When she was 22, Melissa Bradley went to the Small Business Administration and asked for a loan from the government agency that justified its existence by saying it provided support to entrepreneurs and small businesses.
“They told me I wasn’t going to get the money because I had three strikes against me: I was a woman, I was 22 and I was Black,” Bradley said. “They said ‘We don’t know any successful Black people in financial services.'”
Since then, Bradley has made a life and career out of fighting for the inclusion of Black entrepreneurs.
A serial entrepreneur, Bradley has launched several businesses. Her company 1863 Ventures is named for the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. It is bridging the gap between entrepreneurship and racial equity to accelerate entrepreneurs from high potential to high growth. Started in 2015, 1863 Ventures focuses on scaling historically marginalized businesses in the Washington, D.C. area to increase small business investment, create jobs and develop assets for low-income communities.
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Bradley has worked in the private sector at Sallie Mae, CIT GAP Funds and UBS, and was a presidential appointee for presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and Obama.
She addressed an audience at Black Tech Week Miami 2019 on Afrofuturism and the topic “Maximizing Return On Investment In the Future Economy.”
“We don’t come from a place of ‘You should help us because of diversity and inclusion,'” she said. “We come from a place ‘In 2044 we are the majority — in some place we already are — and you need me to contribute to the tax base so you can be successful. So for us, this is about an economic imperative.”
As an investor and chairwoman of a bank, Bradley is on the frontlines when it comes to turning around a system and institutions that fail Black peopled. “Banks are not our first line of defense,” she said.
If Black businesses had received investment at the same level of white businesses, “we would have 1.1 million more businesses, 900,000 jobs and $300 billion more to (add to) the GDP,” Bradley said. “Don’t give it to me because I’m Black, give it to me because I am a member of the new majority.”
Bradley is quick to insert a little perspective on venture capital: it’s not designed to be fair to white people or Black people, she said. “It’s designed to be fair to the investor. And having been one, my trouble is getting the damn money back, because it’s not mine. I have to give it to somebody else. It’s not private equity.”
Bradley works with founders, and “almost all of them cannot articulate their financials to me,” she said.
Entrepreneurs of color spend $250,000 more than their white peers to start a business, she said. “What do you deserve to overcome that investment you have made or the disinvestment the system has made?”
That’s important data for Black founders to know when you start talking about the valuation of your company, she said. “When we go it alone we’re charged 1.5 percent more than a white person and that’s statistically proven … that is just straight-up racism. Our trajectory does not look like everyone else’s trajectory.”
White or Black, most folks coming out of
“I think it’s important to be sector agnostic,” Bradley said. “The reality that we’re going to have the massive amounts of tech companies coming into our community is just not going to happen yet.
‘If Black businesses in D.C. had been invested in like their peers we would actually have 0 percent unemployment. So one thesis is I need to invest in my people … (it’s) not about technology as an end, but as a means to help us … And then the third thing that we really focus on is looking at scaling businesses.
“Our focus is, how do we build those billion-dollar companies? We believe the SBA is undercounting us — shoutout to more research. It’s important that we set our sights high enough to actually shift wealth, not just for ourselves but for our communities.”
Melissa Bradley: We found 527 companies in 18 months. After they came through our program, they were generating over $300M of new revenue. We went to the community store. We went to the barbershop and we just said, ‘People trust us, we know it’s a stretch but trust us.’ And we focused on building the relationship. We met in the Taxi Commission conference room in Southeast D.C. every Saturday morning from 10 a.m. to noon and people came. Now we have 1,500 people in the pipeline because it’s all about referrals. I don’t need a massive marketing campaign. But you need to prove that your time is valuable to me and I can actually help you. One of the things you can see is the lack of quality control around what is delivered to us. So we get horrible health care. We get horrible banking — we’re not running it but that’s about to change. And we get horrible service because they don’t see us. So it’s extremely important that we raise the bar with an expectation that you will be successful. This is about building relationships and allowing people to know that they can.
Melissa Bradley: There’s a balance between velocity and patience: we need to move as fast as possible and capture this moment where we truly have an economic opportunity because everyone else is talking about us. They have no expectations for us to overachieve as we always have done. We need to be patient with each other, much more patient than we are about the way other people treat us. And have honest conversations about, ‘Hey look, you jacked me up’ and how we get past that. I think what happens is we’re afraid of those conversations because many of us are afraid of each other. That is what we have to overcome. We’re going to be OK economically. We need to figure out how to preserve our culture and stop having it commoditized and really have hard conversations on how we remain as a unified group.
Melissa Bradley: We have companies that came to us that thought they weren’t making money. (For) everybody that comes to our program, we subsidize a lawyer, a tax person and an accountant. We had folks that commingled funds, they were paying their child’s tuition from their corporate money. We’re operating in survival mode. When institutions look at us, they’re looking at what we did Friday, not on the verge of extinction. When I went to the SBA, no one would give me money. As soon as I was making a million dollars, they wanted to give me money. I was like ‘I don’t need your money now.’ We have to understand what the rules of the game are. Once we started cleaning up people’s books, 20 percent of our companies that were not profitable all of a sudden realized they were profitable. Their perceptions of their businesses changed dramatically. So now we have local banks, national banks that are willing to give them money because their financial statements actually make sense. Execution is what you do once you get the money and that’s where we get blindsided and we all get ADD because we can’t execute. But the only way to get the money is to actually show there’s a way to pay it back. Oftentimes we’re not telling the right stories because we don’t have the data.
Melissa Bradley: If I have blockchain, you cannot identify me as a Black man or a Black woman. Because you can see me, I scare you and because I don’t look like you, you will now discriminate against me. If we get blockchain, that goes away in the new Wakanda, maybe. In the next few years, absolutely not.
