Danielle McGee is the founder of Black Business Boom, an e-commerce marketplace that helps drive revenue to small Black-owned businesses. The company provides digital coupon distribution and customer loyalty programs through its web-based platform and Boomin mobile which launched in October of 2019. The platform is similar to Groupon and has been well received. Danielle has been featured in Black Enterprise, News One, and several other major news outlets. Learn more about Danielle and the inspiration for Black Business Boom below.
Fancy: So tell us a little bit about Black Business Boom and what inspired it.
Danielle: Black Business Boom was completely inspired by my need to or want to help black entrepreneurs. I actually facilitate an entrepreneur course here in Nashville, through a nonprofit called Corner to Corner. In Corner to Corner, they do a 10-week course to help underrepresented minorities launch their businesses. I went through the course, actually, and then I decided I really wanted to become a facilitator and teach other folks the curriculum.
In my first time teaching this curriculum, I noticed how the students were responding when it was the week to talk about marketing and really getting their businesses out there, and some of the struggles that they had in doing so. I actually went home that night, and I was like, “I have to find a way to help these people. I really need to find and create a platform for black business owners to be able to affordably get the word out about their products or services.” That’s how Black Business Boom came about. Late one night, I was lying in bed and I said, “I’m going to create the group home for black-owned businesses.” It has just been a whirlwind ever since then.
Fancy: Wow, and I’ve read that Tennessee is one of the best places for female entrepreneurs. Would you agree with that or so far, how has the experience been for you?
Danielle: Nashville has honestly been amazing to me. You hear a lot about Memphis, especially related to black-owned businesses and how they’re booming in Memphis, and the support that they get from the city, but Memphis is a much blacker city than Nashville is. But the support that I’ve gotten in the community for entrepreneurs in Nashville is amazing. The resources that are available are equally amazing. Anything I need- it’s pretty easy for me to find someone who can help me to get something accomplished. Coming from a city like Chicago, which I moved from three years ago, it’s like night and day. In Chicago, you find that it’s pretty difficult, even though it’s a larger city and there are probably are more resources, a lot of times it’s hard to find and get connected to those resources. Whereas in Nashville, you can put something out on Facebook, or make a couple of phone calls and there’s even the Entrepreneurs Center. Nashville actually has a program where you can call them if you need someone to help you with whatever in your business. They have like 200 resources that they’ll connect you with. I’ve found that it’s been really easy to find the resources that I need, as well as an entrepreneur community, where I never really found that community in Chicago.
Fancy: I noticed that with the first merchants that you all have on the app, those merchants were in Nashville, but you’ve also opened the platform to other merchants in other cities as well, haven’t you?
Danielle: Yes, our web-based platform has merchants in about 20 cities. As for the app, we launched in Nashville in October, and we launched as a beta test in Nashville, with Nashville based businesses and then we have several online-based businesses. The people who do want to support can support from anywhere, but we’ll be growing into several other markets in early 2020. I’m excited. We have our ‘Boom-bassadors’ that have signed up to help us to expand into other markets. We’ll be formalizing that program and rolling that out very early 2020 to hopefully move into at least five new cities in the first quarter.
Fancy: How does it work for the merchants? Do they have to be in those cities and what else is required?
Danielle: For us to open up a city- let’s say we’re moving into Atlanta, we want to have at least 20 businesses located in Atlanta to launch the Atlanta market. If we were to get someone who, let’s say is in Baton Rouge and they are interested in being on the platform, we would want to then start actively recruiting in Baton Rouge to try to see if we can open up that particular market, so we will have some specific markets that we’re targeting for our first quarter, 2020, then yes. Those businesses would need to be located in those cities within Nashville, or those five cities to be able to get on the platform. If people show interest in different cities, we can certainly work on upping our recruiting efforts in those cities so that we can get them and the other folks in that city on the platform.
For our Boom-bassadors, yes. We want you to be in that city, boots on the ground, able to go out and recruit businesses to join the platform and there’s compensation involved in doing that. We’ll also have an affiliate program where folks- if you want to recruit online businesses or businesses that are in certain cities, you’re able to do so. You don’t necessarily have to be there to join our affiliate program, but we’re providing our Boom-bassadors with the tools that they need to actively go out and recruit in the city that they’re in and compensate them for doing so.
Fancy: Got it, but is there something else in particular for those merchants that are within those chosen cities? I thought I saw something like an application or an inquiry form, so is there also something like a screening process?
Danielle: There’s definitely an inquiry form. It’s really not a strenuous screening process, especially for brick and mortars. We’re actually more concerned about the screening process for online businesses. We pretty much give any black-owned brick and mortar a chance to be on the platform, but we’re going to be making some changes to what that screening process looks like for online businesses. We’ve discovered there are online-based businesses that don’t have websites, aren’t easy to do business with, and/or aren’t easy to find on social media. They’ve started something, but they need some help with taking it to the next level. I want to provide them with the help that they need and get them ready to be on the platform.
Going forward with online businesses, we’re not going to be accepting everyone the way we had been, but we’re going to be providing them with some additional tools and help so that they can get up to par to do business and really run a seamless operation versus having – we’ve had folks that are like, “DM me to place your order” and that type of stuff. I can’t have people on the app trying to do business with folks, and the users can’t even find the businesses’ websites or place orders on their websites. We’ll be getting a little bit tighter with the screening process to make sure that we are including businesses with good practices on the platform.
For our upcoming planned relaunch, users will be able to rate and review businesses as well. It’ll give us an idea if there are businesses on the platform who may not be the best businesses to be included on the platform, so you’ll be able to rate and review businesses, and reviews will come to myself and the business owner for review before it’s approved to be live. It gives a business owner an opportunity to follow up if there’s any negative feedback, but then also gives the consumers that are looking for black-owned businesses a good idea of what to expect when they go to this business. So we’re implementing a little bit of a Yelp feature with the new platform as well.
Fancy: That sounds really good, as well as those additional features help to keep the integrity of your brand up to par also.
Danielle: Absolutely. That’s the thing, I don’t want someone finding a business through my platform and then having a hard time with that business. The purpose is to support black-owned businesses, but we want to support good black-owned businesses, but we also want to help those that may need some additional help with their business practices.
Fancy: That makes a lot of sense and it’s also good, steadily providing support. To what would you attribute your success thus far?
Danielle: I would say, again, the Nashville community has been amazing for me. My Corner to Corner family has been great in Nashville. The entrepreneurs in there- I really prepared myself a lot better this time than I have in the past. And so again- I have an MBA, so you think you can open a business because you’ve gone to school and you studied business, and that’s not the case. I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons along the way, that have helped me to prepare much better for going into business this time. I will say also, I studied social media, how do I engage on social media, and how to get the community involved on social media. So with that knowledge, I really was able to do just that and in return, that’s been the support that I get from social media. The support from complete strangers is overwhelming. However, I really invested in myself and my education on how to run a business and the things that I needed to do to be successful in business this time, and they’ve been paying off.
Fancy: I’ve read a lot of articles about you. Did you ever imagine that things would take off the way that they have for Black Business Boom?
Danielle: Absolutely not. I did not. It was so crazy because I teach this curriculum to tell folks to go out and figure out if you have a customer, who your customer is, and will people buy what you’re selling? I knew that really my primary customer was going to be businesses. When I got this idea-before I move forward let me say, I’m one of these people I don’t plan a lot of times, I just act. That’s why I said finding that balance is important. So I had the idea, and I decided I was going to put out a Google form in some Facebook groups just to see if there were businesses that would be interested in being on the platform and offering a coupon. I started doing this before I had a business name before I had anything really other than the idea. Within 24 hours of me doing that, someone reached out that’s a reporter for a local Fox 17 in Nashville, and she was like, “I saw your post in this group and we’re wanting to do a story on the importance of supporting minority businesses. Can we interview you?”
That turned into a complete interview about Black Business Boom. We were going to do it that day, but something else came up and she had to run another story. It gave me a little time to prepare, and I was able to come up with a name, get a website up, get a Facebook page up, get a T-shirt that said ‘Black Business Boom’ and be prepared for this interview. That came out of nowhere and that really catapulted the success by having- as I said, it was a complete news interview with Fox 17 News in Nashville. That really catapulted the success of Black Business Boom. I think that where we are as a community right now, people see that we must find ways to band together and support these businesses.
I think people are tired of seeing their favorite little spot go out of business. We want these black businesses to survive and thrive and we have to find ways to really make that actionable. That’s what I wanted, to truly make it actionable, to support black-owned businesses, not to have to go and search for businesses to support. Let’s make it easy for folks to find what’s nearby. Let’s alert them on their phone and then drive them to truly go into these businesses. I think that it just is the timing that’s made it so much easier for me to be successful in this business, as well, because of the social climate we are in in the country right now. I think people just know we have to come together and we must support each other, and I won’t go too deep into politics, but I think that it’s important that we find ways to stick together and support one another.
Fancy: Who is Danielle outside of business then?
Danielle: Danielle is a bunch of fun outside of business. It’s so funny as you were talking, I was like, “I’m in New Orleans right now. I’m actually in New Orleans right now.” I flew down yesterday on a whim. My mother and my grandmother were coming in to celebrate my mother’s birthday, which was last week. They decided to come maybe a month and a half ago and they kept asking me to come and I was like, “I got all of this stuff going on with business and work” because I was still working full time as well. I decided on Tuesday, “I’m not going to put my family second.” That’s never been who I am, and I booked the flight, and I flew into New Orleans yesterday to hang out with my family.
I’m all about family, having a good time, my friends, traveling. I love to travel. I try to get out of the country several times a year. I love a good cocktail and I’ve had a few of them in New Orleans yesterday that I really enjoy. I love good food. I’ve been trying to do much better with my fitness and get myself together- because I feel like it’s so important like your health is your wealth. I truly feel that way, and so I’m actually working on an initiative with my boyfriend right now to launch Black and Fit, which is a movement to get black people healthier and really moving and eating better. We actually hosted our first Black and Fit event in Nashville last month with the Guru of Abs. We brought him in from Atlanta for that.
I would say that’s Danielle outside of business in a nutshell, trying to enjoy life. Because I really feel like, a lot of times you see folks that are really successful in business and a lot of them don’t necessarily look happy to me, and they’ve neglected themselves and the people around them. It’s important to me that I find that balance in work, business and personal really keeping my relationships strong, because if a business fails, which businesses have failed for me before, these are the people who are going to be there to have my back and support me through those days. That’s what’s important to me outside of my business.
Fancy: I totally get that, because I’ve experienced failure as well and I really had to basically relearn how to have relationships with other people, because I was so consumed by my goals and work. I’m glad that you made some really good points there. I think that a lot of people overlook those relationships, because everybody’s so stuck on this secure the bag thing, but once it’s gone, who’s left there?
Danielle: Exactly. For me living in Nashville, I don’t- it’s weird because I have a Facebook group, it’s called ‘Black People Making Moves Nashville’. There are over 11,000 people in it, and I’m connected to many people there. A lot of people know me in Nashville, especially in the black community, but I don’t have a lot of friends or any family in Nashville. The folks that I do have, like I said, my mother and my grandmother and my boyfriend and my close friends, I try to show up for them because, in Nashville, I just don’t have a lot of that. It makes it a little easier, to stay focused on work because I don’t have a lot of social distractions, but when I do have the time to be social with the people who I do love, I try to take those opportunities.
Fancy: What words of advice or tips would you give other business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs?
Danielle: I would say planning and preparation are important, but take steps forward. A lot of times we spend so much time planning and preparing and trying to make things perfect, that we’re not taking action. I think to find that balance between planning and taking action and so one of the things that I’m doing is helping folks do just that.
Fancy: True. Before we wrap up, do you have any other projects or events or anything that you care to share?
Danielle: I recently launched the Minding My Black Owned Business 12- Month Goal Planner that helps entrepreneurs set goals and hold themselves accountable.
Also, my other advice would be to get your digital marketing strategy together because I find that as black business owners, we’re being left behind. We’re not seeing the sales that we could be seeing. We’re not seeing the growth that we could be achieved, and it is because we don’t have a strong online presence or a strategy to sell online.
I’m really trying to do my part to educate folks on digital marketing and make it as easy as possible. Also, in that planner, it’ll break down- it has about 55 action items for anyone who does want to work on their digital strategy. It tells you exactly what you need to do to do so. I really want to help us to have a stronger online presence because we’re really getting beat out by our counterparts just because they’re investing in the technology they need to succeed. A lot of times we don’t have the opportunity to pay somebody to get a digital marketing strategy in place for us or pay to be on certain platforms or to use certain software.
There are ways around that. I’ve been able to establish a pretty strong presence doing it myself and educating myself and so now is my goal to give back by giving that education to other black business owners for free. I’m excited about that. I would say that that is one of my top things, and words of advice for black business owners is to focus on your online marketing strategy and really hone in on what it takes to be successful online. That’s where everybody is right now.
Connect with Danielle below.
Website: blackbusinessboom.com
Instagram: @blackbusinessboom
