Women of Black Excellence II: The Builders Behind Ellie Diop, Sevetri Wilson, Michele Hoskins and Gail Warrior

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When a $60,000-a-year job offer was withdrawn after a credit check, she decided to teach herself how credit actually works, spending hours studying in the public library.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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Vivian Kaye  ·  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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Arnita Johnson-Hall  ·  Sevetri Wilson

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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Sevetri Wilson  ·  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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Michele Hoskins  ·  Jenell Ross

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”
Digital Dealer — “An Exclusive Interview with Jenell R. Ross, President of Bob Ross Auto Group”
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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Gail Warrior  ·  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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Jenell Ross  ·  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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Diedre Windsor  ·  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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Carolyn Thurston  ·  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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Ashley Williams-Booker  ·  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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Kristy Black  ·  Sophia Strother

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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Ellie Diop  ·  Michele Hoskins

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 Bourgeois Society: Women of Black Excellence  ·  Lasenta Lewis-Ellis  ·  Ashley Thomas