Small Business, Big Hopes
As an equipment manager for the Navy, Lowell Pumphrey lugs around printers and computers and shuffles through government paperwork during the day.
But at night, in his home in Camarillo, he does his chosen life’s work in front of a sewing machine, pumping out African-style dashikis and dresses in zebra stripes and leopard print to sell at street fairs during February’s Black History Month busy season.
“I would love to do this full time,” he said, “if I only had a sponsor. . . . That’s what I’m looking for.”
Like many other African American entrepreneurs in Ventura County, Pumphrey is a small businessman with big hopes. But in a county with a tiny African American population, he’s also part of a community that hasn’t managed to create a strong business network and often flies under the radar of the more established county business scene.
This translates to a good deal less time at the sewing machine for Pumphrey.
The problem, experts say, is a lack of access to capital--a challenge for any entrepreneur, regardless of race.
Nationally, the Small Business Administration has changed that a bit. In the last year, start-up loans to African American-owned businesses increased by 35% nationwide, with a 10% increase in California, according to the National Black Chamber of Commerce.
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Locally, African American business leaders say they are trying to help start-ups with the basics: how to prepare a business plan and get a business loan. One group is working on putting together a directory of African American-owned businesses in the county.
“Whatever we do, we try to help each other,” said Andrew Rucker, president of the Tri-County African American Chamber of Commerce in Oxnard. “Most are mom-and-pop businesses. Most of the businesses are in their homes. They don’t have storefronts because of the cost of rent.”
The 10-year-old chamber, which once boasted 40 members, has dwindled to 12 in recent months, Rucker said. Others say it has ceased to be a viable entity and that business owners are isolated throughout the county.
“I don’t think there really is an ‘African American business community,’ ” said Kathy Davidson, owner of Southern Belle, a restaurant in Oxnard. “I don’t know where I can go for help. I’ve had others come up to me and say, ‘Where do I go?’ ”
Davidson and others cite the need for a tighter coalition of African American business owners, those prepared to lend a helping hand to others in need. And so what, they ask, if the county African American population is small?
“Even if you only have three people, united you can make miracles happen,” Davidson said.
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Harry C. Alford, president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C., and a native of Oxnard, said that many African Americans don’t think in entrepreneurial terms, often preferring jobs that will offer them stability.
Further, those small-business owners who do go out on a limb are often at a disadvantage, because they don’t have the traditional access to networks. They aren’t as likely to spend afternoons at the golf course, meet over drinks or do lunch.
Many own very small businesses and need to be there to mind the store.
That’s why they need more cohesive coalitions, Alford said.
“Banks are cut and dried and bottom-line [oriented],” he said. “Asians and Hispanics have done far better in finding alternative funding methods. We rely too much on government to do these things for us.”
But some say that the dwindling sense of a business community--and the dormancy of the chamber--hides the fact that many African Americans are networking. But they are doing it far from the corporate boardrooms and cocktail bars of established business.
“If you want to do anything at all, you go to the church,” said Dee Rawlins, retiring head of the business department at Camarillo High School and a part-time businesswoman with Dee’s Fashions. “That’s where you have the largest group of African Americans, and that’s naturally where there’s a great deal of networking.”
There, she and others said, people learn through word-of-mouth about new businesses, a friend’s designs or a new restaurant. She takes out ads in the church bulletin and enters her dresses in church fashion shows.
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But, African American business leaders say, in a mostly Latino and white county, they can’t afford to be isolationist--to be focused solely on helping each other out.
“This is a multicultural type of business community,” Rucker said. “Business doesn’t run along racial lines.”
Pumphrey, for his part, sells most of his African-style clothes to whites. He has no desire to set up shop in a community with a larger black population, he said.
“I’m better off here. I’m unique,” Pumphrey said. “I’m a man making clothes. I’m an African American designer.”
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