Jay Bailey on equity, supporting Black entrepreneurs & RICE | The Blackprint with Detavio Samuels

my name is detavio Samuels and welcome to the black Print where I sit with the innovators disrupters and change makers laying the groundwork for the next generation of cultural leaders you know Chase is a part of our story one of the first people to say yes we had this crazy idea of the Russell Center we were nothing but a gutted out building with wires hanging down it was Chase Bank through the Abe program you can walk into the business you can wake up every day confident this is the black friend [Music] here in Atlanta Georgia man I appreciate you being here man it's good to be here brother welcome to Atlanta and here we are right now on this podcast video show I so appreciate you for coming I'm excited for the audience to get to meet and understand more about this man right here this King Jay Bailey we all know that In This Moment In Time black entrepreneurship is critical Building Wealth in the black community is critical and so I'm excited to have a conversation with my brother to see how he got from wherever he started to where he is now helping black people do that thing in the entrepreneurship space and so if you don't mind let's take it all the way back to the beginning wow and for me the beginning is where does your heart or passion for our entrepreneurship again you know some kids been selling lemonade on ice cream stands since they were five some people didn't kick in until like where does your where does yours kick in I was riding my bike and I'm from Decatur so I'm from Atlanta um I was riding my bike to the barber shop 11 years old I'll never forget this part of the story and uh Candler Road Candler Plaza Barber Shop and when I was growing up bro you could have put a Bentley next to a Ferrari and I'd have taken a Mustang GT 5.0 every day of the week I pull up to the barbershop and boom there was a black on black convertible Mustang GT 5.0 and anybody from the hood to understand triple gold dates I lost my mind I threw my bike down ran into the barbershop I was like hey whose car is that I'm screaming my barber kind of gives me the universal brother assembly before that's me turn around and count how many chairs you see in the shop so I don't know 10 they said well each one of these Barbers pays me 50 a week to cut hair in my shop Jay you're smart due to math so I started doing the math he said hold on before you finish well I got two more shops just like this finish the matter so Little J Bailey was like zero zero zero comma zero and he said it he said son I'm an entrepreneur I own this business and I own those two other businesses and what you need to do is find something you love and go make money doing it that one whisper in my ear literally changed my trajectory forever my bike ride home I was insanely curious who owns the public library who owns McDonald's who owns a tire shop mom dad do we own our house we do self-esteem self-confidence goes up now I want to fight you if you cut through my lawn because this is our grass that pride of ownership kicked in so at 11 years old you get exposed to this idea of Entrepreneurship yes sir so entrepreneurship kind of sets you on fire it is the thing that actually gets you to be passionate about going to college but you're starting a business at 12. how are you learning how to run a business and manage a business before you get because you're not learning business business education in high school you're not learning business education the Middle School unless you do correct me if I'm wrong where does your business your original business education come from it's the hardest lesson ever learned guys and it's a real one I'll I'll answer your question with a long answer yeah if you want to talk about innovation show me somebody more Innovative on the planet than a single mother with two kids making seventeen thousand dollars a year you want to talk about enterprising and I think the community has a role to play too the beautiful piece about that back in the 80s is that those kids that had to make choices based on their exposure saw that I had the opportunity to take other routes and they literally forbid me from going their Direction the same for you Jay don't I'll never want to see you special why did they so they knew that I had two parents in the home they knew that my mom was highly involved in the community she was PTA president they both went to college and yes they were both working class folks but literally they saw that based on their situations and when compared to mine the brother you have everything that we don't and how don't even think about coming over this side of the table because you have more options than we do so now you finally made your way to college what school did you go to the mighty University of Georgia question for you which is so now what I know is you don't go straight into entrepreneurship coming out of college you end up developing a career in Investment Banking real estate tell me how you get there how do we get from college to banking so I was in Richmond Virginia I worked in sales where Hershey Foods Corporation I came back to Atlanta to take care of my grandparents because their health was failing I got into executive development I then found myself in banking and uh but it was there where I actually met the Russell family and uh Michael Russell came in to deposit a check and that relationship was born but what happened brother remember I'm young unsupervised unmentored and very entrepreneurial the real estate market had exploded in Atlanta and I had customers and clients coming in with checks for 30 50 100 200 000 at a time and what does a kid do when he sees that he just simply asked what are you doing yeah how'd you get that and so real estate investment well what's that and so I started to get pieces of Knowledge from everybody so I was wide I wasn't deep I didn't really study it but I did the math as a young unmentored entrepreneurial kid I left that job and started a real estate company and in that real estate company brother it was um you weren't gonna outwork me I have a unnatural kind of probably unhealthy work ethic and even back then I sold houses flipped houses built houses commercial residential you name it and uh the teller was like Mr Bailey do you want to see one of our our platform Bakers and I'm like why would you survive this this wire should be no problem she said yeah that's the problem do you realize that you have 3.47 million dollars in your checking account and you can do probably more things with that than just holding it in a checking account um when the market crashed though I lost everything I went from living in a 10 000 square foot home to literally living in a nine by nine storage unit on Mountain Industrial Boulevard in Tucker Georgia uh and that was that was that's that's the whole next chapter we did this but I would like so tell me how that felt so yeah I like and I won't like give me like those emotions tell me what it feels like to feel like I'm at the top of the top me and my boys riding around and how much just because we can and now I go from 100 to zero how did that but I think that 100 felt like zero because it was an empty hundred and so the money and the spending and the houses and the clothes and the cars I was medicating myself it was probably depression but you know in our community we don't talk about action don't talk about it so the money was the crush so the fall felt like I earned it that's where I was supposed to be and so I didn't have this big Fall From Grace where I was like how did I go from here to here in my mind I thought I was always supposed to be here and so it wasn't that much of a transition and so you know the emotions to go around I'm a firm believer that lost creates leaders like you've got to go through something I think far too often most people take walking upright for granted we're only looking straight ahead I'm a firm believer brother if you've never been on your back I don't know if you've ever really seen the sun it takes that kind of being knocked down to really appreciate the grind the hustle the struggle and the Triumph I love that and so so when I when I was in that 9x9 storage unit I had this great Epiphany by the world standards I've been successful the cars the clothes the houses the trappings of wealth uh I was successful but I had zero significance I'd done nothing to put a dent in this world I spent 10 grand a night in a club but how was there no scholarship in my mother's name and so through that kind of epiphany around success and significance everything changed four years out of homeless since I was helping to run a 30 million non-profit organization in 10 countries um you know we had we had done work all over the world I was standing up in office here in Atlanta and uh you know that's the next Evolution towards this journey of significance we're really looking at how can I work to save community at that point I was immensely focused on saving Community um because I realized that the community was the only reason I got into the places that I've been and now it's time for me to pay it back because I spent a good seven to eight years of my life outside and not wanting to touch and not want to use any of my gifts to pour back into others so I felt this incredible debt that I owe to the people that got me there my mother was a philanthropist and she never made more than 35 000 a year but she always was giving back and I grew up like that so I just kind of returned back to my center and then that's when everything started to click so brother you just look I need to rewind for one second because you dropped something so smooth and so easy you said so I met the the Russell family and built relationship and it kind of kept moving right you don't get to build relationship with the Russell family just on accident I need to know like how did you build relationship we got a lot of young people out here who um the relationships are their keys to getting that kind of Quantum Leap in there and and their businesses and they don't know how to build those types of relationships they've never been in the rooms with those types of people how are you able to build relationship with the Russell family you know it's um I think business moves are the speed of relationships and um I think one of the greatest lessons I ever learned is be authentic um if we can't be authentic you're never presenting yourself as the real person that you are so you'll never be able to build an authentic relationship but Atlanta is a little unique Atlanta is kind of like a small town wrapped around tall buildings and you know we get you know especially families like the Russells you'll see them at the grocery store like the way that I met Mr Russell uh he had built or rebuilt Pascal's restaurant and reimagined the brand and every day he would eat lunch in there and every day I knew that and I'd go in and I'd say hello because he was sitting in the same booth and he would ask me to sit out and have a conversation kid he didn't know from Adam and Atlanta does have a certain specialness about it still and so that relationship just started to continue over time and uh but no man I think that's part of the magic of the city and why I think that will be one of the most consequential cities of The Next Century uh because people can still be nice for no economic reason here and there's still this notion of what it means to be Community uh I just think the cost of perception sometimes kills our community but we can get back to it who is the Russell family you know if you're black and doing business in Atlanta you have to to say thank you to the Russell family Herman Russell was one of the most prolific entrepreneurs this city ever produced as a brother that integrated this chamber of commerce at the city and the state level built a 400 million dollar organization 50 years ago um and even as we start to get into the work that I do now you got to put it in context think of a black man 78 years ago Jim Crow segregated racist South where they were still documented lynchings of black men for thinking too much of themselves this brother had the audacity to build a headquarter building to say full City Block wide and 50 000 square feet with his name on it h.j wrestling company but he built it intentionally on a hill directly across the street from Morehouse Clark Spelman Morris Brown and ITC because back then you couldn't go to Duke or UGA or Georgia Tech so he knew as those students matriculated from all over the world to go to the best schools available for black people they needed to see the physical manifestation of what was possible for them so he built his headquarters on a hill overlooking those campuses when you talk about exposure they'd see it every day even today long after his death h.j Russell and Company were still the largest black owned construction firm in the country exactly uh you go into most airports in America like if you fly of Atlanta today the B Concourse thank the Russell family because anything that you spend money with is within that Concourse so it's an incredible Legacy and one of my personal mantras is plant seeds that will grow trees whose shade you may never sit under I am sitting in this shade and intentionally was able to kind of grab on a branch of that tree but it's a real thing my brother we are very much a very similar about this idea about reinvesting in our community and believing that this is the moment in time for us to leverage our Collective power oh absolutely Collective resources to build us up and I love that you are doing and of course I expect nothing less do you have a story for me so you know it's one way to talk at kind of like a high level I'm trying to figure out who can bring it down to a very concrete level is there a story of an entrepreneur of a company that you guys were able to touch because you're extremely proud of that you can tell you know there's there's during the pandemic um I was really upset when I started to read the headline saying that 86 of black businesses would evaporate because of covert 19. I took offense to that but more than three days later I got a phone call from one of our entrepreneurs the actual contractor is building our Center almost in tears because overnight in one phone call they lost 78 percent of their business gone and there was no you know landscape of when it would come back back to relationships um and I can even say it the company's Chase and I give them you know a lot of kudos for this uh I knew the guy that did Real Estate development for Chase Bank I gave him a call and I said I got a contractor this world class he's got all the bonding he just needs an opportunity he's ready for an opportunity they had a conversation and brother within six months this company who had lost 11 million in Revenue overnight had picked up 27 million dollars Revenue building branches throughout the southeast and so because of that relationship and because of that access that Center was able to provide this company was able to weather the storm good morning weather our job is to create the platform that gets companies at a point of Readiness to do business at the next level whatever that means for them and when we can prove that they're ready giving them the access to fly and so any entrepreneur you know that's part of my dream when I first sat in the middle because the other part of our story is we've only been doing this three and a half years so we've raised a little north of 43 million dollars in two and a half years uh we've gone from one employee to north of 18. uh we serve 200 entrepreneurs full-time and 4 000 in our Network and we're just getting started and so any entrepreneur and part of the vision that led us to this point is I was like we will win when there's a family in Nebraska that has a dream and wants to start a business and around their dinner table they say something like baby if we want this to work we got to get to Atlanta and we've got to get to the Russell Center so you know we're not just the type of people who talk about it we want to be about it we just had a great conversation around the power of Entrepreneurship and around the power of black entrepreneurs I have a conversation outside with two entrepreneurs who are connected to chasing a part of Chase is advancing black entrepreneurship program I would love to take you out there and have a conversation maybe there's a world where there's a connection between them or racism brother I look forward to it all right let's get it thank you [Music] welcome back to the black friend where I had the honor of sitting with my man Jay Bailey today uh you can't have a conversation with the man who is building the definitive Center for black entrepreneurship globally without also talking to Black entrepreneurs and so we wanted to have a conversation with two amazing black entrepreneurs who also happen to be a part of Chase's advancing black entrepreneurship program and so Jonathan Tracy it is such an honor to have you here I would love for you to introduce yourself to the people and tell them about your business you know we want to shine a spotlight on you I'm Tracy Nicole I'm a fashion designer based right here in Atlanta born and raised indicator where is greater so I have a clothing line for women and men now who have confidence take pride in their clothing and juggle work life and play I want to make it easy for them cool I'm Jonathan Brown I'm the CEO and founder of project casting we're like The Social Network for the entertainment industry but emphasizing on jobs so say if you're a filmmaker an actor model influencer and you're looking for opportunities you can find that on Project casting we launched two years ago our platform and we have over 500 000 users and we haven't spent a single Dollar on Advertising talk about it do you also have a consultant at Chase I've worked with I gained a mentor Shay at Chase bank and they made me feel like family they made me feel human and I worked with every Bank you can imagine accounts here and there it was a courtship and they won my business and it was a relationship that was genuine and I felt like they really actually cared they're teaching me things they're telling me okay we can do this and they actually follow through and do it like building business credit and getting lines of credit and things like that things that businesses need small businesses to survive I think for myself uh just a couple of months ago transactions were failing on our platform so we run a subscription-based business and on the recurring transactions they were getting they were failing 90 of the time so I'm calling my merchant account I'm calling of my payment processor and they're not responding they don't know what's going on they're giving me bad advice so then that means you can't make money I'm making no money in less than an hour he put me in contact with a banker put me in contact with a merchant account and we project after we complete our subscription migration at least a 60 increase in Revenue you know I don't think for any entrepreneur it is tough out there it is a struggle to wake up every day and try and complete to work on a dream but when you have a support network and have a mentorship you know you can walk into the business you can wake up every day confident and know that you can succeed and take your business to the next level I love that all right I love his answer you got one is there do you have a story about we wouldn't have been able to do X if it was not for Chase are they helping us launch our businesses into the next Stratosphere I do um and it was a rough road with Chase but they held my hand through trying to get more capital for my business I've had my clothing line for nine years which is uh very long for a fashion brand and I got to this sweet spot where it was maintaining and I want to scale and I'm still at that there's no ceiling for me and so I went to chase how can you help me scale you can't scale without money and so I want the money yeah let me know how to get to the money you know let's cut the small talk how do I get to the money how to use the credit by paying it and increasing the credit and just it's a dance it's a dance that they taught me how to to play that I'm still playing and and the more I play it the more I gain financially not just on the credit side but on the business side so now I can take on bigger deals because I get inventory I can only buy as much inventory as I can afford the more inventory I have the more money I can make the more inventory I purchase the more I can negotiate the prices so I can get that profit margin even bigger now I'm switching and going to this so now we're scaling ready Tracy how are you helping your business skill I'm helping my business scale by dreaming bigger thinking bigger taking on bigger projects eighty percent of my business is online thankfully through the pandemic and my goal is to get in spas all over the world the only way that I can fulfill those type of orders is with so that's where Chase comes in they're teaching me how to build this banking relationship so that we can grow for the longevity because the scale there's no ceiling Jay you are helping entrepreneurs dream big every day which means helping Entre black entrepreneurs scale every day do you have any advice or thoughts for black entrepreneurs as they are thinking about scaling their business you know I think one of the things that we don't talk about enough is the customer you can't grow without somebody buying what you sell and uh you know one of our our takes is that uh and I told you a story earlier when customers come in many forms Chase Bank was a customer of one of our entrepreneurs that led to a multi-million dollar increase in their revenue year over year and so if we're looking at contracts be it direct to Consumer be it in the government if it's business to business we focus a lot on customer Discovery and understanding who that customer is and connecting those companies with that customer that will buy their thing and to Tracy's Point once we've identified who the customer is because one of the things we don't talk about businesses can grow themselves out of business and this is what I'm loving hearing from both of them about the advancing black entrepreneurs program by Chase that you just told me that you had a call that you can make when things got tight there was someone that I could reach out to and that's really encouraging all right right so one of the things that you just talked about and is is the challenges of being an entrepreneur we talked about scaling can be a challenge but I think black entrepreneurs often have very specific challenges can you talk to some of the challenges that you face as a black entrepreneur trying to do what you're doing I was initially introduced to Chase Bank through one of their branch managers Kevin about my non-profit so I got into that place where I wanted there to be purpose behind my brand and so I went to chase asking for sponsorship for my non-profit that led to me being introduced to the advancing black entrepreneurs program because we started talking about business and I'll tell anyone when when they started talking about the resources the mentorship those type of things it's more valuable than cutting a check and so when I hear about the rice Center and the things that they do people don't realize the resources are the biggest challenge as a fashion designer knowing what manufacturers all manufacturers don't manufacture everything you can't get all Fabrics in the U.S and if you're dealing with overseas how do you deal with that so if someone says look I'm gonna offer you this check or I'mma offer you this Mentor I'm gonna choose the mentor all day long because that's what's going to help me to to grow that's what's going to help me to sustain my business not just the check you know Chase is a part of our story one of the first people to say yes when we had this crazy idea the Russell Center we were nothing but a gutted out building with wires hanging down was Chase Bank the people is they make the difference we got family with Chase and so so much so that when you visit the center and I know that you guys have and I hope that you continue too we have our Chase Lounge uh that's beautifully appointed with black art black furniture and it looks as nice as any Center that you'll see in the world but it's by us for us and partnered empowered by Chase but it's not just the edifice of the building you see the different Community Bankers coming in and hosting entrepreneurs and talking about how they grow so Chase is as much a part of our journey as a center as any other institution and so what I do want to end with is to our two entrepreneurs as we talk about the importance of place making and having a home and having that continuous support I'd like to invite both of you to join us as stakeholders at the Russell Center where we're creating this community this culture this Covenant to support we're building it for you we're building it for the entrepreneurs that dream big for the entrepreneurs to see a pathway to success and are feeding their families this way uh but Antonio thank you for having the opportunity but I want to extend that that invitation to the both of you to come join our family let's go make something special happen in Atlanta I'm not the type of person to kind of push any brand I'm only trying to talk about the brands that are helping our community what you heard here is there's resources there's advisory Services there's networking you can find them at Chase you can find them at Rice you can find them in the rice Lounge which is the chase Lounge which is a safe and a holy space and so there are no excuses black people The World Is Ours for the taking let's be bold let's be courageous let's go get this economic wealth and lift our communities up my name is datavio Samuels this is the black Print thank you to my guest Jonathan Tracy my man Jay thank you for being here everything [Music] [Music] hey [Music] no no that's the name [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: REVOLT

Views: 726,214

Keywords: REVOLT, TV, music, rap, r&b, hip hop

Id: PJgidMQrkec

Length: 28min 3sec (1683 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 09 2023