Why Selling Isn’t “Selling Out” | Richelieu Dennis on Essence Fest Fallout & Black Business Issues

15:24Richelieu Dennis:You had partners in the early stages. I wonder what your strength was, right? Like we are a company with three founders. Each of us have different strengths. What was your strength at this time in the brand, right? Was it product management? Was it accounting? Was it logistics?

15:41Earn Your Leisure Hosts:What was your... So my mother takes care of the money. That's what my mother does. But when we started, she was very focused on making sure that we made the product right. So that was her thing. My partner, who was also my college roommate, Nima, was very focused and very gifted at figuring out how to make it and how to make it at scale. Right. And so those were the beginnings, right? And then my sister came in and took it to a whole nother level. And then we started to get in other people that joined along the way that brought all these different talents and all these different skills. But to your point, I don't know of a business where there's one person that does it all and can do it all and then can help that and then can make that business scale.

16:43Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Most of the time when you have that sort of individual, it becomes very difficult for the business to grow and scale because they have to have their hands in everything. And that slows down, that slows down scale, that slows down decision making. It takes away perspective, right? Like one of the things that we're big on is diversity of thought, right? I want to hear what everybody thinks about it, how they feel about it. Let's make a decision. Let's make a decision quick and let's execute against that decision. But getting input from different perspectives allows you to build things that you wouldn't as one individual think about, which when you come to think about it was really that one of the core pillars of our success, starting on a table and listening to women telling you what they want, and then going back and figuring out how to give them what they want.

17:38Richelieu Dennis:So when you decided to sell, how did you know it was the right time to transition? Well, I had always been focused on building businesses

17:52Earn Your Leisure Hosts:to reinvest back in our communities, right? Like that was always the focus, right? And so even as we were building Shea, we were doing that at a time when nobody else was really thinking about it. If you think about the corporatives that we had that were producing the Shea, where we went from just buying Shea to investing in supply chain with those women in Ghana. And then now it's Ghana, it's Ivory Coast, It's Sierra Leone.

18:30Earn Your Leisure Hosts:It used to be called Upper Volta. Anyway, it'll come to me. But we're in like five different countries now where we're investing in their supply chain and helping those women manufacture, store, distribute. So move from become from being sort of gatherers of nuts to now producing semi-finished product, improving the value of the product that they build so that they're able to sell at a premium. because prior to that, what would happen is that the women, like my grandmother, would gather the nuts, and then the men would take the nuts, and they would go process the nuts, and they would make the premium on the actual butter, right?

19:21Earn Your Leisure Hosts:We sort of say, hey, that's not fair. That's not the way this should work. And in Africa, it's called women's gold, right? And so if it's women's gold, they should benefit from the gold, right? So we started to say, okay, we won't just buy the finished products here from these sort of wholesalers. What we're going to do is we're going to go to the very beginning of the pyramid. We're going to work with the women. We're going to train them. We're going to provide equipment. We're going to provide safety. We're going to provide infrastructure. We're going to build processing facilities. We're going to invest processing facilities alongside them so that they can produce the finished product.

20:04Earn Your Leisure Hosts:They can store it. They can have the capital to buy the supply. And then we buy from them the finished a butter. And that program has now impacted hundreds of thousands of women.

20:18Richelieu Dennis:So the idea of selling, right? Because Shai's alluding to that part. And I'm interested as well, knowing when to do it. but also I'm thinking back to the time when it happened, when you sell, what was the environment, right? Cause we, we're looking at now we see companies sell. There's always critique. There's negative critique. I think it has a lot to attribute to the lack of education around it. I guess when you were in this process, again, knowing the timing of it, but was there criticism at the time of yourself or like what was the

20:53Earn Your Leisure Hosts:environment? Yeah. When we, when we saw there was, It was tremendous criticism because it was like the first of its kind and of its size. I think before that, only BET had gotten that kind of recognition or gotten that kind of scale and then the recognition around the exit. And there were the concerns. But what I was alluding to in telling that story about the supply chain was our business was built differently. Our business was built so that we could invest back into this community. So that was the first place that we did that, right? Then we started to recognize and realize, and hey, look, there's all these black women that are buying our product, right?

21:35Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And the same issues that those women in Africa have are the same issues that black American women have here. There's no access to capital for them. If they have ideas of businesses that they wanna run, there's nobody providing them that capital. And remember now, this is back in the 90s. So it was even it was even more foreign than it is today. Right. So there was nobody there was nobody that was really supporting our community of of women entrepreneurs in an organized way. so we then said okay what we're going to do is we as we build this business we're going to take 10 of our top line revenue against the brands that we're putting through here right and we're going to invest that back in african-american women and in entrepreneurs in their communities right and so that's what we started to do so we would go to we would go sell a product to whatever retailer and say it was Walmart or Target or CVS or whoever.

22:39Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And we say to them, okay, when we get on shelf, we're going to take 10 % of this revenue. We're going to put it right on the package so that people know we're going to take 10 % of this revenue and we're going to go invest it in these places. So the first place that we did that was around education. So we partnered with the Tuck School of Business and said, hey, we want to build a program. They already had an executive ed program. And we said, we want to partner with you on this executive program, but we want you to tailor it to the needs of black women entrepreneurs. And so we worked with them to develop that program.

23:23Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Today, I'd lose track. probably three, 400 women have gone through that program today. And that program still runs as we speak today. So the idea there was, hey, we can help our consumers and our community actually be better partners, be better customers. They can grow, they can scale, they can run their businesses, they can do these things. And so we, we focus very heavily on that, but they would come out of these programs and, and we, we all have heard this. I don't know how many times before, but they would come out of these programs and be like, this is fantastic. I now have the Tuck network.

24:10Earn Your Leisure Hosts:I've now met all these incredible black women that you guys have put through this program. We have tons of ideas. My business is, I can't wait to get back to my business. The only problem is now I know all this stuff. I got no money. right? I can't go to the bank and get the, and get the loan. All I need is 25,$30 ,000, right? And back then those numbers were real, right? In, in helping, in helping them get their businesses off the ground. So we then started to rethink it and say, you know, this education piece, this is great, right? Like we're creating like a real entrepreneurial class of women here, but they can't run their businesses because nobody will invest in them.

24:54Earn Your Leisure Hosts:So we then said, okay, as the business grows, we're going to continue to invest, but not just in the education. We're not going to take it up to invest in them so they can run their, they can, they can develop and grow their businesses. So as we started to do that, then we started to recognize how much greater the need was than what it was that we even thought when we started it, which then started to get to thinking, well, we've built, we've now built value in this business, right? We've built significant value here. We need to unlock that value so we can go and continue this work of building out an economic infrastructure for the women in our communities, right?

25:36Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And so that's, that was the impetus of that thinking. So we started to think about it that way and say, okay, if we do this, that now allows us to go create 20 Shea Moistures, right? To go support 20 Shea Moistures. And how many lives can that transform and change? And so that was the impetus for us.

26:06Earn Your Leisure Hosts:It hadn't been done before, certainly not at that scale, right? And because of the scale it was done at, it became very public. We're not very public. But because of that, it became very public. And there were sort of three sides to it. It was the one side of, well, they're selling out. They've sold out. You build something and then they sold out. And we should probe what that means. right then the the other side of it was great um this is fantastic because we don't see we don't see this that was not as loud as that you saw you saw that piece right and then there was the there was the yeah i hear what you say you're gonna go do but i don't believe it right this is this is marketing this is this is um this is talk right and so we actually did what we said we were going to do and we can, we continue, we continue to do it.

27:09Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Um, and, um, for those that were excited and motivated and inspired by it, um, I think we saw, we saw a huge uptake in, um, businesses that were then thinking about, Hey, how do we, how do we become multi-generational, right? How do we, how do we come, how do we create scale? Right? So here's a pathway to scale, like, like Shea Moisture has shown us how you can scale. And so you saw, then saw a ton of companies starting to do that and we can unpack that as well. And then there's still the contingent that was very skeptical. Right. Um, and, and, and I think in a lot of ways, um, had been disappointed so many times before, right?

28:05Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Around products that they thought, hey, when this company was doing this, they were focused on me. They weren't watering down the product. Something changed. Something changed. And that's not necessarily the case. I'm not here to say that things don't change over time because they do. but there's a physiological change that happens in the human body, right? So when you're 22, what your hair needs are are very different from after you've had a baby and you've gone through certain life stages and then you move on, you go on. And so part of that is the journey of the human being themselves to say, hey, oh no, this changed because it's not working the way that it was.

28:51Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And it doesn't necessarily mean that the product changed, the human changed, right? And in some cases, when you do sell to these companies, and then in some cases, in most cases, they're finding ways to maximize their return. So they're saying, okay, we have this scale. We can change this, change that, and we can get a bigger return.

29:15Richelieu Dennis:This ingredient might cost us much. We get more revenue if we add this one. So let's have this conversation. So there's a three. Let's have this conversation in a very black and white format. There's a narrative that when black businesses sell their company, that they've sold out. And you've sold the company, but you've also invested in a lot of companies that have been purchased. And sold more companies. Okay. Yeah. Miel. Miel. Miel. That was a recent one that was very big on Twitter. But an incredible couple, right? Monique and Melvin. Yeah, out of the moment. An incredible family. Shout out to Monique and Melvin.

29:57Richelieu Dennis:Definitely. So let's really examine this on several different levels, right? Like the idea that we can never have generational wealth because we always sell out. You don't see. But that's not how generational wealth is created. But I'm going to explain each one. Okay. So, all right, so that's the first. I'm a little passionate about it. He got three pillars. That's a pain point. That's the first one. That's the first one. That's the first critique is that how can we ever have generational wealth if we sell it out? We don't have anything to pass down. What's your critiques to that?

30:33Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Well, look, I think there's history is littered with black owned businesses that thought that way, waited too late to take advantage of the wealth that they had created. Right. And are no longer around. right and they're not around for a whole host of reasons right market dynamics change the biggest part of this and the common thread is and we'll talk about this hopefully a little bit later the grace that is not given to the black entrepreneur right which then takes away the opportunities that the black entrepreneur could earn right so So most of these companies don't have access to capital to$30 ,000, right?

31:40Earn Your Leisure Hosts:What about to$30 million, right? There's probably 10, 15 black entrepreneurs and businesses that you can point to that have raised more than$50 million. even if that i'd be surprised right um but the the the challenge with that is that say you were building something in the in the 70s and there's plenty of examples there were great great brands in the 70s um uh um brown and brothers um lustre products uh johnson products uh tcb like you can go on and on, right? And these brands, our mothers and grandmothers grew up on, right? Many of them had the same idea of, I'm going to pass this down from one generation to the next, right?

32:40Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And they did that. And when demands change, when tastes change, not all kids are equipped to run businesses, just because I had this child doesn't mean that this child can now do the things that I did. And is it even fair to put that burden on a kid whose true calling may have been to be a doctor, right? Or to play a sport or to, but now you have to be tied to this business because we created and this is how the family survives, right? Many of those businesses made from one generation into the second generation and then failed, right? Not just because, hey, the second generation couldn't do it, but it's a multitude of things.

33:32Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Let's say the second generation was exceptional at running the business, right? Now you've built a business, and this was one of the things that kept me up at night. Now you've built a business that's gone and taken share away from a multinational corporation that believes that they own that shelf space. And whose infrastructure is set up to compete to maintain that shelf space against competitors that have the same scale and the same reach. That have the same resources, the same paths to market. right? That's how they're set up. I'm not saying they sit there and think, oh, here's a small brand.

34:17Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Let me go kill it. But their machine is built to either eat or kill anything that comes on that shelf space. So now I'm generation two. I've now broken in, we'll use a brand like ORS, Organic Root Stimulator. Perfect example. Organic Root Stimulator came out of Softsheen Carson. And Softsheen Carson built a beautiful brand. They actually sold that brand to L 'Oreal. They were one of the first ones to sell to L 'Oreal. I mean, to sell to a multinational, right? And the son started up a second brand called ORS, Organic Root Stimulator, right? And it took off, right? So Gary, obviously, highly, highly, one of the most competent people I've ever met.

35:12Earn Your Leisure Hosts:But now you've got to go compete against L 'Oreal, who owns Softsheet. Or you've got to go compete against Pantene, or you've got to go and compete against Cream of Nature, or Revlon, or whomever it is. Right. And they have access to capital. They have infrastructure to produce at scale. They've been doing it for, you know, 40, 50, some of them, hundreds of years. If you look at a P &G, it's like hundreds of years. And so how do you compete against that when you can't go to your local bank and get a$20 million loan? or go to a fund and get a$50 million investment to go scale a business like that.

36:05Earn Your Leisure Hosts:So you run into these structural challenges. So you have two things. You have, hey, does the next generation actually want to do it? And if the next generation can actually do it, are they going to have access to the resources and the capital to do it? And when you come from our community, if you've built a business that's doing$10 million a year,$20 million a year,$30 million a year, that oftentimes is probably the largest black owned business in your neighborhood, in your community, maybe even in your state. Right. And so as a community, we look at it and say, wow, they're doing so well. And they're so, you know, they've gotten so big.

36:47Earn Your Leisure Hosts:but to the broader marketplace that says, hey, you guys have unlocked something here that is taking away shelf space from my business. I need to either acquire it or I need to knock it off or I somehow need to compete against it because that's how we survive. And so you end up now in an environment where you may be a big fish in our world, But when you hit the larger world, it's a much different game. And it becomes much, much harder for our companies to compete. And then the other problem that we have is talent. Right? So if you think about what it takes to become an executive inside of a corporation, right?

37:47Earn Your Leisure Hosts:The investment in your education, right? The student loans that you have. The investment in self-development. the things that you have to go through in those organizations, because many places you don't feel a sense of belonging. You don't have the same levels of mentorship. It's not the same access to getting pulled up. So you're clawing your way up every day, right? You have to be, as our parents used to tell us, you got to be six times as good as the next guy just to get to first base, right? You've got to literally be that much better. And then you think, well, I'd love to go work for a black-owned business.

38:36Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And you stop to think about it and realize, hey, yeah, that business may not be able to get the capital that I was going to take to get from point A to point B. So now what I've done is I'm going to take a risk on all that I've built here, on all of the cost of my education. I now have two kids that I've got to put through college or other sort of familiar obligations. and so then the really great talent starts to think well that's just too much of a risk because i don't know if that company can survive right i don't know if they can get the capital that they need and we're seeing that all around us today right so that's that's that's that's the other thing that goes into that into that mindset when you talk about going from one generation to the next, right?

39:32Earn Your Leisure Hosts:It's like, how do, how do you do it? And there's a reason that so few are able to do it.

39:40Richelieu Dennis:So, and then also talk about like how public opinion can actually sway even a future valuations of a company. Like if somebody's getting targeted on Twitter, like the next person that sells their company, the company that purchases that is going to say, okay, well, I'm going to have to buy it at at a discount because I know that there's going to be backlash.

40:02Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Yeah.

40:02Richelieu Dennis:Yeah. Right. So that's actually hurting black founders.

40:06Earn Your Leisure Hosts:It hurts. It hurts tremendous. It doesn't just hurt black founders. It hurts the black community period, because I think what we don't, we don't truly, one of the things to really appreciate and understand is what impact can a business or does a business like Mayel have on their community in Indiana, right? The jobs that they provide. And it's not just the jobs that they provide and the income that they make, but it's also that you're in a safe, comfortable environment to work in, right? And that is that is priceless, right? But I think what, getting back to your point, I think today, many entrepreneurs, a driving factor in why they want to sell is because they're afraid, right?

41:07Earn Your Leisure Hosts:They're afraid, the things that I just talked about, am I going to be able to get the capital to continue? Am I going to be, is the market going to change on me and I'm not going to be able to react? Am I going to be able to get the type of talent support that I need to run this? And more than anything else, if my community turns on me, am I going to be able to stay in business, right? And recently we've seen examples of where the community turns and the business can't recover or the individual can't recover, therefore the business can't recover, right? And so I think you put those factors in there, and it's a very, very harsh environment for black entrepreneurs, right?

41:56Because the places that you should find comfort, oftentimes you don't get that comfort, right?

42:02Earn Your Leisure Hosts:You don't get that grace. You don't get that forgiveness, right? And you don't have the access to the things that can help solve the problem, right? So it's a double-edged sword. But I believe a lot of, I mean, when we, I gave you the reasons why we did what we did, and we caught a lot of backlash for selling. And when we were selling the business, we were very clear in saying, hey, we're going to unlock wealth to invest in black businesses. And I think to date, we've probably invested more in black businesses than just about any fund out there.

42:46Richelieu Dennis:You're up there. I mean, the fear sounds like it comes from the grace conversation, right? Or the lack thereof grace conversation because we're not afforded the ability to make a mistake because of that. If we do, what will happen, right? Or I might sell because I'm at the point where I haven't made the mistake, So let me get out while I'm ahead. Yeah. What, what, I mean, you've, you've invested in a lot of businesses. You've seen them not be afforded that lack of grace. What do you say to both populations, the people who are not extending it and to the entrepreneur who's actually living in it?

43:24Richelieu Dennis:Yeah.

43:25Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Look, I think, I think it's, we're, we're getting to a place in our society where we're forgetting that the only way our ancestors got through this environment was by loving each other. Right. And that's the only way that's, that's, and that's, that's what we need to, that's what we need to stick with. Right. It's, we can be, we can be critical, right. Especially if that is to help you get better. there's there's no there's no i mean i i take it all the time i'm i'm i i enjoy learning and saying hey oh i missed that oh we could have done that better oh we should do this this differently right that's different from when there's sort of this it's it's so venomous that you can't see past it that you then the message gets lost right and now it's it's it's fight or flight and you get you get defensive and and you lose it i think that there's a way for us to help each other get better um through through love and care and hard conversations right you gotta have the hard conversations um but it's not always this sort of black and white thing right um so that so that's that's that's the way that there's like i guess it's a reconciliation moment right like there must be internal healing because the criticism a lot of times yeah it can be fair and you can

45:02Richelieu Dennis:learn from it but when it's vile and there's no idea of hey if that gets torn down you know there's not not anything coming after it yeah i don't do i mean i feel like that's not part of the consciousness of of the that population that is creating that what are your thoughts yeah i mean i

45:22Earn Your Leisure Hosts:I think it's, I think for people that say that or that, that, that behave that way, I don't think they understand how hard it is to actually build these things. Right. Um, and even if they understand how hard it is to build it, um, it is, it is imperative that you still try to preserve what it is that's been built, right? You don't need to burn this down to go build something else. I look around at other communities. I look around in other places. That's not what I see happening, right? And so it used to be that we could take comfort and solace. We could retreat back inside, get our strength, and then go back out and fight, right?

46:16Earn Your Leisure Hosts:If we get to a place of where there's nowhere for me to retreat, there's nowhere to take solace, there's nowhere to regroup, there's nowhere to recuperate, there's no safe environment because the community that I've built is... Look, I've met tons of entrepreneurs. We've invested in tons of them. We spend a ton of time with them like we do with each other. Talking about hard things. Talking about challenges. How do we work together? How do we figure this out? How do we move forward? If that's not what we're fostering, then we've got no chance.

46:55Richelieu Dennis:So, but yeah, more like, let's break this down a little bit more as far as the grace that black businesses are not giving because a company like Meta, you know, has a billion dollar lawsuit where they were actually selling people's data and nobody actually unstalled Instagram.

47:12Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Yeah.

47:13Richelieu Dennis:Or, you know, Apple, you know, has glitches every single iPhone that comes out, right? And purposely messed it up as far as for Android users. There's not a mass to get rid of iPhones. When Mercedes-Benz has a recall, nobody stops buying Mercedes-Benz. But it's like a T-shirt comes three weeks late and it's like you make a TikTok video to actually bash the company and say how poor, and this is why you don't buy from black businesses because black people don't know how to handle business the right way. So, like, explain that, because that's a level of not only grace that's not given, but it's campaigns that's run out of the enjoyment of seeing people fail, when that same energy is never put into organizations and companies that have historically made 10 times worse of a blunder than somebody mismanaging, you know, things on a small business level.

48:22Richelieu Dennis:Yeah.

48:24Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Look, I don't know what the solution is, but I can tell you there's a lot of mistrust in our community and some of it earned and some of it not. right but the way that i choose to live and i i think the way that um is is is grace is that word is that word grace because the the challenges that those businesses are facing and those individuals that are running those businesses are facing just to get that product on the market that you're so proud to see when you see it like when you see that t-shirt or you see that dress or you see that scarf or you see that shampoo or that, like the pride that you feel because you know how hard it is to get it there, right?

49:21Earn Your Leisure Hosts:The grace has to be come in to help us sustain it. You know, it has to come in to help us pick it up and grow it, right? And not when it becomes successful, you know, just because somebody's business gets successful doesn't mean that they stop caring about the people that they've always cared about. It doesn't mean that they stop wanting to solve the problems that they're solving, right? But they're now dealing at a whole nother level, with a whole nother set of problems that they haven't dealt with before. And that they may not have a network around them that has dealt with it before. So they may not have the good fortune of you being able to pick up the phone and call me and say, hey, Rich, here's what I'm dealing with.

50:05Earn Your Leisure Hosts:How have you solved it, right? How do you get to it? they may not have that around them right they may not have that person in their organization that has run a business like this somewhere else and has that expertise because of what i said earlier is the risk of of people coming over and that gets that becomes a very lonely place right so now you're seeing women saying and men saying hey you know what i'm just gonna shut it now i'm just i'm just gonna pause right because i i can't i can't do it and that's not what our community wants that's very detrimental to our to our community especially at a time where we're under pressure from so like we're talking about unemployment rate is 7.7 percent for black people right now right that's double what it is for the white community.

51:07Earn Your Leisure Hosts:600 ,000, 700 ,000 women losing their jobs or being displaced from their jobs. That's real economic pressure that we're feeling between the unemployment, the direct loss of DEI means that the contracts that you were able to go bid for on a more even playing field, you can no longer bid for on a more even playing field. And that's got nothing to do with race. It's got to do with economics. If I don't have the capital to put the presentation together, to drive the programs, to build the infrastructure, I'm not going to be able to, I'm not going to be able to win that. Right. Then you add in there, you know, healthcare.

51:46Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Right. And the cost of what that is. So you take a population that has a high unemployment rate that's now losing its businesses. You add in the we're disproportionately impacted by these health issues. Right. So now, you know, every dime I got is going to just helping me stay alive or taking care of my mother or taking care of my father. And you start to add these things together and we're ending up in a place of extreme economic destabilization. Right. And so all of that coming together puts a lot of pressure, not just on not just on the business, but on the individuals. Does that forecast a population that is predominantly going to shy away from entrepreneurship careers?

52:38Richelieu Dennis:We had a conversation about AI and the impact that it's going to have and how at some point everybody's going to have to have an entrepreneurial journey. Based on that, it feels like, no, that doesn't seem like it's going to be the path. In fact, there's going to be more of us that are going to be employees after employee after employee. Yeah. Yeah.

52:58Earn Your Leisure Hosts:I mean, that's where we're headed unless we course correct. Right. And we've got to course correct internally amongst ourselves and within our community so that we can go out and go fight for these things. Go out and fight to get the capital. Go out and fight to get the shelf space. Go out and fight. We've got to fix that internally. And quite frankly, you know, I don't believe that this is a overwhelming part of our community. I think it's a small part of it, but I think it's a loud part. Right. And so it becomes something that you can't get away from. But there's also lessons to be learned in there.

53:45Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Right. It's not to say that these things don't matter or that. There's lessons to be learned in there. Most of the vocal minority.

53:53Richelieu Dennis:But I mean, as far as the... But it's harmful. No, for sure. Even that you mentioned more employees. I don't know if we're going to have more employees because of unemployment. Talk about that. Talk about the disproportion as far as black unemployment, white unemployment, how alarming that is. How, you know, your thoughts on that.

54:15Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Yeah. Well, I mean, it's the gap is growing wider. Right now it's 2x plus, right? And that gap is growing wider. So there's two times more black people that's unemployed than white people? As a percentage, yeah. As a percentage? As a percentage, yeah.

54:30Richelieu Dennis:So it's like 8 % of black people?

54:32Earn Your Leisure Hosts:So it's, what did you say? No, 7.7, 7.7, 7.8, depending on what they use.

54:37Richelieu Dennis:We could round it to eight.

54:38Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Yeah.

54:39Richelieu Dennis:And then it's like 4 % of white people, 3 point. 3 point something, yeah. So black unemployment is two times that of white people.

54:47Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Yeah.

54:47Richelieu Dennis:And it's growing. Yeah.

54:48Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And it's higher than every other group, too. It's higher than Latinas. It's higher than Asians. Why is that?

54:54Richelieu Dennis:Because we know that per capita black women have the most college degrees. So why?

55:04Earn Your Leisure Hosts:They have the most college degrees, but they don't have an equal proportion of the opportunities. Right. Right. So and for many that are in jobs, they're really underemployed. employed, right? So they're not necessarily leveraging all it is that their degrees give them, all it is that their experience give them, because they're now having to accept jobs that are not necessarily on par with what their experience or their expertise is. So it's not just the rate of unemployment, but it's also the rate of underemployment.

55:37Richelieu Dennis:So how do we, because in black men are losing jobs at a rapid rate also. Similarly, yeah. So education is not the answer, obviously, to solve this problem. I don't know, right?

55:54Earn Your Leisure Hosts:I think education, look, I grew up in a world where everything was education, education, education, right? We now live in a world where you can certainly do tons of things without having to have all of the rigor of the educational structure and the costs of the educational structure that we have. And you talk about, you know, you said you guys were talking about AI, right? You talk about AI and what that's going to level. At the end of the day, it always just comes back to capital, right? That's the thing. I can be the smartest guy in the world, the best business guy in the world. If I can't get access to capital to build a business, I'm just not going to be able to do it.

56:39Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Or I'm going to be able to build a fraction of what it is that I could build. And what's going to happen is somebody else is going to see that fraction, and they're going to go build something that goes to the moon. So it boils back down to capital, right? It's the economics of it. And if you think about it, I think like stats are like 2021, it was like 1.2 % of capital went to black businesses, right? Today, it's 0.3%, right? That's a period of five years, right? And that is a dramatic decline on an already tiny number. If we're 13, 14 % of the population, right? And the investments that come our way are less than 1 % of the funds that are being invested, then we're not gonna be able to build these businesses.

57:43Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And then the few that we do build, we have to make sure survive.

57:48Richelieu Dennis:it's it's alarming it is alarming right and somebody might hear it was 0.4 now it's 0.3 it's one basis point but we're talking like in terms of billions of billions of dollars that go to to black uh founders i think the the piece the capital piece is important i think the opportunity piece is equally as important right like the capital buys opportunity it buys opportunity which i'm saying which is why when we look out at the playing field who gives opportunity yeah Right. And if we attack places that give opportunity, then we have none. Obviously, you guys have essence. We invest fast. These are structural opportunities.

58:25Richelieu Dennis:We're bringing people together to create opportunities. Talk about being mindful of losing spaces because you even gave us education on, look, this institution is no longer here.

58:35Earn Your Leisure Hosts:This institution is no longer here. we're losing them fast we're losing them fast you know when i was coming up um there were there was no greater holy grail in the beauty world than braunner brothers no no greater holy grail right for i think braunner brothers speaking of multi i think braunner brothers is in its third generation of operation now, right? And I just saw online, on social, maybe two weeks ago, that the Bronner Brother hair show is not happening this year. That, every hairstylist, every black makeup artist, every designer, every, that came out of the black community, in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s.

59:37Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And Brown and Brother was where they got their start. Brown and Brother is where they got access to customers. That's where they got their start. For that not to be happening is devastating to us culturally and socially and historically. There are going to be people who never heard of it, who never missed it, who never... But that grounding that we had as a community is not happening this year. And then there's, you know, Carl Fest last year. And you can go up and down the list. Losing these businesses, losing these institutions, and there's a mindset that can be, yeah, business is business. It's not performing.

1:00:33Earn Your Leisure Hosts:It's not doing these things. no argument here but the fact that we're in this place of where the things that we are culturally connected to are being lost is something that we've got it we've got to do something about

1:00:48Richelieu Dennis:so let's have this conversation essence fest last year got a got some negative backlash um do you think that that backlash was warranted how how do you as a leader address that what changes were made what's the roadmap moving forward yeah so look when you're when you're

1:01:10Earn Your Leisure Hosts:building a business and i've said this and we continue to do that um when there's backlash there's always some reason for it right it's it's it's not it's not now the scale that it gets how it gets you know the the the way that it travels the misinformation that may come with that or not come with that, you know, those, those can be dealt with individually, but to just say, hey, no, there was, that's, that's not, that's not the way to think about it. It's not the way that, that we think about it. I think there were, there were some structural challenges in terms of transitioning and building for growth, because it's the same thing that we're talking about earlier is if you know essence is the essence is really the only black owned um platform the essence of scale right that's the only independent one right um it's it's either live nation or ag i mean you guys know this um so it's it's what we have left and and and what is extremely important is that it is the home and it's the place that we can come to and love on each other, right?

1:02:31Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And be with each other and enjoy being with each other and we can develop and we can grow. And that's why, you know, the Essence Festival of Culture, right? So we're highly focused on the music. The music is still incredible. It's still great three nights of incredible music. but then there's also the cultural aspects that are now in the festival the food and wine festival come and experience black chefs black owned vineyards and spirits right and come and get that whole experience there's the film festival now where you come in we had over 600 submissions last year We're on pace to get that same amount of submissions this year.

1:03:22Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Come and support the directors in our community, the filmmakers, and especially as AI comes in, what's the new model going to be? So you get all of that, right? Then there's the book and author festival. I think we had almost 60 authors last year doing signings and panels and discussing their books and, and, and, and, and all the like. So, and then it goes, it goes on and on and on. There's beauty con where there's all the celebration of our beauty, right? Whether it's the, the brands and the products, the hairstyles, the, um, uh, the master classes, the, like all of that. Right. Um, so the idea is to continue to bring to our community, the things that are most important to us, that are grounding us, that we're building on and that we're driving.

1:04:23Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And then for us to take ownership of that, because that's another big part of this is, you know, a lot of people talk about our culture, right? But we're not always the ones that monetize that culture. We're not the ones that benefit from it economically. So creating an environment where that can happen is extremely important. And so that's the vision, right? The vision is to really take all of these pillars and provide them back to our community or give our community an opportunity to platform themselves on there. So you have all the professors, you have all the educators, you have all the entertainers, you have all of these different genres, the entrepreneurs.

1:05:08We've done over a million dollars in pitch competition grants, right?

1:05:15Earn Your Leisure Hosts:So investing in businesses there, we have over 400 black owned businesses that are that are there that are selling their products that are that are getting exposure to almost, you know, the convention center will have somewhere between 40 and 50 ,000 people come through come through every day. And we provide all of that free. Right. So, you know, any of these other experiences, there are some some charges general admissions for the entire convention center is free. right and it's i'm not talking about we're not talking about having you know like we're having top tier um uh guests that are teaching classes that are talking on panels that are that are signing books that are giving lectures that are you know last year we had katanji brown jackson doing a lecture we had um um um oprah two years ago we've had kamala harris um we have so so it's it's this idea of continuously giving back and reinvesting in our community especially around our cultural anchors you you announced did you know we had all of that well i know

1:06:36Richelieu Dennis:the world knows you you announced and this is something that the world knows but even i was confused to what it really meant uh tiana taylor who's having an incredible year golden gold winner i mean obviously musician events all the things she's super talented incredible the chief curator of yeah that's of the entire event yeah explain what that means because i'm like i know rich runs it so what is what does this mean yeah yeah well um so the

1:07:03Earn Your Leisure Hosts:first thing is I don't run it. There's an incredible team that does that. But what it means is, so if you think about the future of me and we should talk about this, what's the future of media, right? Like what's, what's the future and how do brands, legacy brands that have served our community all these years, Essence is going to be 57, 58 years old this year, right? How's, what has to happen for Essence to be here another 50 years, right? In an environment where everything's changed, right? The, you know, the Facebooks, the Instagrams, the TikToks, that's the destination of choice today, right?

1:07:51Earn Your Leisure Hosts:That's where everybody's going. We don't own any of that, right? We create the content for it, right? We make it hot, but we don't monetize it. Let me rephrase that. Proportionately, we don't. So you can monetize YouTube. You can monetize Instagram. You can do that as a creator. You absolutely can. But as far as the ownership and the wealth that gets created. And then the other thing, going back to your earlier question is, they build it. They sell it. They trade it. They take it public. They're free to do that. which means they can then take a look at what's happening now. And I admire the business acumen and the skill here of David Ellison.

1:08:46Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Yeah. Second generation, right? His father created enormous wealth, right? Invested in him in a small business called Skydance. He proved himself there, right? Or did what he did there, earned his father's trust and some other people's trust. And then now Paramount, and then next thing, Warner Brothers, right? They're able to do that because his father was able to capture that wealth in Oracle, right? Release it and move it forward. That's where we have to get to. Because that's when we'll be able to, when you talk about true generational wealth, it's not just I build it and I give it to my kids.

1:09:35Earn Your Leisure Hosts:It's I build it and I put my kids in position to go build too. Right? So now they go build the next thing. Right? Another, and I know we're going backwards, another model that I love, and I talk about this all the time, is the Walmart model. Sam Walton built an incredible business, decided, hey, my kids, for whatever reason, are not going to run this business. I'm going to go out and get the best team that I can. I'm going to put the best financial infrastructure together, and we're going to continue to rock. But my kids now get, they're in the top 10 of richest people in the world. There's different ways to do this.

1:10:21Earn Your Leisure Hosts:We just as a community haven't had, and for a whole host of reasons, and I think we all know what those reasons are, haven't had the opportunity to do those types of spectacular things. And so it's going to take one of us, two of us, five of us, ten of us doing it, doing it consistently over a period of time for it to become natural to us and for us to understand it. Do you think we're at that inflection point?

1:10:46Richelieu Dennis:I talk about this all the time, about having grace and black wealth transforming over the past 10, 15, 20 years where you have more black billionaires. We don't know what second generation looks like because we haven't gotten it yet. Most of them are, well, pretty much all of them are first generation. They're all first generation. Do you feel like we're here now at that inflection? Like, okay, let's plan to build so that your kids can build and so we can help?

1:11:13Earn Your Leisure Hosts:I think everybody's thinking that way. The next step is going to be instituting the infrastructure that enables it to happen. Right. And that's that's a hard thing to do. And that's not one person can do that. It's going to take, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 100 people thinking similarly and doing that. Right. Like I said, from our perspective, it was, hey, when we unlock this, we're going to go invest in the best black businesses and black business minds that we can. And we're going to try to provide them infrastructure. We're going to try to provide them capital. We're going to try to provide them access.

1:11:55Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And we've done that. And so now you have the miles of the world, right? You have the honeypots of the world. You have the Big Dave cheesesteaks of the world, Derek and his, right? You have the money points of the world. You have the Caribbean of the world. And I could rattle off 30 or 40 of them.

1:12:17Earn Your Leisure Hosts:That's how you start to build infrastructure. But you've got to invest in it and it takes time. And I think these other people that are doing these incredible things too are thinking similarly. But I don't know that this next generation is going to be where it's already. and then the other thing is everything that we knew about business is out the window there's nothing that you knew about business five years ago that you should be relying on today because it's all gone right if I were to tell you five years ago that Skydance would own Warner Brothers or that 20 years ago that Amazon would own what's the studio they know

1:13:05Earn Your Leisure Hosts:they own they own they own one of the large mgm yes right mgm as well as owning whole foods yes if i had told you that amazon was going to own whole foods would you if i had told you that nvidia would be what it is today and ibm would be where it is today you would have been like you're crazy you wouldn't be sitting here exactly right so the point is like everything that we know we have to we have to be thinking differently and we have to throw it out and start over so part of what's good about that is that our people are thinking about the future you're now building infrastructure on new technology and new thinking right so that's good the part that is is going to be hard is that those people have already hit escape velocity right they've already done it and they're now on to the next thing when you talk about the black billionaires that that exists or even the black millionaires that exist what we should be concerned about what i remain concerned about is the the black woman who graduated spelman seven years ago has gone out and and gotten some experience at a at pfizer and now has an idea on the next miracle drug and that she gets an opportunity to bring that idea to life, right?

1:14:28Earn Your Leisure Hosts:That's where I'm concerned. And that's where I think we really need to build the infrastructure so that that can happen at scale.

1:14:37Richelieu Dennis:Yeah, we got into business. I never let you get to tell us what Tiana's actually doing. Yeah, business does that.

1:14:44Earn Your Leisure Hosts:I get excited about that. I get excited about that. Look, Tiana is one of the most incredible human beings I've ever. Absolutely. Right. And, and she has been a part of the Essence journey or Essence has been a part of her journey from jump, right? Over the, over the years, lots of love, lots of support. And everybody at Essence is so proud of the journey that she's, that she's come on. And as we think about what the future is going to look like, when we think about, hey, we've got this brand that means so much to so many people, right? Who are the people though that truly embodies the brand? It's Tiana, right?

1:15:30Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And so to say, we're now turning this platform over to our community, right? We're building infrastructure so that people can be successful on this infrastructure. They can bring scale to this infrastructure. infrastructure we can leverage the scale that we have as a media company if you compare essence to the to the giants when we're nothing right but if you compare us to our community we're it right so to be able to take the infrastructure that we have and now put people on our platform people that can take it to the next level that can that can that can drive it i'm not saying that you know i'm not putting that pressure on tiana that's that's what it is.

1:16:14Earn Your Leisure Hosts:That's the vision that we have. And now for Tiana is to come in and take a look at the festival. How do we make it better? Let's get a fresh set of eyes on it. Help us make it better. Everything from how it looks to how it feels to what the themes are to what should the place smell like? What should it feel like? Right. Um, and we're not asking her to do it all on, on our own, like, Hey, come right. It's there's infrastructure here. There's teams here. She's got a great company and aunties, right? She's done this time and time again. It's not like she hasn't done it. Right. But now she gets an opportunity to do it for something that she cares about something that she got an opportunity to be a part of from early on in her career.

1:17:11Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And we're extremely proud of it. And so even some of these conversations that we're having is like, she and I had to have like a real hard conversations because she wanted to make sure, hey, what am I getting into? Right? Are you guys really serious about this? What is the plan? What is the path? What is the journey going to look like? And so we had those conversations. Because I think the other thing in business, and like with family, is if you shy away from the hard conversations, you're never going to be successful. Because eventually they will pop up in some other way. So we had some great conversations and we're like, okay, let's go.

1:17:56Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Our community deserves this. So we're excited for her to be doing this. Um, she's, you know, we're going to have, um, um, other folks join, uh, in these different capacities, like the book festival, like let's get somebody who's really transformed the book industry. Like, like the, the, the, um, the, the, the, the, the way we think about literature, the way we think about community, the way we own community. Let's, let's have, let's have somebody that can, that can think about that as well. Right. and then connect with the vision and the mission and all those things. So we're excited about it.

1:18:37Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And you'll see that same thing with BeautyCon on the beauty side. I mean, there's a mic right up in your face. I'm not used to this. I like to talk, but damn. So it's really getting into all of these things that we call cultural pillars and making sure that we have fresh minds on them, that we have people that are actually moving the culture and that are impacting the culture, a part of developing it for our community, right? Because that's super, super important. There was a conversation about critique of Africans and African-Americans and the infrastructure of

1:19:19Richelieu Dennis:essence being African-driven and the audience being African-American. And that was a, that was a critique on Essence Fest last year. Yeah.

1:19:30Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Yeah.

1:19:31Richelieu Dennis:What's your thoughts on that?

1:19:32Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Well, that's not true. Right. The infrastructure is not African driven. The infrastructure is black driven. Right. It is focused on serving black women. Right. Which are overwhelmingly black American women. Right. And we are focused, though, on our culture broadly. Right. Because I think that the notions of separation makes us smaller. Right. The idea of expanding how we think about each other, the things we can do to each other is what's going to open up those opportunities and those broader those broader opportunities that we talk about. So it's not, it's not, hey, we're focused on Africa now.

1:20:22Earn Your Leisure Hosts:We're not, that's, nothing could be, nothing could be further from the truth, right? The organization, the structures that we've built, the teams that like everything is in service of this vision of how do we put black people in the best light we possibly can on this planet? and how do we give them the maximum opportunity that we can leveraging this platform and leveraging this infrastructure? So we're highly, highly, highly, highly focused on that. And the thing that, you know, if you think about when Essence, again, you go back to when Essence was formed, right? 57 years ago.

1:21:13Earn Your Leisure Hosts:That's a lot of generations that Essence has served. And every time a new generation comes in, there's a new set of needs. We've got to create space for our children, right? And for their children. Because again, when you talk about this generational thing, if we're only serving the people that started with Essence, then we won't be here in another 10 years. Right. But if we're serving the people that started with essence and we're doing that deeply, we're providing her everything that she needs there. But we're also serving her granddaughter, in some cases now her great granddaughter, and we're providing her what she needs.

1:21:59Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Then there's one place for them to convene. There's no other place like that on Earth. there's no other place for four generations of black women to go and be with each other and fellowship with each other and love on each other and party with each other and eat together and travel together and go all over and do it in mass you can do it as a family yeah right you can do it as a family reunion but can you do it with 400 000 people that have the same sort of zest for you as a human being, that's the place to do it.

1:22:37Richelieu Dennis:I mean, it brings me to the point of the economic impact. Like when people think New Orleans, especially people who are from New Orleans, it's a part of the fabric, right? Like, yes, they had the Super Bowl a year ago and it was like, oh, that's a huge... That was every 10 years. Only every 10 years. You're there every year. People understand like, yes, there's vendors there, but the amount of people that you're employing, the local businesses, the travel, the hotel. Talk about the economic impact because obviously we have an event. People can completely not understand that. Discounted, not really appreciated.

1:23:13Richelieu Dennis:Unpack that for them.

1:23:15Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Wow, that's a big one. It's big because it is...

1:23:27Earn Your Leisure Hosts:I think of things in terms of infrastructure, flywheel, and scale. Right. the infrastructure that we continue to build allows this flywheel to happen every year right and what the flywheel does is millions and millions of dollars directly into jobs during that week period, right?

1:24:16Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Talent, security, transportation. Those are all black businesses, right? Or employees that work for a business that gets paid because Essence is there and Essence is investing in them, right? Right. So the scale of it, right? The workers in the hotels, like you go to New Orleans and New Orleans is a black city. Like people say Atlanta is a black city. Yes, Atlanta is a black city, but it's not black, like in terms of the population distribution. Right. And so you're bringing Super Bowl type economics every year, right? And we're not the Super Bowl, we're not the NFL, right? We are a small to medium-sized business.

1:25:10Earn Your Leisure Hosts:When you compare it to the rest of the world, I guess if you said, hey, in black media, yes, we have some heft. But if you compare it to the people that we compete against, because our competitors are live nation, right? Our competitors are AEG. Our competitors are Condé Nast and Vogue. We're competing with Vogue to get people on our cover. We're not competing. In fact, unfortunately, we're the only ones left. We're the only ones left. We have an incredible issue coming out for festival, which will be our first one this year um and it's a double issue and we're going hard at it um but we're the only

1:25:55Richelieu Dennis:ones of magazine of magazine are you still doing magazine or is it just digital no we're doing we're

1:26:00Earn Your Leisure Hosts:still doing physical magazine still doing physical magazine does it even make sense to do physical magazines anymore economically it may not but culturally it does right because where else do our women see themselves on their on the on on the cover on the newsstand on a regular basis where do our daughters see themselves in a physical space? And now with AI coming, Lord knows what they're going to be seeing, right? So where else is that? So it becomes extremely important. This is a place where partners are saying, oh, we're not advertising in magazines anymore, right? We're only now doing digital, right?

1:26:40Earn Your Leisure Hosts:We're only doing social. so as a cultural artifact do we just let that go right that's why we need the support because we need our daughters need to see themselves physically right they need to as much as even as they say you know now all the kids are on the phones but every once in a while that kid wants to go outside and play right they want to go run around right they want to go we We have to be there for our kids, right? This has to be here two generations, three generations, five generations from now. So that becomes extremely important. So that means we've got to make money in other places in order to make sure that that happens, right?

1:27:29Earn Your Leisure Hosts:When a young black star is coming up, who's going to cover her? She's only going to get covered once she's hit it big. but who's going to put her in front of her community, right? How is she going to learn her community? How's her community going to learn her? We saw three weeks ago, four weeks ago, the BAFTA awards, right? As long as we're in somebody else's space, those things are bound to happen. We just did Black Women in Hollywood, the 19th one, right? 19 years we've been doing it. to celebrate our women who don't get the same recognition. Even when they get the recognition, they don't get the time.

1:28:21Right?

1:28:21Earn Your Leisure Hosts:It's not consistent. Right? So you have a black woman in Hollywood that's there expressively to make sure that she gets the time, that they get the shine, that they're the focal point. Right? I'm very passionate about this stuff because it is what it is that we have to do in order to live up to why God put us here.

1:28:47Richelieu Dennis:It's a great room to be in, too. Amazing. We had the privilege to sit in one.

1:28:52Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Appreciate the invite. I don't know. We slummed that year.

1:28:58Richelieu Dennis:We were seat fillers.

1:29:01Earn Your Leisure Hosts:But it's an incredible thing, right? And we need that. And then we have black women in music at festival this year. Okay. So that we're celebrating the women that are driving music, right? And it's not just the women that are, the incredible women that are performing music, but it's all of these women that are actually making it possible for music to remain true to our community and true to our culture. And they're behind the scenes driving this stuff. and they're doing big deals, man. You know, the women in the music and the ones that are hitting are hitting, boy. You know, they're really running.

1:29:43Earn Your Leisure Hosts:So to be able to celebrate them and be able to give them that platform, right? To give them, to be able to create an environment where that love and joy can be like harnessed, right? And then you leave there and you're so motivated, even for you, right? For you guys and for me. when I walk out of that room, I can do anything. You know? That's true. You can do anything.

1:30:10Richelieu Dennis:Surround us with black women. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you for coming. Definitely. I think you shared a lot of light and a lot of wisdom. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. When is Essence Fest? August? I mean, July.

1:30:23Earn Your Leisure Hosts:July 4th weekend. July 4th, July 3rd, 4th, and 5th. And we may extend a day. Monday? We're not sure yet. The demand has been extremely high. So we're trying to figure out, do we do that or do we sit tight and then do that next year? We'll see. But I think let's get it right this year. Let's get it right this year. Let's make sure all the bugs that we had, make sure all the issues are resolved. and then we can start to expand further again. But it's an exciting time. And I'm really excited about Tiana and what she's going to be able to do for her community and help us deliver. I think that's going to be out of this world.

1:31:18Richelieu Dennis:Yeah, she's having a hell of a year. Yeah.

1:31:21Earn Your Leisure Hosts:Well, I like to think that we called it because we were honoring her last year. This is true. Right? So we honored her, Black Women in Hollywood, for what she had been doing in Hollywood. That was a kickoff. Yeah. Well, no, actually it wasn't. That was a kickoff for her. Yeah. Yeah. Her year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I met her at Black Women in Hollywood. Oh, really? Yeah. And the other thing is, you know, to see that room, man, and to see those women loving on each other and protecting each other, it's really special. And then it's the same thing at festival. And I think a lot of it is people don't want to lose that.

1:32:03Earn Your Leisure Hosts:And they're concerned also with all that's going on in the world is this going to be here. And I'm here to tell you it's going to be here.

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