PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Consumers in the region may celebrate National Black Business Month by shopping, eating and using other services at Black-owned businesses. And a Black-owned management firm based in Center City is celebrating its 11th anniversary by continuing to help minority-owned businesses find new ways to grow.
Common Ground Management, Inc. (CGM) provides services to businesses — such as bookkeeping, trademarking, web development and financial referral.
“Our core mission has always been to support our peers,” said James Burks, co-founder and chief operating officer. “Even though [Black business owners] historically only form 800 to 900 Philadelphia-based businesses annually — a drop in the bucket for Pennsylvania — those owners know they have an ally that will help them through their business journey.”
What makes CGM unique, Burks said, is how it helps business owners “decipher all of the noise”: What documentation is needed to start a business? What should you look for in a banking partner? How do you set up your business in a way that’s appropriate for its particular industry?
Crystal Bailey owns several businesses, and she says CGM helped her structure and develop them before, during and after the pandemic.
“I’m an event producer, and our industry took the biggest hit because we couldn’t socialize,” she said.
Bailey said her businesses are bouncing back from COVID-era restrictions. “We are probably about 70 to 80 percent back on the rise,” she said.
Many businesses had to get creative during the pandemic, and sought government grants and loans to keep themselves from going under. CGM co-founder Dominique Landry said business models are changing.
“How can you be great at what you do? [That’s] going to be probably where we reset back to,” he said, “because now the money is drying up from different financial outlets like the federal government, and people have to get back to being good at something.”
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Since CGM started 11 years ago, it has served more than 12,000 minority-owned businesses nationwide.
“When we started, minority business owners didn’t have a readily available resource that could translate all the legal and financial liabilities surrounding their business or business ideas,” added Landry. “Now, the task is to help them weed through the overabundance of bad information and resources available on the internet, which causes non-compliant or illegal activity in their business.”
Co-founder Sherman Washington, the firm’s chief financial officer, compares the bond to that of family.
“Since I met my partners Dom and Jim in 2005, it has been an instant brotherhood and connection — even moreso now, as each of us have lost parents in that time, which has inspired us to serve as they served and depend on one another as a family.”
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