CLOSING THE GAP

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Morgan Smith is a Work reporter at CNBC Make It. You can follow her on Twitter @thewordsmithm.

Black women make up less than 10% of the U.S. population, but they’ve emerged as the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs, new research from GoDaddy has found.

Between 2017 and 2020, the number of Black women-owned businesses increased by nearly 20%, far exceeding the growth of women-owned and Black-owned businesses overall, the Brookings Institution reports.

CNBC Make It spoke to three Black women who left their corporate careers and became full-time entrepreneurs:

Brianna Doe, co-founder and CMO of Verbatim

Brianna Doe says she decided to start her own business after months of feeling “deeply unhappy” in her role as a marketing director at a fintech startup.

It wasn’t until the 30-year-old started working with a career coach in July 2023 that she realized her job wasn’t the problem — it was working in the corporate world, period.

“I was really scared of failing, of losing the stability of a paycheck coming in each month but it was also exhausting trying to fit into a system that’s just not built for me,” says Doe.

Doe had taken on various side projects as a marketing consultant since 2011, but didn’t consider turning that into a full-time business until her career coach suggested she work for herself.

She was laid off from the startup in September, mere days before she planned to give her two-week notice. Just a few weeks later, in October 2023, Doe and co-founder Alexis Rivera Scott launched Verbatim, their marketing agency.

“It’s been healing working for myself and creating a more fulfilling, supportive space,” says Doe.

Leslie Frelow, owner and chief discovery officer of The Wine Concierge

Three years ago, Leslie Frelow decided to make a full-time entrepreneurial venture out of one of her favorite hobbies: drinking wine.

At the time, Frelow was a senior director at the Universal Service Administrative Co., a nonprofit organization under the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, D.C.

She loved her job, but she loved her side hustle — leading virtual wine tastings and tours to Maryland wineries — even more.

Frelow also saw an unmet need she could fill in the wine industry: supporting sommeliers, farmers and winemakers of color. Less than 1% of U.S. wineries are Black-owned, according to the Association of African American Vintners.

She launched The Wine Concierge, an online wine store and subscription-based wine club, in December 2020 and left her job to run the business full time in October 2021.

“It’s given me the ultimate flexibility to be there for my aging parents, to pursue something I love, which is seeing people’s excitement from trying wines they didn’t know existed,” she says.

Joy Ofodu, freelance content creator and voice actor

Joy Ofodu always had aspirations of becoming a performer in the back of her mind, but those dreams didn’t come to fruition until the pandemic lockdowns of 2020.

Ofodu decided to spend her newfound free time practicing voice acting, drawing on her love for animated films and cartoons as a kid.

In 2022, she quit her job as an integrated marketing manager at Instagram to pursue voice acting and content creation full time.

Ofodu says she hopes to make voice acting a more open and inclusive industry. Research shows Black women and girls represented less than 4% of leads or co-leads in the 100 top-grossing films of the last decade.

“I don’t want what I am doing to be so rare, it doesn’t energize me to be the first or only Black woman to do something,” says Ofodu. “I want to fling open the doors for many, many others to join me.”

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