JANICE BRYANT: FROM HUMBLE TO BILLIONS

Janice Bryant Howroyd has ambitious plans to boost revenues to $3 billion at her staffing solutions firm, ActOne Group. If realized, that would be a $200 million revenue gain for the nation’s largest certified, woman-minority-owned full-service staffing agency.

Howroyd’s business is a Black Enterprise 100s company, capturing the No. 2 spot on the Black Enterprise annual listing of America’s largest Black-owned businesses. It maintained that ranking with $2.8 billion in yearly revenues for 2018 and 2017. In her new book, Acting Up: Winning In Business and Life Using Down-Home Wisdom (Lioncrest Publishing, $22.99) out this month, she details growth tools and strategies for her California-based company.

“At the ActOne Group, we are a company of entrepreneurs all working under the belief that together, we win,” Howroyd says. “The key thing is having an inclusive decision-making team who, once a decision is made, rally to it.”

A businesswoman and entrepreneur for over 40 years who started her firm with $1,500, Howroyd is the first Black woman to break the billion-dollar revenue mark with her company. Her book provides an inside look at how she made the transition from humble beginnings–growing up in a family of 11 children in the segregated South–to become one of the country’s richest African American women with a $400 million fortune.

She has evolved to become a top executive in the multi-billion-dollar staffing industry. Her firm is a global enterprise, offering employment, workforce, and procurement solutions to a broad range of industries, Fortune 500 organizations, local and mid-market companies, and government agencies. It operates in 19 counties, has 17,00 clients, and employs more than 2,600 people.