Micro Businesses

Children admire their parents’ careers, and often emulate the kinds of jobs they perform: they want to be firefighters, police officers, teachers, doctors, lawyers and so forth. This was also the case for Celia Rudder, who wanted to be like her father from an early age and become an entrepreneur in Greensboro, N.C. Although she wasn’t encouraged to follow in his footsteps, she eventually took over her father’s business after he passed away.

Lauren Fontaine’s small business, Blackscriptions, is a quarterly subscription box full of goodies from a selection of Black-owned businesses. What’s different about this subscription? There are a couple of things, the most significant being its objective. Lauren calls her boxes a conduit, connecting others to Black-owned businesses needing further support and sales. 

“I launched Blackscriptions out of my desire to economically uplift and empower Black-owned businesses,” Lauren said. 

Jose Cristian and Keila Castorena founded SelvaSur Coffee in 2016, a family-owned coffee manufacturing company, with the vision of bringing the highest quality coffee beans and Latin American products that are ethically and lovingly harvested from Peru and Organic Chiapas coffee beans from Mexico, to the Denver area.

Starting a small business may seem daunting for most people, but for those who take the risk like Tierra Henderson, it’s a matter of seeking mentorship and applying yourself. 

Raised in an immigrant family of merchants, Alejandro Flores-Munoz learned about entrepreneurship from an early age. He watched his mother, a single parent living in Southern California, work a full time job, while juggling side hustles selling perfumes, jewelry, and desserts door-to-door. Today, he is an entrepreneur himself, with several gigs selling personalized buttons and sunglasses, and a proud co-owner of Stokes Poke, a Hawaiian food caterer and pop-up business in Denver, Colorado.

Small business owner Natalie Dubose recounts the night of Nov. 24, 2014, like a scene out of the movie “Independence Day.”

“Every shop in downtown Ferguson leading up to mine and past mine was destroyed. I found furniture from the law firm across the street, that the protestors had used to break the windows,” she said.

As a twenty-something woman in business with her parents, Molly Leadbetter often finds herself trying to convince customers that she is an equal partner in the family-owned Meriwether Cider Company in Boise, Idaho.