Many times some of us are just dying for the spotlight. We want to be acknowledged, known, and loved. Working behind the camera all the time I get to pay close attention to this phenomenon.

I generally am a low key laid back type of person, so aiming for the shine is generally not my cup of tea, specifically when I’m working. I was at a shoot a few weeks ago where the client wanted to really impress some guests they had coming in. So our company was hired to film, and so were two other companies. It was kind of weird. Three different production companies working together that had no idea whatsoever what was going on.

Well I did the usual, try to establish a goal in mind, see where we could be most beneficial, etc. And watched how the other two companies were trying to shine quickly by talking a lot of about what they could and what could be delegated. I just watched with patience because I knew the check had already been deposited for this job. We just had to do what was expected and leave the egos aside.

So as my ideas for what I thought would be a good solution was getting shot down by boisterous competitive “teammates”, I continued to stay focused on the task at hand. And kept avoiding a proverbial sword match with two other gentlemen who obviously were intimidated by the lack of exclusivity the client had shown.

By the end of the shoot, the first production company had noticed they had shot everything in the wrong format, the second production wasn’t able to project their images on the screen correctly throughout the even, and our team were the only ones with useable footage. I didn’t make a fuss about the other guys. I just handed the discs over to the client, packed up and left.

Sometimes playing the back in a good thing. You can observe a lot more when you step back to have a look at the situation.

Amidst my move of the business to a new location, it’s been interesting working with new marketing strategies and starting over in terms of networking, business building, and just learning my way around town (I just recently moved to Atlanta, GA from Michigan).

But one thing that has remained the same has been my ode to doing good business no matter where you are. Believe it or not, if most of us (black business owners), lived up to this most of the time, we’d be farther than where we are. There are tons of consumers out there who appreciate honest business no matter what race.

I received a call for filming an event, and like most of my potential clients, I always become familiar with the individual (make a personal connection – give your name and remember theirs). I asked about the event in terms of finding out the details to provide the best filming possible. Even asked about a possible event walkthrough. The potential client on the other end was surprised and a bit impressed. He said out of the 20 other video guys he talked to, I was the only one who asked those questions.

At that point I remembered that no matter how much money I spend marketing, networking, building the business, or moving the location, the most important marketing tool I had was the integrity of my business. And in that moment on the phone I felt great that I was continuing to provide the best service I could provide and not just fast talking this potential client into signing a check.

We got off the phone after asking and answering each other’s questions and I knew that I wanted to share this story with the world. I know personally I’ve spent so much time trying to figure out the best way to stretch marketing dollars or compete with larger companies, but I just want to stress the importance of being authentic in your client service, and being a good and fair business owner. That alone gets you to the head of the line fast.

And I DID get the job.

It’s starting to get into heavy wedding season for all wedding vendors. Specifically for us, it’s when we start to see less and less of our weekends and more and more nuptials beginning. As most wedding professionals will tell you, it’s game time! If you’re not working now, you won’t be working.

So we notice an influx of ads from some of our competitors looking for interns and have determined a lot of them are just cranking out videos left and right without putting the care we do into them. How can my 4-man team compete with the competition across the way who just hired 15 new interns for the summer to go out do a ton of more wedding videos like a video factory. I can only speak for us, but I can’t imagine bringing on and training 5 – 10 new people to shoot, edit and craft a wedding video the way we’ve been doing for years in such a short amount of time. Our brides have consistently paid us for our quality. In fact, when you’re black in business it has to ALWAYS be quality over quantity. I can’t afford to have an intern out there doing a job just for the experience. To them it might just be a summer gig, but for me, it’s a lifestyle.

Yeah yeah, I know, just hire competent interns and everything will be fine. Truth is, the last time I hired an intern, I gave him a job, paid him to do it, and made him an employee. I don’t believe in free work. When people do or get something for free, it seems to come across as having no value. And the work we do has a high enough value for me to want to pay someone to do it.

But I guess in the grand scheme of things having interns doing free work for me I just can’t afford. Someone around just doing work for the sake of doing it doesn’t constitute the type of work ethic I’d like my employees to have. And unfortunately the little nuances and mistakes you can usually blame on the interns, my business won’t get away with.

My motto, don’t hire people to work for free when they control the value of which your work will be on display.

Because your intern could always end up like this:

I’ve had several colleagues of mine who’ve talked about having some kind of “side hustle” to bring in more money. Often these same colleagues would have full-time jobs and would refer to this “side hustle” as a supplemental income. And I wouldn’t have a problem with them pursuing this “side hustle”, I would just hate that the term would sort of stick around throughtout the pursuit.

My grandmother used to always talk about having a skill you could do with your hands, and you’d never be out of work. And I think about a lot of black people that would be using these skills as their “side hustle” with the hopes of one day turning it into a full-time business.

Now the process of taking the “side hustle” into a full time business, is a completely different topic. I want to stick with this notion of having your “hustle” being run like a business, and not the other way around. If I’m running my “hustle” like a business, then I’m really just using “hustle” to describe what it is I’m doing. Not the way I’m doing it. In fact, your profession should never be looked at like a “hustle”. Let’s get that mentality staple out of your head now. But if I’m running my business like a “hustle”, then I’m setting myself up for failure. The “hustler’s mentality” is a self-centered concept. You can’t do good business with only the satisfaction of yourself in mind.

In business, the name of the profession is the description and definition of itself. Business. In hustling, the term “hustle” behaves the same way. You hustle for your hustle.

Mixing business and hustle is like mixing oil and water. It’s a sure fire way to start building your professional future off track from the beginning. Someone will eventually notice your lack of homogeneity, and unfortunately may never tell you until it’s too late. Or it leaves you wondering why your business isn’t growing the way you want it or you’re not reaching the clients you want to reach.

When is the last time you got “hustled”? It probably didn’t feel too much like a business deal now did it?

Here’s a video clip guaranteed to amuse you. Now this obviously is an extreme example of the Business-Hustle concept, but notice at the end, “Hustleman” pretty much wants to charge the same price as his much more professional competition.

Let’s lose the “hustle mentality” and get to doing business.

We’ve all done it before (black people), made up the lame excuse of CP Time, talk about how we don’t do business with black folk anymo’, and assume we can get some kind of “hookup” because there’s some kind of connection between us.

Unfortunately I believe this is the kind of approach to business that holds us back big time. I HATE being late. I can’t stand it. It’s almost like a sickness. And if I show up to a function where I’m the only “chip in the cookie” and I’m late, I feel like I just sent a message to the world that black people are always late y’all, told you so.

Unbeknownst to me I have this obligation built inside me of representing black business owners to the most highest caliber that I can. Doing good business is what keeps you in business. Doing good business when you’re black and in business, to me, is imperative to our survival.

It’s my opinion that when one of us does bad business, it’s a reflection on all of us. It becomes real easy for the non-minority clients to assume all black businesses are like that. An ignorant concept? Sure. But something that can’t go without being acknowledged. We need to do more to hold each other accountable for just doing good business period. Stop letting stuff slide, stop being ok with half-ass work, stop letting our colleagues get over on people. Speak up!

I feel a lot of pressure as a black business owner. But if I can get through a project without any hiccups or disappointments and in the end that client sees me and my company as the guys who did the work and did a great job, the next time they get an opportunity to do business with a brown face, maybe there won’t be a bad taste in their mouth.

Be on time black people. This is more important than you may think.

My grandfather passed at a really awkward time. Since we didn’t live in the same state, time spent with him was extremely valuable. And I had just seen him several weeks before his passing. When I got the phone call, I was getting ready to enter into my senior year of undergrad and sweating about our senior design project. I knew the next year was about to more stressful than the previous ones.

Then I got the phone call from my sister. And the next day I was on a flight to Arkansas.

Although I miss him dearly as the patriarch of our family, I really know that our relationship had yet to reach its full potential because I was still learning to be myself. That valued time with our elders we look forward to comes with maturity. I hadn’t yet had conversations with my grandfather on what it was like growing up for him as a black man, and how different is life going to be for me and my generation, and does he ever believe America can have a black president.

What I’ve picked up on in my 10 years of business is something I wouldn’t have had the chance to ask him until a year after he passed. That’s the year I started my business. And that thing I’ve learned was that our work as black business owners has to be twice as good or better than our non-minority counterparts or competition. As much as we would like to believe everyone is equal and on the same playing field, we aren’t.

An elder client of ours had a really good conversation with me one day on how the Civil Rights Movement changed everything. We all know this. But he said to me that his father told him when he was a child that his work had to be twice as good because he was a black man. And that type of preparation for success and achievement was instilled in him and re-enforced throughout his life until his father died. After the Civil Rights Movement it seemed that type of mental thinking got lost in the sauce so by the time my generation comes around, we think that everyone is equal, and I’m afraid to say for the past 10 years, I’ve clearly seen we are not.

I think this approach to business has become second nature to me. I strive for excellence because that’s what our company does and it’s how I conduct business anyway. But I’ve noticed on several occasions where I knew my sales pitch was the best fit for a potential client hands down (budget, experience, marketing analysis, etc.), and they went with someone else, only to call us back later after the project failed. Then we play cleanup, doing the same excellent work we would have done from the beginning.

It’s my opinion that when you’re black in business, you HAVE to be twice as good as your competition. That means your appearance has to be twice as good. Your mannerisms. Your marketing materials. Your company branding. Your work. We aren’t called minorities for naught. And since it’s my belief that most of time new business is already looking for a reason to say no when they see the brown face coming, it’s up to you to give them the sales pitch they can’t refuse. You’ll find once you understand this concept, you won’t even have to think about doing it anymore. It’ll just come naturallly.

And even if you know you didn’t get the job, you gave it your all and sometimes that’s all you can do.

If you don’t think President Obama had to work two to three times as hard as others to win his presidency, then you won’t understand what I’m saying. But you’ll get it one day.

I miss my grandfather.

Sure, the title of the site may come across a little brash, but so does the real world when you’re out there trying to do business, and you just happened to be young and black as well. Over my last 10 years in growing this business, I’ve come across some interesting approaches to potential clients turning us down or getting certain business in certain areas. And I always kept a mental log of how being black affected me in my business and thought to myself I couldn’t be alone. There HAD to be other African-American business owners out there experiencing these same things.

Let’s get one thing straight, I don’t make any excuses for who I am. And I sure don’t make them when it’s comes to doing business. What I’ve learned from myself is that the passion to keep doing what I love overtakes any negativity that I face on a day-to-day basis. Excuses are for the weak. And I couldn’t have made it to 10 years crying foul every time it happened.

But since I know this is the internet, I expect a lot of ignorance from those who hide behind computer screens (among other things). Which means I know there will be plenty of nay-sayers and negative individuals who may not like some of the things I have to say. And that is ok. This site isn’t for you. There are plenty of those kinds of sites out there. But those of you willing to listen, I’ve got some stories to tell. And I’m sure you do too, so let’s begin.