We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sutton C. McCraney and Lace Flowers a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sutton & Lace, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

The Flavor Room didn’t start as a business plan. It started as a pattern.

In 2022, when I (Sutton) launched my consulting business, I was told to network, get in rooms, and build relationships. So I did. But what I found felt familiar as a Black American woman raised in Utah and later serving as a Black Muslim in the U.S. Air Force — I could be present without truly being seen.

The rooms were crowded but empty. Performative. Transactional. I was good enough to sell to, but not positioned as a peer or leader. At first, I internalized it. Maybe it was my mindset. Maybe I just needed to try harder.

But over time, it became clear the issue wasn’t confidence — it was infrastructure. These spaces lacked standards, accountability, and real pathways for leadership, especially for entrepreneurs of color.

For three years, I carried the idea that something better was possible.

On August 7th, 2025, I sent a direct message to Lace Flowers.

Two years earlier, on that same date in 2023, Lace was leaving a hospital in Colombia in a wheelchair after emergency surgery and losing 3.2 liters of blood. Her business had collapsed. As she rebuilt, she re-entered online spaces that marketed healing and inclusion but still operated with racial bias and performative allyship. She was invited in for optics, not expertise.

When I shared the idea for a space built differently — she said yes immediately.

We didn’t start with a polished website or investors. We started with clarity. Within 24 hours, we sold out founding member spots using a Google document and a Stripe link.

The first months were focused on structure. We codified the standards we felt were missing into LEGIT — Leadership, Equity, Growth, Integrity, Transparency. We conducted over twenty hours of interviews and independently published our research paper, Is It LEGIT? Redefining Equity, Leadership, and Influence in Online Business.

We didn’t rush to scale. We built deliberately.

The Flavor Room exists because we stopped trying to fit into rooms that were never designed for us — and chose to design one ourselves.

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

Sutton is a former U.S. Air Force Non-Commissioned Officer who managed multi-million-dollar projects before transitioning into entrepreneurship. Raised as a Black American woman in predominantly white spaces and later serving as a Black Muslim in the military, she learned early what it meant to be present but not always fully seen. When she entered the online business world, she recognized the same pattern — visibility without real positioning, access without real power. Her background in systems and leadership strategy now shapes how The Flavor Room is designed: not as a networking group, but as intentional infrastructure.

Lace has been an entrepreneur for nearly two decades, building businesses across wellness, coaching, and digital systems. After surviving a near-fatal medical emergency and rebuilding her life and work from the ground up, she became even more aware of the hidden systems that sustain real success — family dynamics, community architecture, and structural integrity. Re-entering online spaces, she encountered racial bias and performative inclusion that reinforced what she already knew: something different needed to be built.

Together, we created The Flavor Room as an invite-only ecosystem for diverse leaders and entrepreneurs of color who are serious about building businesses with standards. Our work centers on three pillars: research, structure, and development. We independently published Is It LEGIT? Redefining Equity, Leadership, and Influence in Online Business to name what many experience but rarely articulate. We codified our findings into the LEGIT framework — Leadership, Equity, Growth, Integrity, and Transparency — as non-negotiable standards. And through our membership tiers, convenings, and upcoming certification program, we apply those standards in practice.

What sets us apart is that we are not building around personality or hype. We are building infrastructure. We are willing to name hard truths about race, power, and accountability in online business — and then design alternatives.

What we are most proud of is that we built slowly and deliberately. Our founding members joined because they recognized the clarity and conviction behind the vision, not because of marketing spectacle. The Flavor Room exists because we stopped trying to fit into rooms that weren’t designed for us — and chose to design one ourselves.

For us, that is the real work.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Lace and I met in 2022 in the most modern way possible — through Facebook groups.

At the time, I was actively growing my own community. One day, I saw a post from Lace in another group. She was looking for opportunities to speak and do live interviews. I didn’t know her yet, but I commented.

About a week later, I was interviewing her inside my group.

What was supposed to be a standard live conversation turned into something else entirely. Somewhere in the middle of talking business, we randomly bonded over predictive programming in movies — a completely unexpected tangent that revealed how similarly we think. It was one of those conversations where you realize quickly that you’re not just aligned professionally, but intellectually.

That interview was the beginning of an ongoing dialogue — about systems, power, leadership, and what was missing in online business.

The rest didn’t happen overnight. But that first conversation made it obvious: we were meant to build something together.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Before The Flavor Room existed, Lace and I had already built strong individual reputations in our respective fields. When we decided to build together, we weren’t starting from zero — we were building on years of trust, results, and relationships. Many of our founding members had already worked with one of us and knew how we operate.

But reputation, for us, goes deeper than past clients.

From day one, we made a non-negotiable decision: our marketing would match our reality. We would never sell transformation we couldn’t deliver, proximity we didn’t intend to provide, or standards we weren’t willing to uphold ourselves.

That alignment between what we say and how we operate, is what people consistently reflect back to us. In an industry where branding often outpaces substance, we’ve built credibility by ensuring the talk and the walk are indistinguishable.

Reputation isn’t something we chase. It’s something we protect.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.theflavor.biz/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theflavorbiz/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFlavorRoomYT
• Other: Fully Flavored Business Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fully-flavored-business/id1844646207