ActOne Group: Janice Bryant Howroyd

In the late 1970s Janice Bryant Howroyd moved to Los Angeles and began temping as a secretary. She soon realized there were many other young people in situations similar to hers. So with $1,500 in her pocket, Janice rented an office in Beverly Hills and created the staffing company ACT-1. Today, ActOne Group is an international workforce management company, making Janice Bryant Howroyd the first African-American woman to own a billion-dollar business. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how Ofer and Helene Webman developed a device that can change the way an acoustic guitar sounds without bulky pedals and amps. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, it's Guy here. And in just a minute, we've got a brand new episode of the show for you today with Janice Bryant-Howroyd of Act One. But before we start the show, I just want to remind you to take a minute to show your support for NPR programs by contributing to NPR's year-end fundraising campaign. Your local station depends on your support to bring you the news and the programming you love. And the stations are the lifeblood of public radio. So please consider donating by going to donate.npr.org/built. That's donate.npr.org/built. And thanks.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I'll tell you candidly, and I'm not proud of it, there were times when I would gift my intelligence to other members of my team and have them go in and make a presentation, or them make the pitch, so that the client wouldn't have to interact directly with me as an African American or as a female.

• 1:02Guy Raz?

  Hmm. Because you thought they wouldn't want to.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  In some instances, I thought it. In other instances, I knew it.

• 1:17Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:28Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a temporary gig as a secretary inspired Janice Bryant-Howroyd to build an employment agency that turned into an empire and made Janice the first African American woman in history to own a billion-dollar business.

• 1:50Guy Raz?

  So hiring employees is one of the hardest things about running a business. If you've listened to this show long enough, you've heard founders talk about how, when their company started to scale, hiring enough good people consumed so much of their time. Because hiring requires patience and research and, yes, luck. Even the best applicants sometimes flail after they start. And this was an insight that Janice Bryant Howroyd came across early in her career after working as a secretary for her brother-in-law. It was the late 1970s, and her brother-in-law, Tom Noonan, needed an assistant for his growing role at Billboard magazine in Hollywood. Janice noticed that lots of other executives in Hollywood needed clerical help, too, and

• 2:34Guy Raz?

  they needed it fast. They just didn't have the time to find the right people. So with all of her money, which was $1,500, Janice rented a small space in front of a rug shop in Beverly Hills, and she started an employment agency. At the time, Janice was a young African-American woman, starting out in an industry dominated by older white men. Now, today, her company, Act One Group, does an estimated billion dollars a year in sales. Act One handles hiring and recruiting for all kinds of industries, and it also provides a lot of backend services, like employee screening and payroll. But when it began, it was just one office, one phone, and Janice.

• 3:19Guy Raz?

  She opened that first office in a city she barely knew when she first arrived to LA in her mid-20s. Janice had spent most of her life in a very different place from Hollywood. She grew up in the 1950s and 60s in a big family in the small town of Tarboro, North Carolina.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  I grew up on the other side of the tracks, and that's literally the case because we did have a train that ran through our town. We were a town that was incorporated in the 1700s, so a train track in the middle of the town did indicate some level of prosperity. Now, we were segregated, make no mistake about that, but we had that southern etiquette that went along with it, so there was a politeness that occurred amongst people. But we also were very aware of the injustices.

• 4:11Guy Raz?

  Hmm. How many brothers and sisters did you have, growing up?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Five brothers, five sisters, all type A's.

• 4:19Guy Raz?

  So 11 kids in your house.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, you say that like that sounds so much to you.

• 4:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah, it does. It sounds like a lot of kids. It sounds like a chaotic house.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Oh, my, no, you don't know my mom and dad if you thought there was chaos going on in the Bryant household. As a matter of fact, we had a system where the older siblings would take care of the younger ones. And when I say take care, I mean, they were responsible that we did chores appropriately. We had personal grooming taken care of. They checked us for and helped us with. And that homework was done. And so Sandy got me. She was first born. I was fourth born. And when she went all the way off to Greensboro, North Carolina, which by drive time is about four hours, it felt like the end of the world had happened for me. Everything just felt so empty to me. Yet there were still 12 people left in the house every day if we had no guests come over.

• 5:16Guy Raz?

  Did your parents, I mean, was there ever a sense that, you know, that they were struggling? Or did it always feel like you had everything you needed as a kid?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Guy, I remember sitting in a class and I had, what Oprah later coined aha moment. And I remember sitting in class and thinking, wow, we're poor. Had no concept of poverty growing up.

• 5:39Guy Raz?

  You had no idea?

• 5:40Speaker 01

  None at all. We always had enough for us and Psalm to share. And that meant clothing, that meant food, and that also meant emotional support.

• 5:49Guy Raz?

  When you were, when you were little, did you, would you dream about what you would be when you grew up? Or did you already have big ambitions as a kid? Or, or were they kind of like, yeah, you know, I'll, I'll see what happens?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Now, see, print media was really the thing that taught me so much. And books, print, period. My mom bought encyclopedias and then she paid them off over time. She also had periodicals that came to our house. There was a magazine called Cypia. There was Ebony was popular. Jet magazine was popular back then. And so I knew a lot about the world and I knew a lot about what black people were doing. And so I had role models who fulfilled thoughts about what I might do when I grew up. But as a very young child, I remember admiring my mom so much, which I continue to do to this day.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  She, even then, I could sense, even though I couldn't put label to it, was quite an efficient person. And she ran our home like a business.

• 6:55Guy Raz?

  And what did your dad do?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  My dad was a foreman. He was a foreman in a dye factory. You know, we're a textile community in North Carolina. And dad was very integrated in our lives. He made sure that we had our Thursday family meetings. Thursday was payday. And we all had to gather around and we discussed what we'd done, what we would be doing. In business, we say we discussed the gaps and we brought forward the solutions. And my family dad just said, let's see where we are and where we're going, kids. That was always his open comment to us.

• 7:32Guy Raz?

  Janice, when you were, when you were a girl, when you were a kid, did you see entrepreneurs around you, either in your community or, or in your family?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Retrospectively, I saw them growing up. I did not know that's what I was looking at. I remember Grandma Dora walking around Taubrough in high heel shoes, coming over to our house. And they ran a barbecue shop. And they had a home that had a beautiful dining room in it. But their dining room was to serve their customers.

• 8:02Guy Raz?

  Oh, they ran it out of their home?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and white people would come over to eat there, which was a big deal, that they were coming over to have dinner there, lunch there. But I didn't look at that as entrepreneurship back then. That's just what Grandma did, you know? I also saw her run, she fed people to-go bags, where they would come and buy their lunches or dinners at the back. And she would charge based on who was working and who was out of work. And she had that sense of justice in her mind about how to run her business. And I think it paid off because she did it quite well.

• 8:41Guy Raz?

  So Janice, I read that when you were in high school, your mom and dad decided to send you to an all-white high school. You were going to be the first African-American student at that school. What do you remember about your first day going in there?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Well, mom and dad didn't send me. We decided as a family that that would happen. Our community wanted to have our best and brightest go to the white school to lessen any fear around whether or not the school would dilapidate in any way by our attending it. And I was one of the first. And I remember my first day going into my English class, and I thought, oh, English has always been one of my better subjects, and I'm going to fail because I couldn't understand my English teacher. She had a twang that sounded so different to me from my side of Tarboro.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Mind you, we're talking about a distance that I could walk to school from my home.

• 9:44Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  But she sounded so different. The communities were truly divided in that way.

• 9:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  And we had a teacher who stood up on the desk that day, the first day I went into his history class, and explained so eloquently, if you can even see the paradox of that, how blacks were so suited to slavery.

• 10:08Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  I remember chewing so hard, saying, God, please don't let me cry. If you just let me get out of here without crying, I'll never come back. That's how intimidated, how fearful, and how foreign I felt in a US history class.

• 10:26Guy Raz?

  Did you want to stop going to that school? I mean, I could imagine being 16-year-old, 15, 16-year-old kid and feeling that level of hostility, and then hearing a teacher say that, somebody with power to say that.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I absolutely did want to stop going. And I told my dad I didn't want to go back. And dad gave me three options. He said, you can come back here and compete against other black kids who are going to need scholarships to go to school. He could go up and he could floor the teacher and seek retaliation.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Or I could go back and I could understand. And this is something that if you say to many black people, they will finish this sentence for you. It's not what they call you, it's what you answer to. And that was my first big lesson from dad, that I should not listen to what they called me. I could only be what I answer to in life.

• 11:26Guy Raz?

  Hmm. So you graduated high school and then you went off, you went off to college to North Carolina A and T. What do you, what do you remember about that time?

• 11:37Speaker 01

  I loved that campus and that's where my older siblings had gone. It's, it was such a wonderful time to be at North Carolina A and T when I graduated. Everybody was full of promise and ideas about what we could do. So much of my adult framing happened on that campus. And by the time I started my own business, I was able to reach back on what I had learned in my home, which is where I gained most of my business education was in my home and the ability to, to meet new people and not as strangers that I learned at A and T. That was so wonderful.

• 12:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And what did you do when you graduated?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  First, I worked in the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC. I worked there for about a year and a half and I went home to visit mom and dad. And I remember one morning, my mom and dad, when we were kids, early morning was always their time. I told you dad left to work really early in the mornings and their date time was early morning. And they dated in the kitchen in the little, they window where she has the table there to this day. And I got up to walk through the hall and I saw them kissing and hugging just, just like teenagers.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  And I thought, ooh, you know, I'm an adult by then, right? That was the last time my mom saw my dad alive.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  And I many times since then have thought, if you have to say goodbye, what a wonderful way for her to know that the last time he saw her alive, he held her and loved her so richly, and she him.

• 13:30Guy Raz?

  Did he have a heart attack?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  My dad had taken two young men out on the waters in North Carolina shrimp boat fishing. They were on a shrimp boat and a storm came up.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  My dad was taken in the storm.

• 13:47Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  And so I remember my mom took to her bed for a couple of weeks and I had booked a ticket to come to California to visit my sister Sandy. And I remember I told my mom, I'll stay here with you, Mom, and help you. My mom had been married since she was a teenager. She'd never had any other boyfriend.

• 14:09Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  I knew there would be some heavy adjustment for her. And she said, no, I'm gonna have to learn to live on my own. I better do it now. And then she said, the last thing Dad would want is for me to stop you living your dream. Because we certainly, we certainly have lived ours.

• 14:32Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you, you leave North Carolina. I mean, what a, what a, what a moment

• 14:42Guy Raz?

  in your life, in your mom's life, in your family's life. I mean, this is like the late 70s. And you come to LA to visit your sister. And it was, it was supposed to be just a quick visit to, to, to see her, a couple of days or weeks or something like that?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  I had a couple of weeks planned. It was gonna be a good visit. Two weeks back then was a long time, still is.

• 15:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and you were just a kid. I mean, you were in your mid 20s, right? Or early 20s at that point?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  I was hot and poppin'.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Although, let me tell you, when I got to LA, I didn't think so on the East Coast. I thought I was all of that. When I got to LA and I saw all these women who worked without pantyhose on, they carried purses with somebody else's name on it, Louis Vuitton. And I was calling it Louis Vuitton. And they were all, all, all the black people, all the black women I saw were, were, were like fabulous, gorgeous women. And I felt like this little nappy headed colored girl coming out of North Carolina amongst all these fabulous people. No, I didn't feel all hot and popping then.

• 15:48Guy Raz?

  What was your first impression of, of LA at that time? And this is like the late 70s? It was?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Palm trees, gorgeous, gorgeous palm trees. And, you know, you go up and drive all the way up and look out over the city. And it was just so beautiful, so beautiful. LA was wide open. It, it truly was a fairy tale kind of existence for me. And I wanted in on it.

• 16:14Guy Raz?

  You wanted to stay?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  I, I didn't at first. I needed to sustain my stay financially because my sister kept saying stay. I'm the first family member she's got out here from home.

• 16:28Guy Raz?

  So Sandy and, and her husband Tommy, he, he worked at, at Billboard magazine, is that right?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  He did. He had worked at Motown for years and helped move Motown out to LA. And then he went to Billboard. You know, his career had been in the music industry. I remember seeing his name scrolled the year he died at the Grammys. And Tommy invented what they called the Hot 100's chart.

• 16:54Guy Raz?

  Oh, the Billboard Hot 100, yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Yes. To this day, I keep meeting people who just have such great memories of him. And certainly I do. He was an incredible, incredible first generation Irishman.

• 17:07Guy Raz?

  So you go out to LA to see your sister and her husband, your brother-in-law. Tommy says, hey, you know, I may have some temp work for you at Billboard. And that's what you did. You kind of went to his office and worked, kind of worked for him?

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. She and Tommy were going to a NIMIC conference in Italy. And when he came back, I had reorganized things, put things in form as I saw they should be. And he thought I had worked magic. I thought I did what I was supposed to do. And he said, you know, you don't, you really are good, Janice. You should not go back without proving you can make it on your own. And he was the one who seeded the idea that I should hang my own shingle.

• 17:52Guy Raz?

  You were looking for work and your brother-in-law essentially says, hey, Janice, why don't you just open up a business? And you've got your job. You've got your own job.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  He absolutely did. It was that simple for him. He later told me he saw so much enterprise, entrepreneurship in me that I wasn't seeing in myself.

• 18:15Guy Raz?

  So what was the business idea that you guys started to talk about?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  I actually started as a full-time agency.

• 18:23Guy Raz?

  Meaning what?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  We were finding, I found people full-time jobs.

• 18:27Guy Raz?

  You were like a headhunter, sort of?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the admin level.

• 18:32Guy Raz?

  So what, once you decided that you were going to start this company, this agency, to help place people in jobs, what was your first move? I mean, where did you get an office? How did you, how did you start it?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  I made a deal with a guy who owned a rug shop. And I set up office in front of the rug shop.

• 18:51Guy Raz?

  Where was the rug shop?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  It was very, very beautiful, in Beverly Hills.

• 18:54Guy Raz?

  In Beverly Hills?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, location, location, location.

• 18:58Guy Raz?

  You wanted a Beverly Hills address to say, hey?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  No, I had a friend who hooked me up with someone who had a Beverly Hills location. I was not looking at real estate that way, but it worked out perfectly. The stars were aligned for me.

• 19:13Guy Raz?

  And what did you call it? What'd you call the company?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Act One.

• 19:16Guy Raz?

  As in, act one, like when you're in a movie? That kind of act one?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  You know, because it's located here in Los Angeles area, many people thought that. But for me, it was more around the biblical sense, the book of Acts. Yeah.

• 19:34Guy Raz?

  So you get this office space and what you put in a desk and a phone and

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Didn't have to, it was there, didn't have to, it was there. And it worked out very well for me, but I'll tell you something, when I did get my own office, that I remember the first day, I got a fax machine. Do you know who Judy Jetson is?

• 19:53Guy Raz?

  Sure, of course, yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  I thought I was Judy Jetson, technology hit hard for me, yes. That was incredible for me. And it also taught me the power of technology. And I think that's why, over the years, my company has evolved more around how we build human-friendly technology than anything else.

• 20:16Guy Raz?

  When you started Act One, did you need a lot of startup money to get it going?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  I borrowed money from my mom and I had saved 900 and borrowed 600 from her.

• 20:30Guy Raz?

  But so you had $1,500 to start this business?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 20:34Guy Raz?

  And that was going to get you the office, a lease on the office, and I guess a phone. But here's what I'm trying to understand, you're so young and you just, you essentially just got there, so how did you even start? How did you even find people to recruit to say, hey, you know, you looking for work? I can help you.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Well, finding people to place was not an issue during that time. Finding the jobs was. And the core of our business remains today as it was when I was one desk. And that's understanding the power of the interview. I mean, you've talked with me for a few minutes now. You know a lot about me and you know a lot of resources to go to gain more information. And that's the way the interview worked as well. So the power of that interview enabled me to make sure that I understood the individual who was looking for work. I knew where they'd already worked. I knew if they were already employed, that once they left, there was going to be an opening there. And because of the rich network that I was able to achieve in the social side of how

• 21:40Speaker 01

  I lived with my brother and sister, I knew people who were Looking for assistants, people who were looking for people to hire and built it on that. In the early days, I call it the womb, word of mouth, baby. I got, I got most of my leads toward opportunities to fill positions and most of the leads toward applicants by word of mouth.

• 22:04Guy Raz?

  So your business model was you'd help companies fill these jobs, mostly clerical jobs, and they would pay you a fee. And how were you able to guarantee that the person you were offering was gonna work out?

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness, there were so many different guarantees that were offered in our industry back then. I haven't thought about this for years, but that's the risk you take on making sure that you're making a good placement. And that's why I say we had to focus on the applicant. Because you, you offered people money back. If they didn't work out, then you know, you had, you had a reduction in that fee you got. And you got, you had to pay that money back if they didn't last. So nobody wanted to do that.

• 22:46Guy Raz?

  Were you, were you profitable pretty quickly or did it take some time?

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Um, actually, thinking back on it, hitting profitability in a year seems pretty good. But living through it, it didn't. But remember, I was in a very low overhead business and I was in a business that had high transaction. I was as good as my effort allowed me to be.

• 23:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah. In those early days, as you, you know, as you start to grow, things were, things were like kind of hectic. In the midst of this, you like, you got married too, right? Like in the early eighties.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Well, I met my husband at an industry conference, Bernie. And I saw this guy and he was really handsome to me. He had this presence about himself and he also spoke with this English accent. But he liked me a lot more than I did him. I noticed him. I can't say I didn't notice him, but he liked me a lot more than I liked him. And he he chased me for a bit and um I found out that he was the founder of Apple One.

• 24:00Guy Raz?

  And Apple One was a temporary employment agency?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Apple One was, Apple One was a really respected temporary and full-time placement agency doing business in California.

• 24:13Guy Raz?

  So you married essentially your competitor. How did you keep like work and personal life separate?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  My husband and I love each other very much, so definitely we have rich and open conversations. I think it would be the same as if we had been physicians or scientists.

• 24:32Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  We are going to share a love of the industry and talk about it. And we're still competent, capable people building a business. My husband is a white, European-born man. And I have had instances where there have been inferences in social settings, not ever in business, where people have, oh, you might, you're so lucky you were married to him. You must have learned so much from him. But at the end of the day, I think Bernie, in his best, honest conversation, will tell you that he has rather learned a lot from me.

• 25:08Guy Raz?

  And so when was it clear to you that this wasn't just gonna become sustainable, but this could actually become really big business? Was it, was it within a year? Was it within two years? Was it after that?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I would say it was about, um, oh, I want to say six or seven years in. And I remember a lady named Gwen Moore. Gwen Moore was an elected official Congresswoman out of California here. And she had been very active in championing, and I believe she was one of the original authors of legislation that required public utility companies in California to have diversity spend. Because she said, your ratepayers are diverse, so you should be doing business with them. And she contacted me and she said, I want to come see you. And she met with me and she told me that I had an obligation to get certified.

• 26:08Guy Raz?

  To, to do what?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  As a minority woman-owned company. And I didn't want to do that. I was doing very well, thank you. And she said, no, it's not about you doing better, although you will. She said, it's about you creating the opportunity for others who won't get a shot.

• 26:28Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  She said, we need some strong businesses that are run by women and run by minorities to certify and go in and do business as such to open the door for others. And even when she was arguing the point as eloquent, as clear as she is, I wasn't getting the point because initially I thought that certification was a strip search. I needed to open up my business to total exposure to someone to, in return, have them come back and say, yes, you are a minority. Yes, you are a woman and yes, you are running this business.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  And it just did not align with how I felt that I wanted to be measured.

• 27:18Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, why Janice wound up changing her mind about that and how she turned Act One into a billion-dollar business. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 28:02Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's 1992 and Janice Bryant-Harrods' LA-based employment agency, Act One, is doing pretty well. And after some back and forth, she eventually decides to get certified as a woman and minority-owned enterprise.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Becoming certified opened up many new client opportunities for me because now companies could look at me as, look at my business as an opportunity to meet numbers and quotas that they had around inclusion, diversity and inclusion. And if it became a choice between me and another company who was not certified, I was going to get that opportunity. I'd never known that existed before I got certified. And so that's when I started to expand into contract business. Before then, I was doing business on handshakes or on service agreements. But once I started to go after different types of business, I needed to do it in contracts

• 29:03Speaker 01

  and had to learn a lot about the process. And one of the failures I've seen occur in my own business as in others is that we create great relationships with people in companies and definitely we should do that, but people are moving all of the time. And the agreement you have with a person, it may not align with the agreement you have in that contract. And when that person is gone, that contract is still standing. And so you've got to understand the difference between that. And that was one of the biggest lessons I had to learn once I started to expand my business from focusing on one-on-one transactions into contract work.

• 29:41Guy Raz?

  I mean, I just keep thinking, I mean, it seems like you were growing pretty fast. So your head must have been spinning.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Well, let me tell you two things about that. One, the big thing for me was not so much the exponential growth as it was the adoption of doing the temp work and bringing temp into the fold. Temp work, you're paying people long before the client pays you. And so there's another element of risk in there. You're also the employer of that worker. And so you assume the employer risk. So you've got two dynamic, new and very strong differences in place here. And you're competing against larger entities who are going in and able because of

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Their scale to offer a much better pricing. And you are, for, for me and many companies like me, woman owned. You were the minority company or you were the diverse company. So you were getting one tenth of that business against one larger vendor. And I still had to meet the same pricing as the larger company. To do that efficiently, to do that sustainably. I needed to integrate technology in a different way. And I didn't find any over the shelf technology. So that's when I started to hire people and we built our own technology solutions.

• 31:05Guy Raz?

  And I guess we should just mention here, Janice, that, uh, that some of those solutions that you came up with internally. They, these actually became a huge part of your business.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so our technology suite is called Acceleration. And it really was about that detailed reporting we were able to give to clients that they weren't getting anywhere else. And so I had a client up north who had a very bad experience with a publicly held company. Called me on a Friday morning and asked if I would come up. So I actually ran over to the airport with my brother, another employee. And the three of us went up north, uh, Northern California to the client. And we found out that they had an issue where this publicly held company was not negotiating well with them and had walked out. And they had several hundred temps who had to be paid.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  And we had to get all of that work together, transition those people. And on Monday morning, all of the work was done, everyone was paid and they had reports on their desk.

• 32:06Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  I got a call from the lady who was head of HR and said, my goodness, Janice, how were you able to do this? And I explained that we used for her what we use in our own company technologies that enable us to do that. And she said, we've been working with this company for 12 years. And they've never been able to give us a detail of reporting that you have here. And they started to want, um, conversations around how to buy my technology. And my brother Carlton said, Janice.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Let's pause. Don't sell them the technology, sell them the service.

• 32:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  I said, Carlton, what are you? He said, no, don't sell your technology to them, sell them the service. And we went up and had a different conversation with them, and they became our first acceleration customer.

• 32:57Guy Raz?

  And I guess I should mention here, Janice, that you mentioned your brother. Several members of your family actually work for the company for Act One.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely. My sister Sandy was my first employee. And since then, I went on to hire seven other siblings into my business. And they have just been incredible for all of those emotional and those value support systems that you need in place as you're growing a business up. Everyone needs that. I needed that, and I had that in siblings. Now, one of the things that I insisted for my family members before they could come into my company is that they either had to work for three years in a larger company somewhere else, or have three promotions before they could come to work for me. I wanted to make sure that they brought into my business some learning, not just the abilities

• 33:49Speaker 01

  to sustain for three years, but the ability to have learned and have grown within someone else's organization, and then bring that value into mine.

• 33:59Guy Raz?

  I guess at a certain point, this is like 2007, 2008, your business is worth well over half a billion dollars by that point, and you decide to merge with Bernard's business, with your husband's business. Tell me, why did that happen? Was it just the sort of the natural point to kind of bring your businesses together?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  When Bernie and I were leaving a conference in San Diego, we decided to take the scenic route back to LA. And we were having a discussion about our children. And I remember my brother had said to me, Carlton, had said, you know, Janice, you and Bernie. Have something that nobody else in this industry has. And I asked him what he meant. He said, well, you guys work from completely different sets of strengths oftentimes. And if you were to combine that, that could be dynamic in the industry.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  And I thought that was nice and I mentioned it to Bernie. And Bernie said, that makes sense. I said, but it's not enough to to to merge our companies and we talked more. And then I said, you know, Bernie, I think the thing that would make it interesting for me is that our son not have to decide which one of us he wants to work for. Because by then, our son was looking at our industry as a future for himself. And he had worked in my company, he had worked in his dad's company as a kid. And I said, Bernie, I don't think he should have to make a choice.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  And it is a lot better succession planning for us to go ahead and do this now. Let's not have him have to do it later. And that was the decision, that was the thought around how we would blend the companies.

• 36:01Guy Raz?

  Jess, I'm wondering, you know, looking back as as your company grew, I mean, for for a long time, you were a minority within a minority. You were a small company with big competitors. You were a woman of color in an industry that was, I'm assuming dominated by by white men. Did you run into circumstances, a lot of circumstances, where you you were judged because of who you are? Or or where things were made much harder because of who you are?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Very often, very often, I I ran into that. I'll tell you candidly, and I'm not proud of it. There were times when I would gift my intelligence to other members of my team and have them go in and make a presentation or them make the pitch so that the client wouldn't have to interact directly with me as an African American or as a female.

• 36:56Guy Raz?

  But but because you thought they wouldn't want to?

• 37:00Speaker 01

  In some instances, I thought it, in other instances, I knew it.

• 37:05Guy Raz?

  That if they saw an African American woman making the pitch, they wouldn't want to work with you?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  I think the questioning and the scrutiny would be different. There would be more question of can we than how will we?

• 37:24Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Whereas if I sent someone different on my team in, the questions around how are we going to do this happened a lot quicker in the conversation. And there are women who will tell you today that's still the case.

• 37:39Guy Raz?

  How have you sort of grown as a leader over that time? I mean, were there things that you did earlier on that were mistakes that you learned from? And you thought, well, that was not the way to go?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Certainly, I've made mistakes. The bigger of my mistakes were the mistakes I made where I have held myself back because of things that were latent from my childhood and sometimes very active, you know, in businesses around the isms, whether that be racism or sexism or whatever. But those have been where I think my bigger errors have been made.

• 38:19Guy Raz?

  When you say when you held yourself back by, for example, by not taking those meetings or by sending somebody else in your place, what other ways did you hold yourself back?

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Holding myself back from taking risks around expanding or investments that weren't right in the core of what I'm doing. But I always saw myself as, you know, driving in my lane and understanding where my lane was.

• 38:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, it sounds like even though you have had incredible success, by nature, you're not sort of a kamikaze risk taker.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not going to be the bull in the china shop, if that's what you're saying. I'm not going to rush through and, you know, break things on the way toward a higher goal. Perhaps the one decision I would change in my career would be that I would forgive myself for being smart and being female a lot sooner. Everything else, I think, has been integrated toward the good of a solid business that has a strong future.

• 39:34Guy Raz?

  Today, Act One is either the largest, or certainly one of the largest privately-held, women and minority-owned workforce management companies in the US. You and your family own this company, I believe, 100% outright. This is a billion-dollar business. I mean, that's amazing. I mean, just think about that for a moment. You came to LA for a two- or three-week trip and built a billion-dollar business.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  It's a blessing. This is what we've built. This is what all of the people who really believed in me and trusted in me have built. And in our company, we teach that there are five things you can't teach people. You can't teach people experience. You can't teach people common sense. You can't teach people confidence. You cannot teach people anything if they don't want to learn it, and you can't teach them anything if they know it all. And I think when I look at where you see the amazement in building a billion-dollar enterprise, I think it's because those things that you can't teach, I've learned.

• 40:51Guy Raz?

  How much of all that you've achieved do you think is because of the hard work you put in and your determination and your skill, and how much just because of luck?

• 41:06Speaker 01

  I don't think luck had anything to do with it. I do believe that I've been blessed, and I have received those blessings by honoring them with hard work. All of the challenges, all of the people, all of the clients and applicants. My life has been a kaleidoscopic opportunity.

• 41:33Guy Raz?

  I keep going back to that moment where your mom in mourning told you to leave, told you to go.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  She did.

• 41:41Guy Raz?

  That your dad would want you to pursue whatever it was that you were going to pursue. And you didn't know what that was going to be, right?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:51Guy Raz?

  Can you imagine what your dad would make of this? Like, his daughter running the largest women and minority-owned business of this kind in the world? I mean, what do you think he would say or think?

• 42:08Speaker 01

  I absolutely can't imagine what dad would say or what dad would think. My dad is the one who told us it was our attitude, not our aptitude. My dad was the one who told us education is freedom. My dad was the one who taught us that we wake up on purpose, you know? And I think about him so often, and you can't not think about him when you're with mom. I was voted princess in high school. And I remember asking for a new gown to wear on a float. And dad said, "Oh, we can't afford it. We worked so hard for you guys." And I remember my mom putting her hand on my dad's hand and said, "No, Daddy." They called each other mommy and daddy.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  She said, "No, Daddy, don't tell Janice we work hard for our kids. We work hard because of the decisions we made." And I've kept that in my mind as I've built my business. And I've made a point never to tell my children. I don't work hard to give them what they want. I work hard because of the decision I've made, you know? And for me, it's a joy. It's a joy to do what I do.

• 43:22Guy Raz?

  That's Janice Brian Howroyd, founder and CEO of Act One Group. From that one little office that she opened in Beverly Hills with just 1,500 bucks, she now has an estimated net worth of $350 million. And she's also donated some of that money to education. 10 million to support scholarships at USC in her adopted city of LA, and another 10 million set aside for her much-loved alma mater, North Carolina A&T.

• 44:08Guy Raz?

  And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building.

• 44:17Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. So let's set the scene here. It's 2013 and Ofer Webbman and his wife Helene are living in Phoenix, both in their 50s, and they're feeling a little restless.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  I think we dearly wanted to do something different.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  But we were also completely broke.

• 44:39Guy Raz?

  Not exactly living on the street broke, but they did have one daughter in college, and they lost a ton of money in the housing crash. So it was not a good situation. And they decided to come up with a plan.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  And I said to myself, find something that we love to do, and maybe we can sell to people. And we almost had to do it.

• 45:01Guy Raz?

  And the thing they wound up doing, it actually grew out of Ofer's love for music. He would come home at night and noodle on his acoustic guitar. But as he was doing this, he was thinking, you know, this is fine, but this experience, it could be a lot better.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I want to have what the electric guitars players have, you know? They get all the toys, all the gadget. They can attach any sound that they want. They can paint their music in any way they want.

• 45:29Guy Raz?

  So Ofer's thinking, I want to do that, too. I want to make my acoustic guitar sound more dynamic, more electric. But I want to do it in a really simple way, with no bulky amplifiers, nothing to plug into a wall. So he comes up with an idea for a little box.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  Try to imagine this, it's the size of a big iPhone.

• 45:52Guy Raz?

  So then imagine that you take this thing and you attach it to the back of your guitar, and then you give it some battery power. You build in some electronics.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  And then the only thing that you need to do is push one button. And you start playing.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  And suddenly, from the body of the guitar, you don't hear only your guitar, but you're also hearing a different kind of effects.

• 46:17Guy Raz?

  OK, this is not much of a spoiler, but this is a spoiler alert. We are obviously listening to Ofer's invention as I speak. It's called the Tone Wood Amp, and it's pretty much how he envisioned it. It's a battery-powered box that attaches to the back of your acoustic guitar. And in the box are a bunch of electronics that can make all kinds of cool effects: reverb, delay, tremolo, overdrive.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  You can feel that you are inside Carnegie Hall. It's like, if I couldn't sing, suddenly I could sing.

• 46:55Guy Raz?

  And it sounds pretty impressive now, but let's not get too ahead of ourselves. I mean, the Tone Wood Amp didn't just fall out of the sky fully formed. Back in 2013, Ofer was working on the very first prototype in his kitchen, and his wife, Helene, used to watch him work.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  I would see him come back with these bags, like from Hobby Lobby or wherever he was. And I'm like, oh, God, like, what is he up to?

• 47:19Speaker 03

  And in this case, it was actually, believe it or not, a sponge that I went to Hobby Lobby and I bought. And it was electrician tape that held everything together and some electronic devices that I had at home that I basically put together.

• 47:35Guy Raz?

  And yeah, that first prototype was kind of janky-looking. But Ofer eventually got together with an electronic engineer to make the next version. And by the summer of 2014, they were ready to show it off at a trade show in Nashville.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  And the first really impressive musician that walked down the lane was Larry Mitchell, who was a Grammy winner. And I went up to him. I said, "Would you like to try the Tone Wood Amp?" And he went with Ofer to the Whisper Room. And when he came out, he said to other musicians, "I don't even know how to explain it. You just gotta go try it."

• 48:08Guy Raz?

  And that basically became Helene and Ofer's marketing strategy. They'd ask all these well-known musicians to try the Tone Wood Amp and then get them to make videos of themselves playing it.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  You know, we're here in Phoenix, Arizona, and George Benson heard about us.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  And then many artists introduced it to artists like Travis Toye from The Rascal Flat.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Jackie King, we went to her home.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Janice Ian, Joe Bonamase, Vince Gill. The word kept on spreading and spreading and you've got folks using it all over the world.

• 48:50Guy Raz?

  And Helene and Ofer took some of these videos

• 48:52Speaker 04

  I flip the switch.

• 48:53Guy Raz?

  and used them to launch a Kickstarter campaign. They raised $120,000, enough to get two factories in Phoenix to start making the device. That was just four years ago, and today, they've sold close to 30,000 units and they expect to gross more than $2 million this year alone, which means they're no longer feeling as pinched for cash as they were when they started.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  Moving from really being on the brink of being broke to profitable, that was a really blessing for us.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  And when you're midlife and you don't really have savings and you don't really like what you're doing, you become more hungry. So this was like a really important adventure.

• 49:43Guy Raz?

  If you want to find out more about the Webmans and the Tone Wood app, or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howibuiltthis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis. And please do be sure to check your podcast feed all this month because we've got some amazing episodes coming up from the How I Built This summit. We've got brand new live interviews with Lisa Price of Carol's Daughter, Joe Gebbia of Airbnb, and Katrina Lake of Stitch Fix, and more.

• 50:28Guy Raz?

  Our show was produced this week by James Delahoussaye, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to J.C. Howard, Noor Kutsi, Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Mia Venkat. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 51:06Speaker 05

  There are millions of books out there just waiting for you. But how to keep up? Introducing NPR's Book of the Day. Every weekday, we feature some of our favorite conversations with authors and writers about their latest books. You can check it out in about the time it takes to walk the dog. Happy reading.