By Lorrie Baumann

The Empower Project aims to connect investors in the consumer packaged goods space with investment opportunities that they’ve probably been overlooking. The entrepreneurs who will benefit from that are typically under-capitalized, but they come from a community that has a track record of outperforming the market in the CPG space, according to Steve Gaither, the Chief Marketing Officer at C.A. Fortune, and a co-Founder of The Empower Project, which is designed to pair a few Black entrepreneurs in the CPG space with resources to help their fledgling businesses take flight. The Empower Project is currently recruiting Black entrepreneurs nationally to participate in a December 15 informational session. Eligible businesses must be at least 50 percent Black-owned or founded with current annual revenue between $150,000 and $10 million. Additionally, the business must also be able to dedicate time and energy to manage this project and have the ability to cover the hard costs of external expenses for items including packaging, printing, and distribution. Applications for the program are open until January 15. Five applicants will then be selected to participate in a virtual pitch slam scheduled to take place on February 16. From those finalists, one will be selected to receive a package of business services and capital investment valued at $700,000 to help with everything they need to grow their business.

The project is designed to help bridge the wealth gap in this country where Black entrepreneurs don’t often have the same access to start-up capital from family and friends to get their new business off the ground as individuals from more privileged backgrounds, according to Kyle Gardner, the Chief Executive Officer and co-Founder of Dobson Avenue Capital Partners, which is also a partner in the project. “The bottom line for entrepreneurs is the lack of, due to the wealth gap, an inability just to call up a family friend, which is usually how a lot of people start their fundraising, and get a check for five figures or six figures to get the business up and running. The average Black entrepreneur raises $35,000 for their business,” he said.

Although only one winner will be chosen to receive the investment package this year, the project is designed to help expose many more of the applicants to all of the project’s participants and sponsors. Sponsors currently include C.A. Fortune, the private-held, full service-consumer brands agency, which is The Empower Project’s title sponsor, along with C.A. Branding, C.A. E-Comm, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, Dobson Avenue Capital Partners, JConnelly, Propeller Industries, SPINS and Whole Brain Consulting. Additional participants in the process will include other potential investors with CPG portfolios. “We’re going to try and fill that room with investors along the way, so everybody in that room gets access to investors,” Gaither said. “All of these companies presenting should be investable companies and align with smart people in the room that recognize smart people – there should be smart results.”

The project started with an idea that came from one of Gaither’s employees, who was inspired by Black Lives Matter and asked Gaither to think about how their company could lend their marketing and branding expertise to help address underlying issues. Gaither then enlisted Will Madden from Whole Brain Consulting, who has expertise in many of the operational aspects of bringing a CPG product into the marketplace. Madden was enthusiastic about the opportunity to participate, Gaither said. ‘I definitely want to create a legacy and something for my daughter to be proud of,’ he told Gaither, and from there, the project grew from being an opportunity for some free marketing collateral into a chance to give a Black-owned business access to a 360 degree-range of all the expertise a new business would need to get started.

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As the grandson of an entrepreneur who’d started a hair care products business that he ultimately sold to L’Oreal, Gardner had that understanding bred into him. Before that, he’d been an assistant principal on the south side of Chicago, where he met his wife, my grandmother, who was a librarian,” Gardner tells the story. “He started selling hair care products to make extra money to support his four kids. He was trying to find out how to expand his business, and my business partner, Adam Robins, who was fresh out of business school, said, ‘Hey, I really like your business, and I’ll lend you my full lending authority that the bank just gave me fresh out of business school.’”

That friendly arrangement lasted only as long as it took for Robins to present the proposal to his boss, but Gardner’s grandfather, who went on to attain the funding he needed through the Small Business Administration, never forgot Robins’ willingness to back him. Robins is now Gardner’s business partner at Dobson, and Gardner’s grandfather’s hair care products business eventually provided the funding for Gardner’s father to start his own business, where Gardner himself got his early education in entrepreneurship as one of his father’s warehouse workers. “I’ve literally seen, throughout my life, two generations of how these economics of starting a business in the Black community pays dividends for decades and decades, because not only did my dad start his business, but other people in the company started businesses and then went on to use that money to put their kids in school, to own homes, etc., etc. They called it the ‘Miracle on 87th Street,’” he said.
Gardner worked in his father’s business during high school and college, and what he’s doing now, through Dobson, is investing in minority- and women-led businesses operating in the CPG space. The businesses that Dobson supports tend to skew toward Black-owned enterprises, so, with the Empower Project, Gardner saw an opportunity to focus on that community in particular and to help a Black-owned business leader find the resources to help a fledgling company take flight. “We know what they can achieve because we’ve seen it before,” he said. “When he called me, it was essentially a no-brainer because we’re already doing this work – it just allowed us to focus on specifically Black entrepreneurs.”

This project, though it’s starting out small, is a blueprint for greater things in the future, according to Gardner. “Access for even the companies that don’t lend – even the application process will give them an opportunity to meet these investors and start to become part of the network that can help them grow their business,” he said. “It really opens the door, not only for those who apply but for the investors who attend, helping to educate them more about some of these discrepancies that they don’t already know, but also help fill their pipeline with some more diverse entrepreneurs in the long run.”

“When we invest in this one company, we want to start a domino effect. The founder that we invest in, we want to be a mentor for other founders. It all starts with one step,” Gaither added. “It’s a strong step forward.”