Starting From Scratch with Entrepreneur John W. Barfield | American Black Journal Clip

welcome to American black Journal I'm Stephen Henderson we think of african-american entrepreneurs in the Detroit area one of the first that comes to mind is John Barfield he founded what is now the bar tech group a global supplier of workforce management and staffing solutions the story of John bar Fields rise to success is told in a new book titled starting from scratch the humble beginnings of a two billion dollar enterprise a documentary on Garfield's life will debut on Monday during a Michigan minority Business Week event at the Charles H Wright Museum I started out to do something that would benefit my family and as a result of many good fortunes and many wonderful people that I've met along the way I have I have been able to provide my family with education and experiences that I never had in a country and a narrow ribbon by racial oppression and struggle it's impossible to find a single person who can embody those times but there is one man who comes close John W Barfield born to poor southern sharecroppers who went on to build a billion-dollar international business a family business John ballfield is a really impressive serial entrepreneur I mean he's got deep entrepreneurial genes in him you know here's a guy who had a newspaper route he was a door-to-door salesman he worked as a janitor he's an irrepressible presence that has to succeed an entrepreneurial ventures business men are made entrepreneurs are born and if you bring this back to John Barr feeling he's an entrepreneur he was born entrepreneur he's a gentle soul but he has the eye of the tiger he is truly the American dream my father was an extraordinary man he was big in a powerful physique and was maybe the kindest person I've ever known he was - crying - even spanked my sister and I that was a job that my mother had to do they taught us a lot of principles and I've been asked why why they taught you these principles that these were principles that were designed to protect us from God and man living in the south where we did you could be lynched for nothing we thought that Pennsylvania would be better we found that Pennsylvania for my folks was almost as bad my father had to work almost as hard as hardly as he did in the South was not the best lifestyle most of the coal mines paid ruined script you know they're working 12 14 hour days and sometimes more than that the life expectancy wasn't very high there were deaths on a daily basis in most of these mines it was probably the harshest of all the industries I'm pleased to have John Barfield as my guest today welcome to American black Journal thank you yeah so I like many great success stories yours has very humble beginnings born in Tuscaloosa AL Alabama in 1927 but we were talking before the show started and you were telling me about being a janitor at the University of Michigan in 1949 and deciding from there to leave to start your own business I want to start the interview there talk to me about what it was that that that it led you to make that decision and made you think this will turn out to be better than what I'm doing well I left high school after the tenth grade I was 16 years old and when I became 17 years old I joined the US Army and I served for two years in Germany and France and came back to this country without any skills so I applied for a job at the University of Michigan as a wall washer and at the end of the wall washing period I was one of the people that was offered a job as a custodian and I worked from 1949 to 1954 as a janitor in the chemistry building I left that job in 1954 but the way I left it was I had to find more income because my family was growing and I noticed that they were building a number of homes on the west side of Ann Arbor so I went to the Bill and I said my name is John Barfield I'd like to clean your houses for you I can do them better cheaper and and and and on time and would you give an opportunity and they did and I made an amazing discovery that discovery was that I could clean two small homes in a day and I was paid thirty five dollars for each so I was able to make as much in one day working for myself as I could in a whole week working with you working for the university that's when I decided to leave the University and to become an entrepreneur yeah but but this is also a time when African Americans weren't assumed to be able to manage companies to build companies tell me about some of the resistance that you encountered early on and sort of how you navigate it around it well you true it was a time when African American women were thought not to be able to handle complex profitable large opportunities and it took a while before people gave me an opportunity but I stayed with the University and then when I left in 1954 I wrote a book called the Barfield method of building maintenance and I started cleaning commercial and industrial buildings in 13 years after I left the University of Michigan I was met by a number of large corporations they were consolidated foods mac no maki corporation the senator's corporation international telephone all wanting to buy my business so i sold the business in 1969 to ITT but one of the largest multiples that they'd ever paid at that time for a contract cleaning service uh-huh uh-huh and and how do you get from there to the Barfield group well of our tech group I should say in 1975 I got a call from the General Motors Corporation asking me would I be interested in coming out they had a proposal for me so I went out to the hydra-matic plant there and they they said would you help us find minorities and women that we could buy goods and services from that were said after the boycott yeah and I think our leaders went to the the the large corporations that we we buy your goods and services but you don't give us time give me you don't give us any of sure unless you change they were going to boycott and that's what started this minority business development program so after a year of looking we found only one African American and his business was selling corrugated boxes back to the corporations and that's when they said John we have a we have a proposal for you we'd like for you to clean up some old engineering drawings for us and if you can do this to our satisfaction in six months we'll continue to give you opportunities and that was the beginning of the Bartek group we started that company with six students from Washington Community College and a day that company has grown to over 3,000 employees Wow Wow so I mean as I said in the open I mean you can't talk about business or black business in Detroit without talking about you and the things that that you have done it's been a long time for you though I mean that you've been that you've been at this you've seen a lot of change over that time in the city in business what do you see today as the things that that are either opportunities for African Americans who want to start their own businesses or things that are still obstacles well I I don't see a lot of intelligent effort going on to start black businesses interestingly enough I was asked by the Detroit Public School System to come up with an idea of how we could create more black businesses particularly with the students attending high schools and I met with them the other day and gave them an idea of embedding an entrepreneurial training program at every high school in the city of in the city of Detroit yeah we really have to do a better job of providing opportunities for young people and and we don't I mean schools in general are not teaching kids to be entrepreneurs I mean they are really geared toward you know sending kids into careers I think and there's not that much focus on the idea that maybe you could you could start your own thing and sort of control your own destiny yeah you know one of the things that I think has held us back as a people is we have not realized the true value of our time and our talents and that's what started me off on my road to success yeah we think that we don't realize sometimes the difference between ordinary income and meaningful wealth what we have to begin to teach our people is that it's not about ordinary income the whole purpose of working is to create wealth for yourself yourself family and down and until we learn to do that we we will not have the success we we're looking for and and what are some of the things that that you have to think of when you're doing that I mean what are the practical things that you need to teach kids when they're teenagers are in high school that lead them to thinking that way let me give you an example I work for the university for six years and at the end of the six year I was making $70 a week then I started my own business and and then I left the University but if I had worked for the University of Michigan for 14 more years I would our total than a total of 20 years and if I had gotten a 5% increase for each one of those 14 years at the end of a 20 year career I would have been making eight thousand dollars a year right which would not have been enough to provide the education for my children so I would have been trapped I would not have made any progress myself and my children would not have made any progress as a result of leaving I was able to send my children to good schools I was able to buy a nice home for my family and I was able to enjoy some of the amenities that we all hope and pray to have if I had continued to work for the university none of that would have happened yeah so we have to learn that we have only so many hours in a lifetime to work and if you spend all of that time working as an employee of others you will create ordinary wealth but you won't create meaningful in making what meaningful well yeah and that's what we should be working toward I mean at the same time if you're someone who has that job that that job that has a steady paycheck and seems to promise opportunity for growth it's you can be scary to say well I'll give this up in favor of something that that is is riskier and maybe maybe it will work but maybe it'll pay me less how do you how do you get people to overcome that well you had to be very careful a lot of people are encouraging people to quit their jobs and to become entrepreneurs full-time entrepreneurs we think that's very dangerous because most new business ventures they fail so we encourage people not to do that but to become part time entrepreneurs I mean something that you can do yes while you're still working yes for example if you were a skill worker and and you meet 20 20 $25 an hour and you worked for a corporation that paid you that you should realize that I'm worth more than that really what I'm worth is what my boss charges for my job right so we tried to encourage people to start their own businesses on a part-time basis to become if you will a company of one yeah to work full-time but to spend some of your time working part-time and when you do that you have to realize how to charge for your services for example if I'm a skilled worker and I made $30 an hour I have to realize that my employer marks my time up one hundred and fifty percent or more and he gets our $80 he gets the the difference between what he pays us and we do charges his other customers and that's how he builds wealth at the same time the people that are providing that opportunity to nerdy am bill no wealth at all we try to get people to work for themselves on a part-time basis sure we've got about a minute left tell me about one thing that you say or would say to young people I mean looking back on your life in your career with if you had one piece of advice for young people to sort of follow in that path or it affords a different path that that would be equally successful what would that what would that one thing be I would say to you that the only way that you can find the path to wealth is to realize the value of your time and your talents that's when you can begin to move forward yeah not to rely on other people to tell you what you're worth but to realize you value yourself and and to have the confidence to do that to move full that's when we roll hurdles right yeah yeah it's it's not hard to be successful when you realize how valuable you are yeah yeah all right wonderful advice and congratulations on all your success and on the documentary well thank you very much I'm very proud of the book and I think it was written with humility and deference and I think there's some good principles and some good lessons and I hope more people will read it may I have a minute to say one other thing sure 40 years ago I made a pledge to our Rotary Club in Ypsilanti to raise enough money to provide vaccinations for a million African children from polio after two years we had not we did not reach our goal but we did raise enough money to vasan eight four hundred ninety seven thousand African children Wow so I went to the Rotary Foundation a year ago and I said if you will endorse my book to you a 1.2 million members I'll give you $15 of the price back for every $27 book that you sell my goal is and my hope is that they will sell five percent of their rotaries will purchase a book and if they do it would provide an I about $900,000 that would be used to provide the polio vaccinations for for African African children while so let's Michael that's it that's an outstanding goal thank you very much thank you very much for being I'm pleased to be here

Channel: Detroit Public TV

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Keywords: detroit public television, detroit public tv, wtvs, dptv, detroit pbs, American black journal, Stephen Henderson, john w barfield, entrepreneurship, Bartech john w barfield

Id: tGA2PSHHmK8

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2015