DOING BUSINESS WHILE DOING GOOD
WORDS: RONDA RACHA PENRICE

Wu-Tang’s “Cash Rules Everything Around Me” became a popular mantra of the early ‘90s. While young, fly and flashy hasn’t completely gone out of style, in the new millennium, more and more young professionals are opting to serve others instead of just serving themselves. So, increasingly, founding and running a nonprofit has become a viable business model. According to the Urban Institute of the National Center for Charitable Statistics, there were 850,455 public charities »

LANDING ON YOUR FEET
WORDS: YTASHA L. WOMACK AND LOUIS LANG

In 1999, Vanguarde Media, Inc. quickly established itself as a new leader in the black publishing world. It was African American history. There were no black-owned publishing companies that had bought their way into the market. Vanguarde acquired BET’s Emerge and BET Weekend and used their subscribers to launch Savoy, a lifestyle publi-cation that was lying dormant at Time Inc., which went head-to-head with Ebony. They also acquired Heart & Soul from BET, a health and well-being magazine for black women, and separately acquired the young, urban chic, women’s magazine Honey from Harris Publications. Vanguarde’s emergence was like the rise of Camelot for young urbanites.»

ONE & ONLY
WORDS: MEGAN SCOTT

One sells upscale condos valued at more than a million dol- lars. Another has his own line of French wines distilled in Bordeaux, France. A third has held lead strategy and finance positions for the foremost financial institutions. While a fourth, built a multimillion-dollar technology company by the time he was 17 and is now the youngest CEO of a publicly traded company.

From the outset, it may seem that these four have nothing in com-mon besides being successful and black in America. Yet what really binds them is that they are all navigating uncharted territories as one of a few, if not the only, blacks in their chosen fields with their level of accomplishment. »