Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to CeeCee Evans. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

CeeCee, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

How I came up with an idea for my business. For me I had the insight to see the disparities of Entrepreneurship as it relates to minorities back in 2016, long before Covid and George Floyd made it obvious for the rest of the world in 2020. So realizing the disparities I decided that I needed to figure out a way to help minorities overcome the many obstacles they would have to endure in order to pursue their entrepreneurial dream. So I founded Mission Bridges a 501 c 3 nonprofit that provides free entrepreneurial training, mentoring, coaching and services to women, minorities, veterans, and ex-offenders.

Being a black woman I personally experienced many of the obstacles, so I could relate on a first-hand basis of the struggles that it took as a minority and as a woman to start a business. I knew when I started Mission Bridges that I wanted to be able to provide one on one coaching, mentoring and entrepreneur training because that was something that many minorities we’re lacking. There are accelerator programs out there however many minorities generally don’t meet the criteria (good credit, capital, and high annual revenues) to be accepted into the program.

Funding and access to resources and services was as limited, and I knew this is one of the biggest reasons that many minority, women, and veteran owned businesses failed or never got started. So this was something that I made sure my board and I focused on when we were in our start up phase. The sole purpose of Mission Bridges is to bridge the gap that minority entrepreneurs experience when starting or growing their business or nonprofit.

CeeCee, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started my career in Corporate America back in 1986 where I worked in investor relations for a few major companies in the DFW metroplex. In 2000 I left corporate america and joined the nonprofit sector , where I worked for the American Cancer Society, Goodwill and the Salvation Army. In 2016, taking my corporate and nonprofit experience I then found Mission Bridges.

Mission Bridges is unique because we help nonprofits and small business will all aspects of their startup or growth phase. We give them one-on-one coaching which keeps them accountable. We also put our entrepreneurs with other entrepreneurs in the industry as mentors. So they can have someone they can reach out to to learn the day-to-day struggles that they will experience in the business and learn ways to overcome them.

We also offer office space through our PeerSpace co-working space as an opportunity for all of our small business and nonprofit to come in and get affordable office space while they are building a relationship with other peer agencies, while having access to the in-house coaching and training. Our goal is to give them every resource they need to be successful.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Honestly word of mouth has helped build our reputation. We do focus on marketing efforts but honestly the biggest success has been from the people that we help. They are so grateful for how we are able to help them overcome the obstacles that they are experiencing that they refer us to a friend and another friend.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

In 2019 covid hit and just like everyone else’s business we had to pivot our way of doing business to work within the new normal that covid brought us. Meaning in the past we had offer all of our online training or coaching and services in person at our office but once covid hit and we had to go to remote working.

This meant changing how we interacted with our volunteers with our staff and with our learners. Honestly it was a lot easier to Pivot how we interacted with our volunteer and staff however with our learners it was a little bit of a struggle. We didn’t have systems in place for remote learning so we had to find a system that we could utilize and a program that we could integrate online so that we could start offering virtual entrepreneur training classes.

Once we had found the system did we had the struggle of getting people comfortable with wanting to take an entrepreneur class completely online. In our years of doing this we found that most people are more comfortable with in person learning so that they have access to an instructor. So from 2019 to the end of 2020 we experienced a lowest training participation since our inception. The irony is I want a wood coaching increased 1000%.

Now fast-forward to 2022 and participation in our training is back up to our pre covid levels. I think now that we’re coming out of covid we’re able to do a combination of remote and its been working well for both our facilitators and our clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: missionbridges.org
• Instagram: instagram.com/missionbridges
• Facebook: facebook.com/missionbridges
• Linkedin: linked.com/company/missionbridges
• Twitter: twitter.com/missionbridges
• Youtube: missionbridges
• Other: tiktok.com/missionbridges