Rich Lou Dennis (30:19)
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 and are no longer around. And they're not around for a whole host of reasons. 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, which then takes away the opportunities that the black entrepreneur could earn. Right. So most of these companies don't have access to capital to $30,000. Right. What about to $30 million. Right. There's probably 10, 15 black entrepreneurs and businesses that you can, that you can point to that have raised more than $50 million. Even if that I'd be surprised, right? But, but the challenge with that is that, say you were building something in the 70s, and there's plenty of examples. There were great, great brands in the seventies. Brown and Brothers, Luster Products, Johnson Products, 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? 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, 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 it from one generation into the second generation and then failed, right? Not necessarily. Not just because, hey, the second generation can do it, but it's a multitude of things. 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, right? And who's, who's, who's. Whose infrastructure is set up to compete to maintain that shelf space against competitors that have the same scale and the same reach, right? They have the same resources, the same, 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, let me go kill it. But their machine is built to either eat or kill anything that comes on that. On that shelf space. So now I'm Generation two. I've now broken. And we'll use a brand like ORS Organic Root Stimulator. Perfect example. Organic Root Stimulator came out of Soft Sheen Carson and Softshine 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, this. To sell to a, a multinational, right? And. And the sun 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, right? But now you got to go compete against l' Oreal, who owns Soft Sheet, right? Or you've got to go compete against Pantene, or you got to go and compete against Cream of Nature or Revlon or whom, whomever it is, right? And they have access to capital, they have the 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 png, 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, right? Or go to a fund and get a $50 million investment to go scale a business like that, right? So you run into these structural challenges, right? 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. 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, when you hit the larger world, it's a much different game. And it becomes much, much harder for, for these companies, 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 a, an executive inside of a, of a corporation, right? The investment in your education, right? The student loans that you have, the, the investment in self development, the things that you have to go through in those, 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, you're, 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, to first base, right? Like you've got to literally be that much better, right? And then you think, well, I'd love to go work for a black owned business, right? And you stop to think about it and, and, and realize, hey, yeah, that business may not be able to get the capital that is 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? It's like, how do, how do you do it? And there's a reason that so few are able to do it.
