After leaving a job as a television news producer in 1990, Sheila D. Brooks started her own company producing news stories and documentaries. She converted a bedroom into an office at the house where she lived in New Carrollton, drummed up three small contracts, hired an assistant and persuaded a bank to give her a loan.
Two years after starting the business, Brooks was doing well enough to lease office space on K Street in downtown DC, just a few blocks from the White House. Clients included utility companies, government agencies and national nonprofits.
But K Street was no sanctuary from the economic maelstroms that soon came roaring in. There was a federal government shutdown in 1995, followed by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, then the Great Recession in 2007 and the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
To survive, she changed her business model, pivoted from a production company with 14 full-time employees to a marketing and public relations firm with 10. She diversified her client base, brought in more universities and African American service organizations. After recouping her losses, she found herself well-positioned to contract with public health agencies to produce coronavirus safety campaigns.
Among the estimated 11.6 million women-owned businesses in the United States, only 4.2 percent have $1 million or more in annual revenue. For the roughly 2.7 million businesses owned by Black women, only about 1 percent have annual revenue of $1 million or more.
Brooks credits her mother for showing her what real determination looks like. Back in 1930s, when Brooks’s mother was 13, she grew tired of picking cotton on a farm where she lived with her grandmother, in Holly Springs, Miss. So, as Brooks tells it, she packed her bags and set out on foot for Sedalia. Mo., some 420 miles away.
“She never told us how she made the journey, but we never doubted that she had,” Brooks said. “A woman she knew in Sedalia worked as a domestic and helped her get a job and a place to stay. She saved her money, and when she heard about a new hotel opening up in Kansas City, she went there, lied about her age and got a better paying job in housekeeping.”
“My drive to succeed comes from watching my mother hold down two full-time jobs while renting out a room in our house to make ends meet,” Brooks said. “In the evening before bedtime, she’d read the newspaper with us, this divorced woman with a grade school education, instilling in her two girls a belief that with education and hard work, we could accomplish anything in life.”
After 18 years as a television reporter and producer in four different national markets, Brooks concluded that she had hit a “glass ceiling” and would not rise above the job she held. In a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, a group of Black women told researchers they had started their own businesses “because of poor treatment and feeling undervalued in the workplace.”
Brooks arrives to work 7 am from her home in Silver Spring and usually stays until after 5 pm Her company is located on the eighth floor of a recently renovated building at 14th and K streets NW. The street below looks different than it did before the pandemic — not as bustling as it used to be.
This content was originally published here.
