We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Boyce Watkins. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Boyce below.

Alright, Boyce thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

I am very happy as a business owner. As a black man, freedom is very important to me. White culture was never something I hated, it was just foreign to me. So, whenever I ended up working in white organizations, I felt powerless, stressed out and unheard.

The Black Business School and other businesses I’ve created have allowed me to do what I do best with people who understand me and to also serve a community that is largely underserved. But with that opportunity comes the challenges typically facing black owned businesses: A lack of access to capital, being ostracized by mainstream society, and having a customer base that has to be educated on the value of what you’re offering, given that many of them didn’t learn to invest in their own families.

One stressful situation I experienced was when hosting our annual All Black National Convention. The ABNC is a time when we gather the best and brightest minds in our community to solve problems for black people in areas related to health, wealth, relationships and other important topics.

The week before the convention, my mother was diagnosed with a very serious case of colon cancer, which required immediate surgery. My father was already battling with cancer, so this hit our family like a ton of bricks.

In addition to this, I received the final invoice for the venue were using for the convention. For some reason, no one in my team let me know in advance that I had $101,000 left to be paid. The worst part was that it had to be paid in 24 hours.

I was able to scramble and raise the money and the convention went on as expected. However, I was thinking about the fact that had I not been a Finance PhD who deeply understands how to manage finances and protect my business from economic volatility, this kind of news would have been a death blow to my company.

African Americans don’t have the ability to just call up the local bank and get a few hundred thousand dollars to cover short-term expenses. Being locked out of the banking system is one of the major reasons our businesses can’t grow.

Despite the obstacles and challenges, I still love being a business owner. I wouldn’t trade it for the world and it’s nice to be doing work that benefits the people I love.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I got into Finance as an 18-year old college freshman who didn’t have any money. I figured that if I studied money and learned about money, someone would pay me money to talk about it. The plan worked.

In college, I was selected as The Wall Street Journal Outstanding Graduating Senior in Finance and went on to earn my PhD in Finance at The Ohio State University. At that point, I joined the faculty of Syracuse University, where I served for 12 years.

While teaching at Syracuse, I realized that most black people like me can’t afford the incredibly high cost of tuition, so I decided to connect to the black community through the internet. This led to the creation of The Black Business School.

To date, The Black Business School has 153,000 students around the world and we’ve introduced over 10 million people to the world of investing and business ownership. Our core beliefs are that we believe black people should educate our own children, create our own jobs and support black owned businesses.

We don’t hold any animosity toward any other racial group, but firmly believe that the racial wealth gap is a serious problem that will only be solved if we address it. Even worse, the racial wealth gap is widening because most young black people are trained to be lifetime consumers and employees rather than producers and business owners.

Focusing on one family at a time, we are working to shift the narrative on black wealth and believe that this can only occur if we recruit leading thinkers in the black community to focus the bulk of their time solving problems for other black people. My wife, Dr Alicia Watkins, is a licensed therapist, full professor of Social Work and Certified Clinical Trauma Professional. We’ve worked together to create the world’s first Black Financial Therapy Department, with the goal of working with leading Therapists and financial experts to understand the psychological and sociological barriers to the creation of black wealth in America and around the world.

We are most proud that we have been able to give our students and education that is better than what they received in college at a fraction of the cost. Our goal is to be a financially sustainable, highly effective HBCU for the 21st century and beyond.

You can learn more about our work by visiting TheBlackBusinessSchool.com or BoyceWatkins.com

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Our business was funded via boostrapping. We couldnt’ get investors and banks don’t loan much money to black people, so we learned that by being financially creative, we could build the base we needed in order to be successful.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

I speak to my clients everyday via Youtube and other social media platforms. We have about 1.4 million subscribers across a variety of Youtube channels and a few hundred thousand more on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

By caring about the problems of our customers, we connect with them and let them know that we are the leading authority on black family wealth in the world. We give a ton of value away for free.

Contact Info:

• Website: BoyceWatkins.com
• Instagram: @TheRealBoyceWatkins
• Twitter: @DrBoyceWatkins1
• Youtube: @DrBoyce

Image Credits
No credits necessary. These images belong to me.