and her stated inspiration from the beginning was to leave her daughters a legacy instead of just a recipe — opening doors for the minority suppliers who would come after her.

Michele Foods (official site) — “About Michele Hoskins | Michele Foods Story”
Black Enterprise — “Sweet Expectations: A Recipe For Success”
The US Times — “Pouring Into Legacy: How Dr. Michele Hoskins Turned a Family Recipe Into a National Brand”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Lasenta Lewis-Ellis  ·  Mignon Francois

Mignon Francois

Founder and CEO, The Cupcake Collection — Nashville, TN

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Mignon Francois moved her family to Nashville on the promise of her husband's new job — and the job fell through.

For two years the mother of seven stretched every dollar, sitting in the dark during the day to save the generator's power for when her children came home, with no bank account because a single overdraft fee could start a spiral she could not afford.

In 2007 a neighbor who knew her baking asked for 600 cupcakes at a dollar each. Francois had exactly $5 — the family's dinner money. She spent it on ingredients, baked sixty cupcakes, and made $60 the same day, putting the $5 back into the dinner budget and baking on.

Using an envelope budgeting system to divide every dollar, she founded The Cupcake Collection in 2008 and grew a kitchen hustle into a Nashville bakery beloved well beyond Tennessee.

"Seriously? You offer me this opportunity when I don’t have any money? I literally have $5 to feed us,"

Francois now uses her story to coach other women into business: she serves as a board member and mentor at the Pathways Women's Business Center and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, and her company funds scholarships at Tennessee State University while working with local community organizations. Her memoir, Made from Scratch, tells the $5 story in full.

The Cupcake Collection has grown to multiple stores — including her native New Orleans — plus a food truck she calls Joy.

AfroTech — “This Single Mom of 7 Took Her Last $5 and Launched a Million-Dollar Cupcake Business”
Black Enterprise — “How Mignon Francois Turned $5 Into a Million-Dollar Cupcake Business”
Black Business — “This Single Mom With 7 Kids Turned a $5 Investment into a $1M Cupcake Business”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Michele Hoskins  ·  Monique Rodriguez

Monique Rodriguez

Founder and CEO, Mielle Organics — Merrillville, IN

Official links: Website · Instagram

Monique Rodriguez spent eight years as a registered nurse, a stable career her mother had pushed her toward, while her real passion — beauty — waited on the sidelines. In 2013, during a high-risk pregnancy, she lost her son Milan, and the grief forced a reckoning: she would transform her pain into purpose.

Mixing concoctions in her kitchen and documenting her healthy-hair journey on social media, she found a community of Black women hungry for products made for their texture — and in 2014 she launched Mielle Organics with a single product.

The road included a $2 million financial hole that nearly ended the company and deals she walked away from, but in 2021 she became the first Black woman to raise a non-controlling nine-figure investment, from Berkshire Partners.

In 2023 Procter & Gamble acquired Mielle in what LEADERS calls the largest exit ever for a Black female beauty founder — with Rodriguez still in the CEO chair.

"when you go through those traumatic life experiences, it leads to a lot of self reflection, and I made the choice to transform my pain into purpose."

Rodriguez built giving back into the deal itself: as part of the P&G acquisition she established Mielle Cares, the brand's nonprofit arm, with a $10 million donation matched by P&G, to advance education and economic opportunity in Black and Brown communities.

Her earlier More Than a Strand program funded Black women-owned beauty businesses and scholarships for aspiring entrepreneurs. In 2025 she added author to her titles with The Glory in Your Story, sharing the journey from loss to legacy.

LEADERS Magazine — “LEADERS Interview with Monique Rodriguez, Chief Executive Officer, Mielle Organics”
BET — “Crowning Glory: How Monique Rodriguez Turned Personal Tragedy Into a Textured Haircare Empire”
Girlboss — “This Nurse-Turned-Founder Built a Beauty Empire From Her Kitchen”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Mignon Francois  ·  Sevetri Wilson

Sharon Ross

President, Ross-Clayton Funeral Home — Montgomery, AL

Official links: Website

Dr. Sharon A. Ross has spent her entire life in and around Ross-Clayton Funeral Home — Montgomery's oldest Black-owned business, founded in 1918 by Robert Ambers Ross and William Clayton.

This was never just a funeral home: during the Montgomery bus boycott the family gave rides to boycotters, used its hearses to carry Black voters to the polls and the sick to the doctor, and hosted movement meetings, earning recognition as a 'jewel in the black community.' Sharon learned the basics of the trade firsthand from her father, David Calloway Ross Jr., who led the company from 1978 until his death on October 14, 2020.

In December 2021 the board named her president — the fourth generation of her family to lead Ross-Clayton, and the first woman ever to head the company in its century of service.

"Funeral business is a calling — not a career; it is a lifestyle — not a livelihood."

Ross now works alongside her mother and younger brother at the firm's 18,000-square-foot Adams Avenue home, with its chapel and limousine fleet, providing leadership, setting policy and serving as the face of the business in the community.

She says she aspires to bring new energy while holding to the standards her late father set — his belief, as she puts it, was to care for those they serve and serve them well.

The company, honoured with a state historic marker in 2011, continues broadening its efforts to give back to Montgomery, the city it has served since 1918.

Montgomery Regional Chamber of Commerce — “Member Profile: Sharon Ross”
Wikipedia — “Ross-Clayton Funeral Home”
ALMetro360 — “Ross-Clayton Funeral Home Turns 100”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Sevetri Wilson  ·  Sophia Strother

Tammy Jones

Co-Founder and CEO, Basis Investment Group — New York, NY

Official links: Website

Tammy Jones grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in South Jamaica, Queens, in a family of eight that never owned a home — and became the first woman in her family to graduate from college, at Cornell.

She then spent a career inside Wall Street's biggest lending machines: helping build GMAC's capital markets lending division as a senior vice president, then heading CWCapital's capital markets lending division, where she closed approximately $6 billion in loans and investments through the worst credit crisis in modern history.

In 2009, with the financial system in ruins, she walked away and co-founded Basis Investment Group in New York with JEMB Realty — a clean-slate, multi-strategy platform able to invest across the capital stack.

It is one of the only diversified commercial real estate platforms in the country founded and majority-owned by an African American woman, and a licensed Freddie Mac seller-servicer.

"When people tell me that they can’t find minorities, I say, ‘You’re not looking in the right place,’"

Jones built Basis to finance the operators and markets Wall Street overlooks: the firm has invested or loaned more than $1.3 billion with diverse owners and operators, most of its team and roughly half its vendors are women- and minority-owned, and it helped create an Emerging Development Fund for less-established developers.

As chair of the Real Estate Executive Council, the trade association for minorities in commercial real estate, she pushes the whole industry to be intentional about partnerships, mentorship and access to credit.

Counselors of Real Estate — “Tammy K. Jones”
SHOPPE BLACK — “How Tammy K. Jones Built an $8 Billion Real Estate Platform with Purpose”
The Real Deal — “Tammy Jones Talks Strategy to Make Real Estate More Diverse”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Sophia Strother  ·  Terrica Lynn Smith

Terrica Lynn Smith

Managing Partner, SALT Capital Equity Group; Owner, Cachet Real Estate — New Orleans, LA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Terrica Lynn Smith's story begins with a memory she does not soften: at five years old, she says, her drug-addicted mother sold her to her drug dealer to pay a debt.

She survived neglect, hunger — left home alone with her siblings for days with no food or lights — and foster care where she endured further violence, and was told she would end up a statistic.

Emancipated at 16 and pregnant, by 17 she was homeless under a bridge in New Orleans with her baby son, Tyreek, promising him he would never end up in the system like she did and that, as long as she had air in her lungs, she would fight to get them out from under that bridge.

After Hurricane Katrina displaced her to Lafayette, she enrolled in real estate school. Her breakthrough, reported by EURWeb, came from a $5,000 tax refund used to buy her first property, which she and her husband renovated themselves and rolled into the next deal.

"Power, to me, means owning who I am without apology."

Smith is now a nationally recognised real estate investor and developer based in New Orleans, leading Cachet Real Estate and SALT Capital Equity Group, with a portfolio reported by HelloBeautiful as exceeding $60 million, specialising in mixed-use, multifamily and Opportunity Zone projects.

She is the developer behind Madeline Cove in Lafayette — a $14 million project planned for 30 affordable homes, 60 townhomes, a 50-unit senior complex and retail — and was invited to the White House in January 2020 to discuss Opportunity Zone progress. She also created 'Developers,' a generational-wealth board game, and mentors women to build, lead and break cycles.

HelloBeautiful — “Terrica Lynn Smith: Empowering Women Through Resilience”
Black Business — “Black Woman Went from Being Homeless to Now a Multi-Million Real Estate Mogul”
OpportunityZones.com — “From Homeless to Opportunity Zone Developer, with Terrica Lynn Smith”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Tammy Jones  ·  Valerie Daniels-Carter

Valerie Daniels-Carter

President and CEO, V&J Holding Companies — Milwaukee, WI

Official links: Website

When Valerie Daniels-Carter applied to Burger King for her first franchise, the company said it had lost her application — twice. So she waited all day outside the vice president's office, and when he left for a hunting trip, she followed him to a cabin in Minnetonka to be heard.

To raise nearly $1 million for that first restaurant, she sold everything she owned, including her car; on her wedding night, her husband Jeffrey surprised her with a savings account built from his second job and told her to go start her business.

She and her brother John founded V&J in Milwaukee in 1982, and over the next sixteen years she grew one Burger King into a 137-unit, multi-brand operation employing some 4,500 people — the largest female-owned restaurant franchise organization in the country. Faith runs through all of it; she titled her book Your Business Is His Business.

"I had to challenge the status quo in the franchise industry,"

Daniels-Carter's success has carried her into rooms few franchise owners ever enter: she is a minority owner of the Milwaukee Bucks and a board member of the Green Bay Packers, and she has chaired the board of AAA.

Through her Empowerment Initiative she has supported uplift work in Africa, and in Milwaukee she has helped build community institutions including a Boys & Girls Club, schools and a credit union — treating community investment, in her framing, as simply part of doing business.

Black Enterprise — “How Valerie Daniels-Carter, Part Owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, Built a Fast Food Empire”
Milwaukee BizTimes — “Notable Minority Executives: Valerie Daniels-Carter”
Working Woman Report — “Multimillionaire CEO Valerie Daniels-Carter success”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Terrica Lynn Smith  ·  Vivian Kaye

Vivian Kaye

Founder, KinkyCurlyYaki — Hamilton, ON

Official links: Website · Instagram · X

Vivian Kaye's first lesson in commerce came strapped to her mother's back in a Ghanaian market, watching her sell wares to feed four daughters. The family emigrated to Canada when Vivian was a baby, and she grew up to try the expected path — anthropology at York University — before depression forced her to drop out.

Working call-centre and tech-startup jobs and running a wedding décor business on the side, she went looking for protective hair that actually looked like hers and found an industry built on European textures. If she would buy the kinky-textured hair she sourced for herself, she reasoned, other Black women would too.

In December 2012, from Hamilton, Ontario, as a single mother with no venture funding, she launched KinkyCurlyYaki — and effectively created a new niche in the hair industry, passing $500,000 in sales by the end of 2013 and $1 million a few years later, all by word of mouth.

"I started this because I wanted to solve my own problem and those of other women who looked like me,"

Kaye bootstrapped KinkyCurlyYaki to more than $6 million in revenue before the brand was acquired, never taking outside funding — and she has made that path her teaching.

Through Vivian Kaye Consulting, her Business Class podcast work, television appearances as an entrepreneurship expert on CityLine, and peer mentorship of women founders, she coaches other entrepreneurs — especially immigrant and women founders — to build bravely on their own terms, a self-described mix of Gary Vee's hustle and Oprah's heart.

People of Color in Tech — “Black and Profitable Part 2: Meet 5 Women Who Bootstrapped Their Way To Success”
Face2Face Africa — “How this Ghanaian immigrant built a multi-million dollar hair business after dropping out of college”
Wikipedia — “Vivian Kaye”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Valerie Daniels-Carter  ·  Adenah Bayoh

Sevetri Wilson

Founder & CEO, Resilia — New Orleans, LA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Sevetri Wilson was raised in a rural Louisiana community about 45 minutes outside New Orleans by a single mother who made less than $30,000 a year supporting a six-person household. A first-generation college student, she lost her father young and then her mother to stage four cancer, leaving her without both parents by age 22.

With zero investment capital and no connections, she bootstrapped her first company, Solid Ground Innovations, to seven figures, then spent nearly a decade advising nonprofits before deciding to turn that work into technology.

In 2016 she launched Resilia, a software platform that helps nonprofits build capacity and helps funders scale their impact — and in October 2022 she closed a $35 million Series B, described as the largest raise ever for a solo Black female-founded technology company.

"Solo founders do go on to be grossly successful, and you can look at that across the board. But for some reason, a Black woman solo founder can’t be successful? Make it make sense to me."

Wilson has deliberately kept Resilia based in New Orleans, arguing that founders have to stay and build the local tech ecosystem if high-paying jobs are ever going to exist there. Resilia reports more than 15,000 nonprofit users and customers including Oxfam America and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

She also created a scholarship endowment at LSU in honor of her mother, Shirley, in 2019, and shares what she has learned through mentoring, speaking, and her books Solid Ground and Resilient.

Black Enterprise — “She May Be the First Black Woman in New Orleans to Raise $2 Million in Capital for Her Startup”
Silicon Bayou News — “New Orleans Tech Startup Resilia Closes $35 Million Funding Round”
inRegister — “LSU alumna Sevetri Wilson’s success is helping nonprofits and inspiring other entrepreneurs”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Monique Rodriguez  ·  Sharon Ross

Sophia Strother

Founder & CEO, L2E Industries — Austin, TX

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · X

Sophia Strother's life could have gone a very different way. She became a mother at 15 and is a survivor of sex trafficking and child sexual abuse.

Instead of letting that be the end of her story, she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in business administration, started her first business, Trustworthy Consulting, by age 20, and became a homeowner.

In 2018 she read an article criticizing Amazon for not working with small delivery businesses and learned that a $10,000 investment could make her an Amazon Delivery Service Partner.

With no background in transportation, she applied — a process that took a year — and in September 2020 she launched L2E Industries (Learning 2 Exhale) in Austin, Texas, building it into a multimillion-dollar business in under three years.

"As I read the Amazon article, I was sitting down thinking, wait a minute. Why not me?"

Strother's fleet of Prime-branded vans — 38 vans and nearly 80 employees in the fuller U.S. Black Chambers account — has delivered more than 4 million packages across Central Texas, generating over $3 million in annual revenue, even after she used her own retirement savings to survive the 2021 Texas winter storm.

She is also a national advocate and inspirational speaker for victims of domestic and sexual abuse and trafficking, a crisis intervention specialist, and a doctoral candidate at Liberty University studying public policy at the intersection of race and sexual trauma.

U.S. Black Chambers Network — “Inspiring Black Woman-Owned Business Thrives with Amazon Partnership”
Black Girls Bond — “Sophia Strother: Meet The Black Woman Whose Company Operates 38 Vans, Making $3M A Year Delivering for Amazon”
Shoutout LA — “Meet Sophia Strother | Entrepreneur & Inspirational Speaker”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Sharon Ross  ·  Tammy Jones