Want to know a staggering fact? Only about 2.8% of U.S. businesses in 2021 were owned by black Americans, according to the Pew Research Center. What is contributing to the disparity in entrepreneurship, especially in the tech industry?
That’s the question William Brown III, a sales development representative and MBA student at USC Marshall School of Business, wanted to know when he sat down with w3r Consulting’s Keith Echols.
During their 54-minute conversation, the two discussed focused tenacity, aligning your own passions with customer needs, and creating parity in the workplace. Watch or read their conversation to gain insight into your entrepreneurial journey.
Editor’s Note: Transcript Edited for Flow
Keith Echols
So, when you talk about entrepreneurs, I think some people can play it really, really safe. This [conversation] is about really, how are you wired? What are you good at? What’s your personality type? And in fact, I’m going to copy this into the chat here for you to actually go ahead and do that as a secondary aspect. That’s a Myers-Briggs test. Are you familiar with that personality test at all?
William Brown III
No, I am not.
Keith Echols
Yeah, that’s going to be very instrumental. You want to really begin to understand what type of person you are and your personality traits. Those things become very important as you start your career, either by working in the marketplace for another corporation or as you pursue your entrepreneurism. Again, you need to know what your own proclivities and tendencies are because if you don’t, they become blind spots for you [in either situation]. In life, you’re going to really have high-highs and low-lows. Those high-highs come at the expense of really hard work, pursuing a vision, pursuing a path, and then having that plan fail, not really materialize in the way that you actually thought that it would. But all those things have inherent risks. You must bounce back from them and proceed forward.
I know in the past, we’ve talked a little bit about sales. How many times do you need to hear no before you actually hear the one yes? Being an entrepreneur is very much like that. I mean, there’s this level of bullheadedness, this level of focused tenacity where you take all of those noes, all of the unanswered calls, all the contrary responses, and they become fuel that allow you to adapt your tactics, adapt your approach, so that you can really continue to press forward towards the vision, goal, and objective.
Those things are still very much apropos, even when you’re working for a corporation or public entity of some sort. There’s a difference between working as an entrepreneur versus working in a corporate environment. There’s a lot more opportunity for you to learn, fail, and then actually have a cushion when you fall in a corporate world. That is not the case over here. When you fall down, you scrape your knee, you bust your ass flat out. Those become very hard lessons when you’re like, “Oh, wow, that was stark.”
Sometimes when you experience some of these things as an entrepreneur, it makes you afraid to try again. And if you have a relationship, especially if you are starting to have a family and kids, you need to make sure everyone else is bought into that vision and plan, actually playing a part to help them come to pass. It’s not just your immediate family but also your friends and extended family. There may be nights you may need someone to watch the kids because you have to now continue to work on doing what you need to do over here so, there’s a lot there.
William Brown III
And I think I’m recognizing there’s still a need for both. Right now, we’re learning about corporate entrepreneurship, building and using entrepreneurial skills in your organization. Prior to this class, I never even understood there was even terminology like a corporate entrepreneur.
Even when I’m thinking about corporations I want to work with, I’m wondering what sort of culture do you have? Is there innovation, experimentation, and A/B testing of things? Is the corporation allowing new ideas to come in and sponsor those new ideas, is that even part of the culture? Some corporations do not really care about growing and being innovative.
A couple of my classmates were talking about how their organizations will literally pay for the patents. They will help you in those R&D spaces. I think that’s very unheard of in normal workplaces. So, I’m recognizing that’s what I want to do because it keeps me engaged with what’s going on with the company and wanting to add more.
But separate from that, I’m also thinking about trying to build something on my own. What I’ve recognized is that, yes, you can have this full-time work, but to really see real wealth you need to have a business venture on the side that you’re building on your own.
Keith Echols
Even my own path to w3r was not that uncommon. I worked for corporations throughout the day, which gave me a base of operation and some sense of steady income. And most importantly, it gave me the benefits I needed to cover myself and my family. After my workday was done, I would spend time cultivating things which were consistent towards cultivating my own interests and building the business.
Let me start and say, I originally never said I wanted to actually one day own a business. I didn’t grow up one day and say that. That didn’t develop until I was actually into it. When doing the work I enjoyed doing so much for a major IT corporation, I saw that there’s a way to make money and deliver for people, but that can be done that offers parity for all engaged.
Here’s what I’m talking about. Working for a major automotive company and then for an IT company, delivering on their technology, I knew exactly what the rate structures and compensation models were for consultants because I was managing and leading all the folks. I knew what we were getting paid from the customer and what the people actually delivering all the IT competency were getting compensated. And to me, it really felt wrong. It really did. I felt it was wrong because there was a huge gap.
And granted, I know that’s how the economy and marketplace are set up in order to operate. But to me, I just felt like there was a better way to do that, where you could still create a way for people to continue to hone their craft, own their skills, still be on top of their game, and want to be on top of the game because they’re really being paid what I would consider is commensurate with their skillsets.
That was one aspect. Couple that with my love for computer technology, put that into a cauldron, cooked it up, and now here I am 30 years later. I still love what I do so much that I would do it for free. And therein lies the caveat of what can’t be taught.
You can teach the fundamentals, I can give you all the building blocks, but the chief ingredient still has to be this “What do you as a person with the vision or an idea, see as the gap in a marketplace or the solution? You’ve got to have that first. And then you can put together all those different building blocks that you’re learning.
I see too many people in academia come out with all the building blocks but missing a key piece: an answer to the questions “What are you going to do?” and “Where are you going to direct your skill set?” And college can’t teach you that. That is an innate piece that must come from you and what you see and what you then bring to the equation.
William Brown III
Right, right. Yeah, that’s the thing about business, you know, it’s like you can, like you said, you can do theory, you can do some case studies, but the only way you can really learn is by being in the fire and really learning from that. I’m going to try to do some formalized questions. How did you recognize the potential market or need for this product and service?
Keith Echols
So, if I were to pull it all the way back, I’ve always loved computer technology, and since I was a 10-year-old kid, I would cut lawns, shovel snow, and do whatever little kind of community hustles I could for our neighbors in order to buy parts and pieces at RadioShack so that I could continue my inquisitive tinkering around computer technology.
But unfortunately, I was a little bit misdirected. I wanted to make a lot of money. I wanted to study to be a lawyer and an engineer, so I could become this patent attorney. I was like, well, gee whiz, I have a law degree, I have an engineering degree, I can get paid, right?
William Brown III
Right.
Keith Echols
And then I completed my undergraduate studies, went to school at night, and was working for a utility company in the engineering department when I saw how the engineers there worked. To me, it was so counterintuitive to I thought engineers should basically be doing, right? They should be impacting the world, changing lives, and solving problems. And maybe that was just one narrow scope of actually being an engineer. I know that now, but that left a burning impression in my mind. Only through that experience did I return to my first internal passion and gift that I had.
They had a computer problem, and none of the engineers or their corporate IT department could figure it out or fix it. They explained the situation to me and fairly quickly I was able to identify what the problem was and then bring about a level of resolution for something that had inhibited a lot of their overall design work. And for me, looking at the problem and the resolution was just so simple and easy.
But that experience became part and parcel for my understanding of people’s approach to technology. They want the benefits, but they don’t necessarily know how to really get the most out of it and make it work for them. That experience helped galvanize my perspective of what I saw as a market need.
Working for a large international IT consulting company, I got more validation of the same problem that I experienced. All those different use cases really helped solidify my understanding of the need.
I saw that you could meet the customer’s needs and achieve their business objective and still bring to bear really knowledgeable IT market leaders and professionals to bring about best-of-breed technology. Plus, you could do it in a way where the customers weren’t getting overcharged and the consultants weren’t being marginalized, contained, or restricted. And I was just like, well, wow, okay, well, here’s an opportunity. And that served as the impetus for our operation that we now have almost 30 years later.
William Brown III
Gotcha. So, what you are saying is people on both ends of the cycle, weren’t necessarily having their needs or what they want prioritized? You looked at this as we should make sure that every party involved is being taken care of? So, you felt “I can create something where not only the customer is taken care of, but also the people we’re building who have the knowledge, who have the skills are also feeling like they are not being overused or misuse.” And that’s how your business came to be, correct?
Keith Echols
Correct. And again, so it goes back to the word I used earlier: parity. Trying to find this element of parity or balance between giving the customers all the things they need so that they can continue to meet these economies of scale and new opportunities for them to continue to grow the business and doing that in a way where folks felt like they were being paid market wages, shall I say.
William Brown III
And that can be hard, you know?
Keith Echols
It is!
William Brown III
A business is all about margins, right? I took an economics class last semester, and everything is a trade-off. I can pay my employee a livable wage and amazing compensation, but if that doesn’t reap a benefit on back end with sales or revenue, something has to give. But if you can bring it to the middle, then I think everyone’s taken care of. And that’s hard. It’s hard to find a business model to get to that point.
Keith Echols
Every day the model has to change. Learning from your failures or foreseeing potential problems and then coming up with countermeasures to offset those things become lifelong lessons. That’s in a corporate environment, working as an entrepreneur or business owner, as well as in your own household.
Again, so maybe I need to offer you benefits, but maybe I can offer you all the nice big beefy healthcare and 401(k) package. So maybe I offer something that still meets the need, not cost as much, but still allows us to maintain the right rate structure with the clients and give our team the level of comfort and care that they and their families require.
So absolutely, those models have to be recalibrated a number of different times. There’s work that we have to do internally in order to maintain that parity. There are times we have to do educate with our clients to let them know that what they’re asking for they can’t get with that rate structure because, again, they’re always going to want more.
We have to then bring market analysis to say, “Well, there’s benchmark data out there that says what you’re asking for is typically done by 2.5 people. Now, if you take the collective wages of those 2.5 people, this is what it amounts to. And you want me to do that at the wage of really the one person?” There’s a lot of education that has to go into it on the customer side.
And then there’s education that has to go to on the consulting side as well, because it’s just like, “What you asking for, man? Listen, I’m sorry. You want to start your own business; you go right on ahead. But this one particular opportunity is not how you make good for every bad situation that you had, right? This is the role. Here’s the scope of the work. This is the rate structure that’s commensurate with that. Now the answer is up to you. Either you want to do it for this rate, or you don’t. If not, it’s OK. We’ll find that next opportunity that aligns with where you want to be, both skillset-wise and rate-wise.” So those conversations happen on a daily, daily basis in order to try to make sure that we maintain that level of parity.
William Brown III
Gotcha. A lot of negotiation.
Keith Echols
All the time, baby.
William Brown III
You sparked a question. You’ve talked about how you’ve been at the business for about 30 years, and you talked about this tug and pull, this trade-off. How do you tell an employee the business is not able to give this, but still keep them wanting to join your organization? How do you keep your employees motivated and keep them bought into the vision? How do you keep a customer bought in when you’re unable to do what they initially wanted?
Keith Echols
Yeah, that’s another great question. I think a lot of that is still rooted in the relevancy of what you provide, both for your team and then also for your clients. In order to stay relevant in the IT arena, we have to continue to grow and evolve our collective skillset as a corporation. And then that has to correlate back to our service offering and our go-to-market strategy we actually have with a client.
Several years ago, everyone was talking about big data. Now, you don’t even hear people talking about big data. You hear it’s all about AI, right? So how have we adapted our tools, techniques, and our language to make sure it is reflective of what the market wants to consume? And then how does that align with our skillset and our actual ability to deliver.
I use the word shared vision with my team. Here’s directionally where we want to go. That still leaves room for you to really provide your level of input into it, but it has to be consistent with the direction that we’re going in. If we’re heading north and your input is going to take us south, I’m sorry, then maybe it’s no, not now. And in some cases, it may be no, not ever, right? But people then have to really see what you’re adding here isn’t really supportive of the direction that we’re going.
That vision and those objectives always have to be communicated, always have to be talked about so people can see themselves as part of the direction, see themselves as part of the solution, and then give them the ability to bring their own level of expertise.
No one wants to be told from A to B exactly what they need to do in order to do their job. There are things we consistently produce in our organization that are productionized. So, we may produce a base widget, but then we still leave room to take that widget and then add different pieces onto it to really make sure that it’s reflective of what our clients may want or the direction that we’re going in.
So, for our clients, it’s being relevant and adapting our skillsets. And for our team, it’s the same thing, but also adapting our shared vision. That helps to make sure that folks stay locked and loaded into what we got going on here and in the direction we’re headed in.
William Brown III
Gotcha. Gotcha. You bring up a really good point. Yes, we have these criteria, we want you to be creative, and we want you to be innovative, but in alignment with the organizational goals.
Keith Echols
The boundaries.
William Brown III
We don’t want to demean your ability to think and be creative. But also, this is a business. We have an organization, we have a mission, and it has to align with where we’re going. I can see how that is helpful in making sure your employees feel they’re involved in the success of the business. At the same time, we understand there’s three heads of this business and we get the last say. We develop the paths of this organization.
Keith Echols
It’s important when people use these big buckets that we don’t overgeneralize people, situations, and circ*mstances. We talk about employees and team members, right? Some are creative, some are not creative. Some you have to overprescribe instructions, some you can communicate overall objective and timing which gives them the ability to navigate the terrain.
This is where the ecosystem of your company and culture has to be adapted for all those different styles of people that you have to create this environment where people feel like they are thriving, where they feel like they’re making contributions. If everything I had to deal with was binary, black or white…man, I can’t begin to begin to tell you how much easier that would be.
What makes it interesting and challenging is really the human dynamic we experience on a day-to-day basis. Every day we work hard in order to be better today than we were the day before. And sometimes we fail at that. But the whole point is (and this is part of our culture) you will fail. You will fail. Even here, even with something that’s only prescribed that’s proceduralized, you will fail.
But the value that we benefit from as a company is making sure we learn from failure. We use the vernacular in our organization of fail forward. When you fail, make sure you fail forward, learn something for it. And then you need to make sure that you communicate it so that your colleagues and your peers don’t make the same mistake over again. And that’s how we’ve built knowledge capital. That’s how we built the resiliency we need in order to sustain the organization and continue to grow.
Want more lessons in entrepreneurship? Stay tuned for the second half of the conversation with Keith Echols and William Brown III. In the meantime, check out our blog for more insights from the w3r Consulting team.
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