Creating and marketing a black owned business is an art. It requires a great deal of passion and love for the people that support you out of a sense of comradery as well as customers for whom you’re solving a problem. Black entrepreneurs worldwide pour in their hearts and soul into their work.
Black business owners have a passion for their work like no other people. But the world is a cruel place for dreamers and especially for entrepreneurs. The system we live in has made it extremely difficult and many entrepreneurs describe their journey as lonely. People who face difficulty in starting off their businesses or suffer mentally and physically, and the strain that puts on their minds is dangerous, as it has been observed.
In addition, black founders are at times solo founders, not allowing for the support that comes with having a second founder to bounce ideas off of or come to for support.
Hannibal Brumskine III, founder of TheMusicBusiness previously had seen all this firsthand. He knew the challenges solo entrepreneurs had to face and decided to implement a live-chat component to his education company for black owned businesses.
To combat the lonely road of entrepreneurship for black founderst, Hannibal Brumskine III created a consulting platform that gave black founders access to black business experts.
Brumskine III stated that the goal was to make black entrepreneurs feel like they have access to their own business advisors, frequently referencing the support that entrepreneurs receive from shows like Shark Tank. This can be a huge blessing for confused and socially isolated founders who previously had no one to guide them or had a lack of access to top level advisors or people who’ve been around the industry.
When an entrepreneur coach Christina Richardson surveyed a group of entrepreneurs about their mental health in 2019, she found out that hundreds of these founders used the word ‘lonely’ to describe their mental state.
Another recent study by UC Berkeley in California, United States found that 72 percent of entrepreneurs self-reported mental health concerns. In addition to this, entrepreneurs were more likely to report a lifetime history of depression (30 percent), ADHA (29 percent), bipolar diagnosis (11 percent), and substance use conditions (12 percent).
In addition to curbing entrepreneurial loneliness by putting black founders in real-time communication with business experts, the platform coined as “Udemy for black businesses” already provides educational resources that helps black entrepreneurs start and scale new black owned businesses effectively; ultimately much of a founder’s depression can simply be linked to failure in business.