Meet the first black woman to own a billion-dollar company

Leanna Byrne (0:01)

Welcome to Founders from Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Leanna Byrne. Today we're meeting Janice Bryant Howroyd, founder of ActOne Group. She arrived in Los Angeles with just $900 borrowed from her mother and went on to build a multi-billion dollar business, becoming the first black woman to own and run a billion dollar company.

Janice says the foundations of that success were laid long before the boardroom, growing up in a family of 11 children in the segregated American South. Janice Bryant Howroyd, welcome to Founders. Do you want to go back to the very start?

You grew up in a house with 11 children. So before we talk about business even, what do you have to do to get noticed in a big family like that?

Janice Bryant Howroyd (0:47)

The funny thing is, Leanna, that although I'm one of 11 children, one mom, one dad in the deep south, that should give you a lot of hint to why it didn't take very much for me to get noticed in a family of 11 children. Mom and dad were king parents. I gotta say the greatest treasure of my life was to have a mom and dad who were in sync on their purpose and who were pretty wide open thinkers in terms of their children experiencing the world and old fashioned in their values. That created for me, I think, a luxury environment to thrive and to grow in even though there was no luxury around the place financially or in terms of accommodations. Mom would always say, you know, if you've got enough for yourself and a little for somebody else, that's riches.

Leanna Byrne (1:40)

There's a story I came across that when your school textbooks left things out about black history, your parents encouraged you to research what was missing and actually added into books for the next pupil.

What do you think that taught you? What do you think your parents taught you very early? Were they trying to make you look at a system and ask, what's missing here perhaps?

Janice Bryant Howroyd (2:01)

I attended a segregated school. We got books after they'd been used at the white school.

So I come home and I page through the books and I complained about always having to have books with stuff missing out or penciling in it, etc.

And my mom said, be grateful you have books. And here's what you're going to do. You're smart enough to figure out what's missing with the information you have. And when you go through life, that's going to be the case. You're not going to always have all the information when you go into a circumstance or walk into a room. But you're smart enough if you're attentive to figure out what's missing. And then she took it a step further. She said, I want you to write what's missing. And she'd have me write it on plain white paper and tape it into the book. And she said, that way, you give a hand up to the person coming behind you, and they don't have to do that same work. In the long term, it became her gift of me understanding that I could learn and share with others, what I learned at no cost to me.

Leanna Byrne (3:14)

I'm sure that really developed your character, and your parents seem quite wonderful actually, particularly your mom. I mean, what else did she teach you? Did they teach you about money as well and career, or was it really just shaping those values?

Janice Bryant Howroyd (3:30)

In terms of what mom and dad taught us, were great business lessons, life lessons. They've informed my decisions a lot more in these last few years. The lessons that they taught me, the life lessons are critical. And let me just lean in on this a little bit too. When we mention AI and we talk about the impact of AI in the workforce, whether you're talking about the UK, Europe, or the world, we're finding that some of those things that structured how I built my business in the earliest days, back when I was calling mom two and three times a day, and then fretting about how I'd pay the phone bill for it, because I was on the West Coast and she was on the East Coast.

Those lessons are being applied out loud today in my business all over again. See, I started my company out as a search firm for full-time talent. Back then, you used to call it permanent placement, people looking for permanent jobs. I learned that I had to really be exact and on point about the placement. So when I look at where we won, it was because we bothered to understand the attitudes and the emotional settings of people and corporations and put people in great places. Fast forward to today, people are looking for community and they're looking for where they fit, not just where they're going to function. So the soft skills are becoming incredibly important.