Empire Makers: The Power Behind Adebayo Ogunlesi, Strive Masiyiwa, Tony Elumelu and Sean Tresvant

Tony Chase

Founder, Chairman & CEO, ChaseSource LP — Houston, TX; tenured Professor of Law, University of Houston Law Center

Official links: Website

Tony Chase grew up in Houston public schools as the son of John S. Chase, the first Black graduate of the University of Texas School of Architecture and the first Black licensed architect in Texas — a man who had to start his own firm because no white architects would hire him.

Tony earned honors degrees from Harvard College, Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, worked in investment banking in New York, and came home to teach law and build companies.

He founded and sold three ventures — Chase Radio Partners, sold to Clear Channel in 1998; Cricket Wireless, co-founded with Qualcomm; and ChaseCom, sold to AT&T in 2007 — then built ChaseSource LP, a staffing, facilities management and real estate firm ranked by Black Enterprise among the nation's largest minority-owned businesses.

He is also a principal owner of the Marriott hotel at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

"My father always said, 'A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.'"

Chase and his wife, Dr. Dina Alsowayel, gave $1 million to UT Austin's School of Architecture to endow the John S. Chase Family Graduate Fellowship — aimed at recruiting HBCU graduates — and a professorship in his father's name.

He has served as deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, chairman of the Greater Houston Partnership, and on the boards of the Houston Endowment, Texas Medical Center and MD Anderson's Board of Visitors, and he chaired Houston's Hurricane Harvey and COVID-19 relief funds.

Nabors Industries — “Anthony R. (“Tony”) Chase” (board biography)
Houston InnovationMap — “Successful Houston businessman donates $1M to UT in honor of his father — Texas' first Black architect”
Greater Houston Partnership — “Anthony R. Chase”

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Tony Elumelu  ·  Tim Harris

Tim Harris

Co-founder & President, Harris & Ford LLC — Indianapolis, IN

Official links: Website

Tim Harris came up the hard way through the chemical industry itself: a chemical engineer with an additional degree in computer science, he worked co-op jobs at Diamond Shamrock, learned distribution from both sides of the counter, and rose to sales manager overseeing six branches — along the way authoring the practice and procedure manual for the National Association of Chemical Distributors.

In 1994 he co-founded Harris & Ford in Indianapolis — by one account starting in an office whose only furniture was two empty paint buckets left behind by painters — and talked Procter & Gamble into a first $20,000 line of credit by walking its representative through that manual, section by section.

The firm grew almost entirely organically, from $1.8 million in year one to a reported $400 million, serving manufacturers in 53 countries with nine warehouses and more than 600 supplier partnerships.

"We did not grow our business by acquisition. We have grown 99 percent organically, just by starting the business and then adding to it."

Harris built the company on a 'total cost' method — tracking freight and delivered cost, not just bid price — which he says saved customers millions a year, and he advises founders to master the micro level before raising capital.

In Indianapolis he is known for faith-driven community work, including founding Turning Point Academy, a private school on the city's east side that, despite serving a high-poverty neighborhood, consistently earns A ratings from the state of Indiana, as discussed on the Big Hearted Indy podcast.

Shoppe Black — “How Harris & Ford Built a $400M Global Supply Chain Business”
The African Dream — “How Tim Harris built a Black-owned $400 million company”

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Tony Chase  ·  Todd Weaver

Todd Weaver

Founder & CEO, DGN Enterprise (TW Constructors) — St. Louis, MO

Official links: Website

Todd Weaver's story starts in 1984 in Hazelwood, Missouri, where, at 12 years old and with his mother battling diabetes and cancer, he walked onto a construction site looking for work.

Clayco founder Bob Clark hired him at $4 an hour to pick up trash and pull weeds — on condition he stay committed to school — and became his mentor and a father figure. Weaver studied marketing and construction management at the University of Missouri–St.

Louis, worked for engineering firms and back at Clayco, then in 2002 launched Legacy Building Group with a $150,000 loan from Clark, repaid within six months. In the 2008 crisis the company took on $2.5 million in debt and nearly defaulted; rather than ask Clark for a bailout, Weaver cut expenses and leaned on relationships to survive.

Legacy became TW Constructors and grew into DGN Enterprise — five companies, 585 employees, nearly $400 million in 2025 revenue, per Forbes reporting.

Today Weaver's companies service and upgrade data centers across six Google campuses and have completed projects for Microsoft, Apple, Pfizer and World Wide Technology — whose founder, David Steward, became a major customer — positioning the group, per Forbes, to approach $1 billion in revenue by the end of 2026.

From the start, Legacy Building Group was created in part to expand opportunities for minority contractors and workers, a give-back mission Weaver has carried through the enterprise's growth.

Black Enterprise — “Todd Weaver Turned A $4-An-Hour-Job Into A Nearly $1B Construction Empire” (reporting Forbes)
TW Constructors — “History” (company site)

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Tim Harris  ·  Troy Taylor

Troy Taylor

Founder, Chairman & CEO, Coca-Cola Beverages Florida (Coke Florida) — Tampa, FL

Official links: Website

Troy Taylor spent about 20 years in banking and consulting — at J.P. Morgan, Accenture and BBVA, as an advisor inside the Coca-Cola system, and as founder of the investment firm Spinel — preparing for an opportunity many assumed would never be offered to him.

As he told a University of South Florida audience, he carried a lot of bags for a lot of people for many years before he understood how to run a business.

When Coca-Cola refranchised its Florida territories in 2015, Taylor was ready: he founded Coca-Cola Beverages Florida in Tampa that May, starting with a handful of employees, and built it into the third-largest privately owned and sixth-largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States — a Minority Business Enterprise-certified, family-owned company and one of the largest Black-owned businesses in America, with exclusive territory covering most of Florida.

"I carried a lot of bags for a lot of people for many years, before I really was able to understand how to run a business."

Taylor also founded Cardinal System Holdings, Coke Florida's holding company, whose portfolio includes Tellus Equipment Solutions, a John Deere dealer, and Florida Fresh vending.

He serves on the boards of Cox Enterprises, the American Beverage Association, the Coca-Cola Bottlers' Association and the Florida Chamber of Commerce, is a trustee of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America Southeast Region, and won the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2018 award in Florida.

He has spoken publicly about stewardship and giving back — product and money to worthy causes — as central to the company's identity.

Cox Enterprises — “Troy D. Taylor” (board biography)
Tampa Bay EDC — “Coca-Cola Beverages Florida, LLC” (investor profile)
Black Enterprise — “Troy Taylor” (Black business / Coca-Cola profile)

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Todd Weaver  ·  Tyrone Burroughs

Tyrone Burroughs

Founder & Chairman, First Choice Global; owner, R.S. Lewis & Sons Funeral Home — Memphis, TN

Tyrone Burroughs was born and raised in small-town Lane, South Carolina, and graduated from Benedict College before building a sales career the patient way — developing account portfolios for employers until, in 1987, he founded First Choice Sales & Marketing in Memphis.

He built it into the nation's largest consumer products management agency in the multicultural personal-care category, a market representing more than $1.7 trillion in buying power, employing more than 100 professionals and serving some of the world's largest manufacturers and retailers.

Then he made the move that defines his legacy instinct: in 2012 he purchased R.S. Lewis & Sons Funeral Home, the Memphis institution founded in 1914 whose morticians prepared Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s body after the assassination — keeping it Black-owned and in the community's hands.

In 2010 Burroughs and his wife Nelda established the Burroughs Foundation, focused on financial literacy, workforce development and higher-education access, funding scholarships and mentorship for students nationwide. Benedict College renamed its business school the Tyrone Adam Burroughs School of Business and Entrepreneurship in his honor in 2017 and awarded him an honorary doctorate.

A 2021 inductee into Memphis's Society of Entrepreneurs, he was honored in 2025 with the St. Jude Spirit of the Dream Award, and serves on boards from the Federal Reserve Bank's Memphis branch to the St. Jude Memphis African American Engagement Council.

Youth Villages — “Tyrone Burroughs” (leadership biography)
Business Wire / St. Jude — “Memphis Powerhouses Wilfred Busby and Tyrone Burroughs to be Honored at St. Jude Spirit of the Dream”

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Troy Taylor  ·  Vaughn C. Greene

Vaughn C. Greene

Founder & President, Vaughn C. Greene Funeral Services — Baltimore, MD

Official links: Website

We're inspired because Vaughn C. Greene never separated business from ministry. Every location he opened is measured in families comforted — more than 20,000 of them — and he built the kind of institution a community leans on in its hardest weeks, with a second generation already rising inside it.

"Even then, I felt that this was my calling. Having that role model of entrepreneurship and business management was something I hadn't been previously exposed to, but I knew I wanted it to be part of my future. That experience truly served as my inspiration."

At 16, Greene took his first job at a Baltimore funeral home, washing the fleet vehicles and keeping the grounds. Watching the owner run the business gave him his first exposure to entrepreneurship — a role model he had never had — and he recognized the work itself as a calling.

He earned a mortuary science degree and an honorary doctorate, founded Vaughn C. Greene Funeral Services, and grew it to four locations across Baltimore and Randallstown; as founding partner and president of Batchelor Brothers Funeral Services he added two Philadelphia locations and one in Trenton — seven locations across three states, described as a leading African American-owned funeral and cremation organization.

He also serves families as a pastor of Gethsemane Baptist Church, and his daughter Brittney Greene now serves as the firm's vice president of operations and managing funeral director. His firms' community work includes anti-drug and anti-violence initiatives and sponsorships across Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Baltimore CityBuzz — “Vaughn C. Greene Funeral Services: A Ministry of Care”
NNPA / BlackPressUSA — “A Staple in Baltimore’s African American Community”
Batchelor Brothers Funeral Services — Our Team

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Tyrone Burroughs  ·  Will Cyrus

Will Cyrus

Founder, President & CEO, Purpose Builder & Developments — Dallas, TX

Will Cyrus was raised by a single mother in a lower-income household near Pompano Beach, Florida, after his father, a local drug dealer, went to prison when Cyrus was five. His mother worked at Winn-Dixie, and at six he was selling Little Debbie snacks and Pokémon cards, making about $100 a week to pay for his own school clothes.

He describes that season plainly: that's when life began for him, and when he saw the poverty around him.

After work in life insurance and financial services with firms including Fidelity Investments and Northwestern Mutual, he invested $75,000 of his own funds and $50,000 of personal credit to start Purpose Builder & Developments, began buying land in Dallas's Fair Park neighborhood in 2016, and built about ten homes a year at $250,000–$350,000 — before pivoting, as Dallas prices doubled in the pandemic, to luxury homes.

"A good idea isn't a God idea, but every God idea is a good idea."

Cyrus's Christian-based design-build firm now builds custom homes that typically sell for $1.5 million to $3 million in Dallas suburbs, with six projects underway including three expected to sell for $2 million or more, and he expected $12–15 million in revenue in 2024.

He says the move past $500,000 homes made him the first Black homebuilder in his locality to build at that level — a door he frames as generational: he wants to pass the character and work ethic he learned from his grandfather, a carpenter and masonry foreman, to the next generation of Black homebuilders and developers.

Black Enterprise — “Will Cyrus Is A Black Real Estate Developer Making His Mark In Dallas”
Face2Face Africa — “Young Black real estate CEO who has developed millions of dollars in properties in Dallas shares how he did it”

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Vaughn C. Greene  ·  William F. Boyd II

Frank Cooper III

Global Chief Marketing Officer, Visa — New York area (Mamaroneck, NY)

Official links: Website · X

Frank Cooper III's route to the top of global marketing ran through music and law, not an MBA marketing track.

A Berkeley business graduate who earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School — where he was Supreme Court editor of the Harvard Law Review — he started as an entertainment lawyer and senior business-affairs executive at Motown and Def Jam, then in 1998 co-founded Urban Box Office Networks, an early internet company focused on urban lifestyle and minority markets.

At PepsiCo he rose to CMO of global consumer engagement, leading the Beyoncé partnership era and Pepsi's first in-house content studio, the Creators League; he then served as chief marketing and creative officer at BuzzFeed and global CMO of BlackRock.

In May 2022 he became Visa's global chief marketing officer, joining its executive committee — a marketer whose whole career has sat at the intersection of culture, commerce and technology.

"The power of a great brand comes from providing outstanding products that make a meaningful difference in people's lives – and the world-at-large – and I look forward to beginning my new role knowing how foundational both of these things are to Visa."

At Visa, Cooper is steering the brand from league-wide logo sponsorships toward original content, creators and live fan experiences: Visa ended its three-decade NFL sponsorship (expiring March 2026) while holding top-tier rights for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the 2027 Women's World Cup and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, telling Reuters there was a better way for Visa beyond acquiring league rights.

He has been named one of Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business, a four-time Billboard Power 100 honoree, and received AdColor's Legend award.

Visa Investor Relations — “Visa Names Frank Cooper III Global Chief Marketing Officer”
Sports Business Journal / Reuters — “Visa pivoting to individual deals after ending three-decade NFL sponsorship”

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  William F. Boyd II  ·  Nicole Hubbard Graham

Nicole Hubbard Graham

EVP & Chief Marketing Officer, NIKE, Inc. — Beaverton, OR

Official links: Website

Nicole Hubbard Graham's story is the rare boomerang that lands higher than it left.

She spent 18 years inside Nike — running global basketball marketing, leading brand marketing in London and Amsterdam, and finishing as vice president of global categories and consumer direct brand marketing — then walked away in 2021 to co-found Adopt, a minority-owned creative agency partnering with athletes, startups and consumer brands.

Betting on herself worked: Nike brought her back as chief marketing officer, effective January 2024, to lead its brand turnaround.

Since returning she has driven the Paris 2024 Olympics marketing comeback, put Nike back in the Super Bowl after roughly 27 years with the women-led 'So Win' anthem in February 2025, and in September 2025 reimagined 'Just Do It' as 'Why Do It?' for a new generation — putting the athlete, not the algorithm, at the center of everything.

"At Nike, we make sure the athlete is at the center of everything we do, from product creation to storytelling. We are at our best when we are representing the voice of the athlete and their voice becomes our voice."

Promoted to executive vice president and chief marketing officer in Nike's 2025 leadership reshuffle, Graham now leads storytelling across all three of the company's brands — Nike, Jordan and Converse — shaping how they show up at the Olympics, Paralympics, World Cup, NBA Finals and Super Bowl.

Her philosophy, in her own words at the 'So Win' launch, is that Nike is at its best when the athlete's voice becomes the brand's voice — a storytelling-first approach Adweek counted among the biggest CMO stories of 2025.

NIKE, Inc. — “Nicole Graham” (official leadership biography)
Adweek — “The 20 Biggest CMO Shakeups of 2025”
Campaign Asia — “Nike appoints new CMO as 'DJ' van Hameren retires”

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Frank Cooper III  ·  Sean Tresvant

Sean Tresvant

CEO, Taco Bell & Chief Consumer Officer, Yum! Brands — Irvine, CA

Official links: Website

Sean Tresvant is the marketer who talked his way into the CEO's chair. He spent more than 15 years at Nike, rising to chief marketing officer of the Jordan Brand, after earlier roles at PepsiCo, Campbell's and Sports Illustrated — then jumped to Taco Bell in January 2022 as global chief brand officer.

What followed was a run of cultural moments most CMOs only pitch about: the viral return of the Mexican Pizza, celebrity partnerships, the Live Más Live fan event and Taco Bell's Consumer Day — with positive same-store sales growth in every quarter of his tenure. Yum!

Brands made him Taco Bell's chief executive effective January 1, 2024 — the first Black CEO in the brand's history — and in September 2025 promoted him again, adding chief consumer officer of Yum! Brands, with a mandate over consumer insights, brand relevance and innovation across Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut.

"The love our fans and team members have for Taco Bell is extraordinary and means we're in a unique position to push the limits on culture and become a brand that inspires and enables the world to Live Más."

Tresvant's second job now is shaping how all of Yum!'s brands win the future consumer — the same instinct he showed at Nike, where he led the Diversity Task Force and helped bring the Jordan Brand's Black Community Commitment to life.

At Taco Bell he frames the brand as a cultural platform, not a menu: fan events, music and gaming tie-ins, and the long-running Feed the Beat program supporting emerging artists all sit inside the growth strategy he runs across roughly 9,000 restaurants worldwide.

The National Provisioner — “Yum Brands names Taco Bell CEO and chief consumer officer” (Yum! Brands release, Sept. 9, 2025)
AfroTech — “Taco Bell Announces Sean Tresvant As Its New CEO, Becoming The First Black Person In The Role”

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Nicole Hubbard Graham  ·  William White

William White

Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Walmart U.S. — Bentonville, AR

Official links: Website · X

William White built his career the long way up America's biggest brands: he began as a media planner at Starcom, earned both his bachelor's in public policy and his MBA in marketing from Duke University, spent nearly nine years at Coca-Cola — where he helped scale Coke Zero into a billion-dollar brand and led global Diet Coke marketing — and seven years at Target, rising to senior vice president of marketing.

He arrived at Walmart in May 2020, in the teeth of the pandemic, and set about making the world's largest retailer feel personal: positioning Walmart as a digital-first destination, launching Walmart+ as its membership answer to Prime, and turning parking lots into drive-in movie nights and college tailgate experiences when customers were hungry for togetherness.

E-commerce grew 79% in his first year, and Forbes named him the world's most influential CMO in 2023 — and #4 again in 2024.

White now oversees customer insights and the full spectrum of marketing for Walmart U.S., driving demand, loyalty and cultural relevance for a Fortune 1 brand — including creator-led commerce through Walmart Creator and immersive shopping experiments.

He serves on the boards of the Walmart Foundation and Duke's Fuqua School of Business, and on the boards of the Ad Council, the Association of National Advertisers and MMA — a seat at the table shaping what American marketing does next, not just what Walmart sells.

Walmart Corporate — “William White, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Walmart U.S.” (official biography)
Marketers That Matter — “How General Mills & Walmart CMOs are Redefining Brand Strategy”

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Sean Tresvant  ·  Adebayo Ogunlesi

Adebayo Ogunlesi

Founding Partner, Chairman & CEO, Global Infrastructure Partners (a BlackRock company); Senior Managing Director, BlackRock — New York, NY

Official links: Website

Adebayo Ogunlesi's path runs from Ibadan to the very top of global finance. The son of Theophilus Ogunlesi, Nigeria's first professor of medicine, he took a first-class degree from Oxford and a joint J.D.–MBA from Harvard, then clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall at the U.S. Supreme Court.

He spent 23 years at Credit Suisse, rising to run its global investment bank as executive vice chairman and chief client officer — and then, at 52, walked away.

In 2006 he co-founded Global Infrastructure Partners from scratch and built it into the world's largest independent infrastructure manager, buying London City Airport in 2006, a majority of Gatwick in 2009 for about £1.5 billion, and Edinburgh Airport in 2012, managing more than $100 billion by the time BlackRock acquired GIP in 2024 for about $12.5 billion.

Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.5 billion.

Ogunlesi now sits at the top table of the world's largest asset manager: a BlackRock senior managing director, board director and member of its global executive committee, still chairman and CEO of GIP — and, since January 2025, a director of OpenAI.

In May 2026, speaking in Cape Town, he announced plans to grow BlackRock's $28–30 billion South Africa-linked assets over the following five years across energy, transport, digital infrastructure and logistics — the dealmaker who left Nigeria as a young lawyer now steering capital back toward African infrastructure at scale.

Billionaires.Africa — “Nigerian-American billionaire Adebayo Ogunlesi meets Uzbekistan's president to expand BlackRock's investments”
Wikipedia — “Adebayo Ogunlesi” (sourced biography: Marshall clerkship, Credit Suisse, GIP, BlackRock deal, Forbes $2.5B)

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  William White  ·  Strive Masiyiwa

Strive Masiyiwa

Founder & Executive Chairman, Econet Global and Cassava Technologies — London, United Kingdom

Official links: Website

Strive Masiyiwa's empire began with a courtroom, not a product. An electrical engineer who had worked for Zimbabwe's state telephone company, he founded Econet Wireless in 1993 — and when the government refused him a licence, he sued the state telecom monopoly, arguing its monopoly violated freedom of expression.

The legal battle lasted five years and took him to the brink of bankruptcy, but Zimbabwe's Constitutional Court ruled in his favor, breaking the monopoly and opening African telecoms to private capital. Econet connected its first subscriber in 1998 and became Zimbabwe's first commercial mobile network.

In March 2000, fleeing persecution, Masiyiwa left his own country and rebuilt from exile — founding Econet Global and, later, Cassava Technologies, whose fibre network now runs more than 100,000 kilometres across Africa alongside data centres and fintech. Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.2 billion in 2026, making him Zimbabwe's richest person.

"Digital technologies offer powerful tools to grow businesses and nations, enabling entrepreneurs to access markets and gives governments innovative ways to deliver better services."

With his wife Tsitsi, Masiyiwa co-founded the Higherlife Foundation, which has supported the education of hundreds of thousands of orphaned and vulnerable children — his family foundations have at times supported more than 400,000 children, and he has provided scholarships to more than 250,000 young Africans.

The couple are Giving Pledge signatories, pledged $100 million to a fund for rural entrepreneurs in Zimbabwe, donated $10 million plus a $60 million pledge against cholera in 2019, and paid striking doctors to return to work in 2020.

Today Cassava is building NVIDIA-powered AI factories in five African countries, and Time named him among the 100 most influential people in AI in 2025.

AfroTech — “How Strive Masiyiwa Maintained His Billionaire Net Worth By Investing In The Future”
Wikipedia — “Strive Masiyiwa” (sourced biography: five-year court battle, 1998 launch, 2000 exile, Higherlife, Forbes $2.2B in 2026)

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Adebayo Ogunlesi  ·  Tony Elumelu

Tony Elumelu

Founder & Chairman, Heirs Holdings; Chairman, UBA Group; Founder, Tony Elumelu Foundation — Lagos, Nigeria

Official links: Website · X

Tony Elumelu got his break by applying for a job he was not qualified for.

Fresh from a master's in economics at the University of Lagos — after starting work as a copier salesman — he answered a bank advertisement demanding a minimum 2:1 degree, though his own was a 2:2, and wrote that his degree did not demonstrate the full extent of his intelligence and ability.

The bank's chairman read the letter, took a chance, and hired him as an entry-level analyst; within about a year Elumelu was, at 27, the youngest branch manager in the bank.

In 1997 he led a small group of investors to take over the struggling Crystal Bank, renamed it Standard Trust Bank, and in 2005 led its merger with United Bank for Africa, building UBA into a pan-African bank with subsidiaries in 20 African countries plus France, the U.K. and the U.S. In 2010 he founded Heirs Holdings, his family investment company, in Lagos.

"I started my career as a salesman, a copier salesman to be specific, young, hungry, and hardworking, but the reality was that I was just one of the thousands of young Nigerian graduates, all eager to succeed."

Elumelu's second act is Africapitalism — his philosophy that Africa's private sector must create social wealth alongside profit — put into money through the Tony Elumelu Foundation, founded in 2010.

In 2015 he and his wife committed $100 million to the TEF Entrepreneurship Programme; the foundation says it has since disbursed over $100 million in direct funding to more than 20,000 young African entrepreneurs (24,000+ by the foundation's 2026 count), trained over 1.5 million young Africans on its TEFConnect platform, and helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Time named him to the TIME100 in 2020 for that work.

Wikipedia — “Tony Elumelu” (sourced biography: copier-salesman start, Crystal Bank/STB, 2005 UBA merger, $100M TEF commitment)
TechMoran — “Tony Elumelu: The Billionaire Philanthropist Betting $100m on Africa's Start-ups” (2026: 24,000+ entrepreneurs, $4.2B revenue, 1.5M jobs)
Global CEO Magazine — “How a bank manager became the voice of a continent”

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Strive Masiyiwa  ·  Tony Chase

William F. Boyd II

President & CEO, E.F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home — Cleveland, OH

Official links: Website

William F. Boyd II — 'Pepper' — leads a house built out of exclusion.

His grandfather, Elmer Franklin Boyd, came to Cleveland in 1898, trained at embalming colleges in Cincinnati and Springfield, passed the state examination in June 1905 and opened a funeral parlor on Central Avenue that fall — entering one of the few professions open to Black people at the turn of the century.

Because the industry was segregated, Elmer founded the Cleveland Funeral Directors Association and built the firm through the Great Depression, moving it to East 89th Street in 1938.

Pepper, a Glenville 'Tarblooder' who attended Michigan State and graduated from Fisk University, joined his father after graduating from the Pittsburgh School of Mortuary Science and has now been a licensed funeral director and mortician for more than 50 years — nearly 60 years working in the Fairfax neighborhood he grew up in.

E.F. Boyd & Son is described by the Western Reserve Historical Society, via Real Men Magazine, as the longest-running minority-owned business in Cleveland, and by Case Western Reserve's Encyclopedia of Cleveland History as one of the city's oldest African American funeral homes — with locations in Cleveland and Warrensville Heights and an on-site crematory, now involving a fourth generation of Boyds.

In the family's Teaching Cleveland oral history, sister Marcella Boyd Cox sums up the mission: a community-related, people-related business that gives back by being members of the community and offering a good service.

Teaching Cleveland — “Fairfax Oral History: Boyd Family”
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University — “E. F. Boyd & Son Funeral Home, Inc.”

More from Bourgeois Society: Empire Makers  ·  Will Cyrus  ·  Frank Cooper III