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Marvin Clark:

I ask the question: What can I do to help you? I want to hear your story. You give that story back to me and then I sit and mull over that and decide, okay, where in my course of resources can I go into my bag of ideas and say, what solution can I provide to help them grow and scale? Whether it's connected to supplier diversity, whether it's connecting to the investment bank, whether it's connecting to a banker on my team…what can I do to help you grow and scale? And it may be external, it may be an outside organization that I'm connecting you with. My goal is to ensure that I'm helping you with all the resources I have, not just one set of tools.

Michelle Bounfiglio:

It's a common theme among first-generation leaders that they're doing everything and when they get to a certain point, you need to start to trust your team, to build your team, and to rely on experts to help you get to the next stage. We can help provide those recommendations as we see those businesses scaling. It's really professionalizing the team you have around you, and then also taking a look at the finances and saying, how are we structured? How are we doing things? And make sure that you have the right support for that next level that you’re looking to get to.

Shaunté Robinson:

We've been there before. We've seen clients excel, succeed in the most challenging times, and we've seen clients not do so well in some of those challenging times. And so, if we can offer our advice when we are able to look around the corner…what we may see as some challenging times ahead, we want to guide them in the right direction. Some business owners don't know what they don't know. And us, being one of the largest financial institutions in the world, we have a plethora of resources to provide them at every stage of the business. I think most importantly, it's leveraging our network as a firm, leveraging a network of our employees, Fred Royall, and opening further doors outside of JPMorganChase that I think embodies exactly what we are doing in this diverse business work.

Danielle Davis:

A lot of first-generation businesses don't start with the end in mind. They really think about the day-to-day, and they're in it and they're grinding, right? But you really want to think about: Where do you want this company to go to? What is the overall plan? What is the strategy for it to get there? When you think with the end in mind, you can be more successful with the business overall. So I tell first-generation businesses that all the time. I also tell them to really focus on how can you get people to work for you that have that same goal and vision? Because if you're able to get those people onboarded and they work for you, you're then able to do the part of the strategy that I talked about. You can't be ingrained in every day-to-day thing as a CEO or founder if you're going to take your business to the next level.

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