After Wharton, Juzang honed his pitch and started shopping around his business plan. The new and improved version mitigated the VCs' criticism by promising that the start-up would extensively survey at-risk youth to get feedback on its videos. Juzang even suggested that the company would employ urban street kids in the making of its videos as a means of ensuring the work's street cred.
"I don't think in a company that's had our growth we ever plan for a downside. There are always setbacks, but everybody's always looking for it to go up. I think it's better to look ahead than stand around trying to figure out where you were."
--Bob Plitt, president of the Plitt Company
#86, 2002 Inner City 100
Even though Juzang was starting an "asset-lite" media consulting company in the midst of the 1991 recession, some people found his story irresistible. Calvert Social Venture Partners, a Virginia venture-capital fund that invests in companies that it sees as both moneymaking and socially responsible, decided to invest $50,000 in the start-up. An angel investor who read about the company in the Philadelphia Inquirer called Juzang out of the blue and invested $50,000. And the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded a $50,000 grant to study the impact of the foundation's ubiquitous "This is your brain on drugs" ad campaign on at-risk youth.
Juzang's story still evokes strong emotion among his backers. "I love him," says John May, managing partner of Calvert Social Venture Partners. "This is the classic case when the founder is visionary, and you back the jockey, not the horse. That company wouldn't be what it is without him."
Benchmark
| The IC 100 by sector: |
| Service |
58% |
| Manufacturing |
31% |
| Distribution |
9% |
| Retail |
2% | |
Juzang's story may sound like one in a million, but it isn't even one in a hundred. Two other entrepreneurs on this year's list similarly pitch their companies as connectors between urban minority communities and the mainstream economy. One is Eugene Morris, CEO of E. Morris Communications Inc. [#59], a Chicago agency that creates advertising that targets African Americans for big consumer marketers like General Motors.
The other is Glynn Lloyd, founder and CEO of City Fresh Foods [#81], which mirrors MEE Productions in many ways. For instance, it tailors the services of big institutions to their minority constituents. City Fresh Foods is paid by city health agencies to provide ethnic food to the homebound elderly. Lloyd sold the idea for his company to customers and investors based in part on his history in the largely African American neighborhood of Boston in which the company was going to be based -- and whose residents would be its meal recipients. "It helped us that we're from here and that our folks are from here and that my grandmother lives down the street," Lloyd says. "We're real and we're authentic."
Like Juzang, Lloyd wrote a business plan and shopped it around to investors, even though catering, like focus-group research, is not a market chock-full of venture-backed start-ups. And like Juzang, Lloyd was successful. City Fresh raised $190,000 in equity from two socially conscious funders in 1995 and has since grown to revenues of $1.3 million on local government contracts.
NEW MARKETS: "I think that there is a lot of opportunity out there because, even though the economy is suffering, I think finally there are companies out there who realize the importance of the African American segment. Even though it's a segment, it's a very viable segment."
--Eugene Morris, CEO of E. Morris Communications
#59, 2002 Inner City 100
Lloyd, 34, says that his pitch is boosted by his company's essential mission: cooking soul food for little old ladies. "The food we're putting out works in our favor," he says. But so does the fact that he's a local guy looking to do a little good. "Politically and businesswise, being local helped us maneuver," Lloyd says. "We could say that, missionwise, we wanted to create jobs and create capacity and wealth here. When I had to, that was the conversation I had. And it wasn't bullshit, either -- it was true."
Even though some investors might eat up the love-me-love-my-company pitch, a sales call is perhaps a bigger deal. How does a CEO infuse emotion into an initial contact without turning it into an uncomfortable "pity me" kind of conversation? After all, prospective customers just want a product or service hassle-free. What do they care about the CEO? The answer, according to Inner City 100 CEOs, seems to be that many customers will actually create the opening, particularly if a company is small or young like many on the Inner City 100. "People buy from who they know and like to be around," says Lanre Olotu, the Nigerian émigré-turned-entrepreneur.
