YouSaid · the spoken record

Janice Bryant Howroyd

lines on the record: 57
first: 2018-12-03
most recent: 2018-12-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And I've kept that in my mind as I built my business, and I've made a point never to tell my children. I don't work hard to give them what they want. I work hard because of the decision I've made. You know, and for me it's a joy. It's a joy to do what I want.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I absolutely can imagine what Dad would say or what Dad would think. My dad is the one who told us it was our attitude, not our aptitude. My dad was the one who told us education is freedom. My dad was the one who taught us that we wake up on purpose, you know? And I think about him so often and you can't not think about him when you're with mom. I was voted princess in high school and I remember asking for a new gown to wear on a float. And dad said, oh, we can't afford it. We worked so hard for you guys and I remember my mom putting her hand on my dad's hand and said, no, daddy, they called each other mommy and daddy. She said, no, daddy, don't tell Janice we work hard for our kids. We work hard because of the decisions we made.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think luck had anything to do with it. I do believe that I've been blessed. And I have received those blessings by honoring them with hard work. All of the challenges, Of the people. All of the clients and applicants, my life has been a kaleidoscopic opportunity.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a blessing. This is what we've built, this is what all of the people who really believed in me and trusted in me have built. And in our company we teach that there are five things you can't teach people. You can't teach people experience. Can't teach people common sense. You can't teach people confidence. You cannot teach people anything if they don't want to learn it and you can't teach them anything if they know it all. And I think when I look at where you see the amazement in building a billion dollar enterprise, I think it's because those things that you can't teach I've learned.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm not going to be the bull in the China shop, if that's what you're saying. I'm not going to rush through and you know break things on the way toward a higher goal. Perhaps the one decision I would change if in my career would be that I would forgive myself for being smart and being female a lot sooner. Everything else, I think, has been integrated toward the good of a solid business that has a strong future.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Holding myself back from taking risks around expanding or investments that weren't right in the core of what I'm doing. But I always saw myself as, you know, driving in my lane and understanding where my lane was.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly I've made mistakes the bigger of my mistakes were the mistakes I made where I have held myself back because of things that were latent from my childhood and sometimes very active, you know, in businesses around the ism, whether that be racism or sexism or whatever. But those have been where I think my bigger errors have been made.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the questioning and the scrutiny would be different. There would be more question of can we than how will we? Whereas, if I sent someone different on my team in, the questions around how are we going to do this happened a lot quicker in the conversation. And there are women who will tell you today that's still the case.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very often, very often I ran into that I'll tell you candidly and I'm not proud of it there were times when I would gift my intelligence to other members of my team and have them go in and make a presentation or them make the pitch so that the client wouldn't have to interact directly with me as an African American or as a female.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm wondering, you know, looking back as your company grew, I mean, for a long time, you were a minority within a minority. You were a small company with big competitors, a woman of color in an industry that was, I'm assuming, dominated by white men. Did you run into circumstances, a lot of circumstances, where you were judged because of who you are or where things were made much harder because of who you are?”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because by then our son was looking at our industry as a future for himself. And he had worked in my company. He had worked in his dad's company as a kid. And I said, Bernie, I don't think he should have to make a choice. And it is a lot better secession planning for us to go ahead. Let's not have him have to do it later. And that was the decision. That was the thought around how we would blend the companies”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When Bernie and I were leaving a conference in San Diego, we decided to take the scenic route back to LA and we were having a discussion about our children. And I remember my brother had said to me, Carlton had said, you know, Janice, you and Bernie have something that nobody else in this industry has, and I asked him what he meant. He said, Will you guys work from completely different sets of strengths oftentimes? And if you were to combine that, that could be dynamic in the industry. And I thought that was nice and I mentioned it to Bernie. And Bernie said, That makes sense I said, but it's not enough to merge our companies, and we talked more, and then I said, You know, Bernie, I think the thing that would make it interesting for me is that our son not have to decide which one of us he wants to work for.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. My sister Sandy was my first employee, and since then I went on to hire seven other siblings into my business, and they have just been incredible for all of those emotional and those value support systems that you need in place as you're growing a business up. Everyone needs that. I needed that. And I had that in siblings. Now, one of the things that I insisted from my family members before they could come into my company is that they either had to work for three years in a larger company somewhere else or have three promotions before they could come to work for me. I wanted to make sure that they brought into my business some learning, not just the abilities to sustain for three years, but the ability to have learned and have grown within someone else's organization and then bring that value into mind.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got a call from the lady who was head of HR and said, My goodness Janice, how were you able to do this? And I explained that we used for her what we use in our own company technologies that enable us to do that. And she said, we've been working with this company for twelve years, and they've never been able to give us a detail of reporting that you have here. And they started to want conversations around how to buy my technology. And my brother Carleton said, Janice Let's pause Don't sell them to technology, sell them the service I said, Carleton, what do you said no? Don't sell your technology to them. Sell them the service. And we went up and had a different conversation with them, and they became our first acceleration customer.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet, so our technology suite is called Acceleration, and it really was about that detailed reporting we were able to give to clients that they weren't getting anywhere else. And so I had a client up north who had a very bad experience with a publicly held company call me on a Friday morning and ask if I would come up. So I actually ran over to the airport with my brother, another employee, and the three of us went up north at Northern California to the client. And we found out that they had an issue where this publicly held company was not negotiating well with them and had walked out and they had several hundred attempts who had to be paid. And we had to get all of that work together, transition those people. And on Monday morning, all of the work was done. Everyone was paid and they had reports on their desk. Wow.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As the larger company, to do that efficiently to do that sustainably, I needed to integrate technology in a different way, and I didn't find any over the shelf technology, so that's when I started to hire people and we built our own technology solutions.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me tell you two things about that. One, the big thing for me was not so much the exponential growth as it was the adoption of doing the temp work and bringing temp into the fold. Temp work, you're paying people long before the client pays you. And so there is another element of risk in there. You're also the employer of that worker, and so you assume the employer risk. So you've got two dynamic, new and very strong differences in place here. And you're competing against larger entities who are going in and able because of their scale to offer a much better pricing and you are for me and many companies like me woman owned, you are the minority company or you were the diverse company, so you were getting one tenth of that business against one larger vendor and I still had to meet the same pricing and”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We should do that, but people are moving all of the time. And the agreement you have with a person. It may not align with the agreement you have in that contract. And when that person is gone, that contract is still standing. And so you've got to understand the difference between that. And that was one of the biggest lessons I had to learn once I started to expand my business from focusing on one-on-one transactions into contract work.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Becoming certified opened up many new client opportunities for me because now companies could look at me look at my business as an opportunity to meet numbers and quotas that they had around inclusion, diversity and inclusion and if it became a choice between me and another company who was not certified I was going to get that opportunity. I'd never known that existed before I got certified and so that's when I started to expand into contract business. Before then I was doing business on handshakes or on service agreements. But once I started to go after different types of business I needed to do it in contracts and had to learn a lot about the process. And one of the failures I've seen occur in my own business as in others is that we create great relationships with people and companies indefinitely.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a minority woman owned company, and I didn't want to do that, I was doing very well, thank you. And she said no, it's not about you doing better, although you will, she said, It's about you creating the opportunity for others who won't get a shot. She said, we need some strong businesses that are run by women and run by minorities. To certify and go in and do business as such to open the door for others, and even when she was arguing the point as eloquent, as clear as she is, I wasn't getting the point because initially I thought that certification was a strip search. I needed to open up my business to total exposure to someone, to in return have them come back and say, yes, you are a minority. Yes, you are a woman, and yes, you are running this business. And it just did not align with how I felt that I wanted to be measured.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no, I would say it was about. Oh, I want to say six or seven years in, and I remember a lady named Gwen Moore. Gwen Moore was an elected official congresswoman out of California here, and she had been very active in championing and I believe she was one of the original authors of legislation that required public utility companies in California to have diversity spend because she said your rate payers are diverse, so you should be doing business with them. And she contacted me and she said, I want to come see you. And she met with me, and she told me that I had an obligation to get certified.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and were still competent capable people building a business. My husband is a white European born man and I have had instances where there have been inferences in social settings not ever in business where people have, oh you're so lucky you were married to him you must have learned so much from him But at the end of the day, I think Bernie, in his best honest conversation will tell you that he has rather learned a lot from me.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My husband and I love each other very much, so definitely we have rich and open conversations. I think it would be the same as if we had been physicians or scientists. We are going to share a love of the industry and talk about it.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I met my husband at an industry conference, Bernie, and I saw this guy and he was really handsome to me. He had this presence about himself, and And he also spoke with this English accent. But he liked me a lot more than I did him. I noticed him. I can't say I didn't notice him, but he liked me a lot more than I liked him. And he chased me for a bit. I found out that he was the founder of Apple One.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, thinking back on it, hitting profitability in a year seems pretty good, but living through it, it didn't. But remember, I was in a very low overhead business and I was in a business that had high transactions. I was as good as my effort allowed me to be.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my goodness there were so many different guarantees that were offered in our industry back then. I haven't thought about this for years, but that's the risk you take on making sure that you're making a good placement. And that's why I say we had to focus on the applicant. Because you offered people money back if they didn't work out, then, you know, you had a reduction in that fee you got, and you got, you had to pay that money back if they didn't last. So nobody wanted to do that.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I call it the womb word of mouth, baby. I got most of my leads toward opportunities to fill physicians and most of the legends toward applicants by word of mouth.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you've talked with me for a few minutes now. You know a lot about me and you know a lot of resources to go to gain more information, and that's the way the interview worked as well. So the power of that interview enabled me to make sure that I understood the individual who was looking for work. I knew where they'd already worked, I knew if they were already employed that once they left there was going to be an opening there, and because of the rich network that I was able to achieve in the social side of how I lived with my brother and sister, I knew people who were looking for assistance, people who were looking for people to hire and built it on that. In the early days,”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, finding people to place was not an issue during that time, finding the jobs was. And the core of our business remains today as it was when I was one desk. And thus understanding the power of the interview, I”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought I was Judy Jetson, technology hit hard for me, yes, that was incredible for me, and it also taught me the power of technology, and I think that's why over the years my company has evolved more around how we build human friendly technology than anything else.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was there. It didn't have to. It was there. And it worked out very well for me, but I'll tell you something when I did get my own office that I remember the first day I got a fax machine. Do you know who Judy Jetson is? Sure.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know because it's located here in Los Angeles area, many people thought that, but for me, it was more around the biblical sense, the book of that.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I had a friend who hooked me up with someone who had a Beverly Hills location. I was not looking at real estate that way, but it worked out perfectly. The stars were aligned for me.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I made a deal with the guy who owned a rug shop and I set up office in front of the rug shop. Where was the rug shop? It was very, very beautiful in Beverly Hills.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He absolutely did. It was that simple for him. He later told me he saw so much enterprise entrepreneurship in me that I wasn't seeing in myself.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, she and Tommy were going to a Nimic conference in Italy, and when he came back I had reorganized things, put things in form as I saw they should be, and he thought I had worked magic, I thought I did what I was supposed to do, and he said, You know, you don't you really are good, Janice, you should not go back without proving you can make it on your own, and he was the one who seeded the idea that I should hang my own shingle.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, to this day I keep meeting people who just have such great memories of him, and certainly I do. He was an incredible, incredible first generation Irishman.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He did. He had worked at Motown for years and helped move Motown out to LA. And then he went to Billbo You know, his career had been in the music industry. I remember seeing his name scroll the year he died at the Grammys, and Tommy invented what they call the hot one hundred's chart.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't at first I needed to sustain my stay financially because my sister kept saying stay I'm the first family member she's got out here from home”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Palm trees gorgeous, gorgeous palm trees and, you know, you go up and drive all the way up and look out over the city and it was just so beautiful, so beautiful. Ellie was wide open. It truly was a fairy tale kind of existence for me, and I want it in on it.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was hot and poppin'. Although, let me tell you, when I got to LA, I didn't think so on the east coast. I thought I was all of that when I got to LA. And I saw all these women who worked without pantyhose on, they carried purses with somebody else's name on it, Louis Vitton And I was calling it Lewis Viton. And they were all the black people, all the black women I saw were like fabulous, gorgeous women. And I felt like this little nappy-headed colored girl coming out of North Carolina amongst all these fabulous people. No, I didn't feel all hot and popping then.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My dad had taken two young men out on the waters in North Carolina, shrimp boat fishing. Want a shrimp boat, and a storm came up. My dad was taken in the storm. I remember my mom took to her bed for a couple of weeks, and I had booked a ticket to come to California to visit my sister Sandy I remember I told my mom, I'll stay here with you, mom, and help you. My mom had been married since she was a teenager. She'd never had any other boyfriend. I knew there would be some heavy adjustment for her, and she said no. I'm going to have to learn to live on my own, I better do it now, and then she said, The last thing Dad would want is for me to stop you living your dream,'cause we certainly, um, um We certainly have lived”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First I worked in the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC. I work there for about a year and a half and I went home to visit mom and dad. And I remember one morning my mom and dad when we were kids early morning was always their time. I told you dad left her work really early in the mornings and their date time was early morning. And they dated in the kitchen in the little bay window where she has a table there to this day. And I got up to walk through the hall and I saw them kissing and hugging just like teenagers. And I thought, ooh, you know, I'm an adult by then, right? That was the last time my mom saw my dad alive. And I many times since then have thought. If you have to say goodbye, what a wonderful way for her to know that the last time he saw her alive he held her and loved her so richly and she him.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I loved that campus, and that's where my older siblings had gone. It was such a wonderful time to be at North Carolina AT when I graduated. Everybody was full of promise and ideas about what we could do so much of my adult framing happened on that campus. And by the time I started my own business, I was able to reach back on what I had learned in my home, which is where I gained most of my business education was in my home. and the ability to meet new people and not as strangers that I learned at A&T. That was so wonderful.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I absolutely did want to stop going, and I told my dad I didn't want to go back and dad gave me three options. He said you can come back here and compete against other black kids who are going to need scholarships to go to school. He could go up and he could floor the teacher and seek retaliation or I could go back and I could understand. And this is something that if you say to many black people, they will finish this sentence for you. It's not what they call you. It's what you answer to. And that was my first big lesson from Dad that I should not listen to what they called me. I could only be what I answered to in life.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had a teacher who stood up on the desk that day, the first day I went into his history class and explained so eloquently if you can even see the paradox of that, how blacks are so suited to slavery. I remember chewing so hard. Saying, God, please don't let me cry if you just let me get out of here without crying, I'll never come back. That's how intimidated, how fearful and how foreign I felt in a US history class.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, mom and dad didn't send me we decided as a family that that would happen. Our community wanted to have our best and brightest go to the white school to lessen any fear around whether or not the school would dilapidate in any way by our attending it. And I was one of the first and I remember my first day going into my English class and I thought oh English has always been one of my better subjects and I'm going to fail because I couldn't understand my English teacher. She had a twang that sounded so different to me from my side of Tarborough. Mind you, we're talking about a distance that I could walk to school from my home. But she sounded so different. The communities were truly divided in that way.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and white people would come over to eat there, which was a big deal that they were coming over to have dinner theater, lunch theater. But I didn't look at that as entrepreneurship back then. That's just what grandma did, you know? I also saw her run, she fed people to go bags where they would come and buy their lunches or dinners at the back. And she would charge based on who was working and who was out of work. And she had that sense of justice in her mind about how to run her business. And I think it paid off because she did quite well.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Retrospectively, I saw them growing up. I did not know that's what I was looking at. I remember Grandma Dora walking around Tawborough in high heel shoes coming over to our house, and they ran barbecue shop. And they had a home that had a beautiful dining room in it. But their dining room was to serve their customers.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dad was very integrated in our lives. He made sure that we had our Thursday family meetings. Thursday was payday, and we all had to gather around and we discussed what we'd done, what we would be doing. In business, we say we discuss the gaps and we brought forward the solutions. And my family dad just said See where we are and where we're going, kids. That was always his opening comment to us.”
2018-12-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT