It wasn’t the usual, feel-good entrepreneurship talk that drew the loudest reaction at the Tri-State Defender’s first “TSD In The Community” forum of 2026 on African American entrepreneurship.
It was a hard truth, said out loud.
“Black people do not support each other,” Alandas Dobbins told the room, pausing as the words landed. “We do not in the way that we need to.”
There was an audible exhale — the kind that signals people aren’t surprised, but are relieved somebody finally said it plainly.
Dobbins, CEO and owner of Oteka Technologies, made the comment during a wide-ranging discussion about what social media glamorizes about entrepreneurship — and what it hides.
But her point quickly became a through-line for the night: for Black entrepreneurs in Memphis and the surrounding region, success is rarely just about the idea. It’s about the ecosystem — who supports you, who hires you, who invests in you, who shares your name in rooms you’re not in yet.
The forum, held Wednesday, Feb. 4 at the Raleigh Branch Library, featured panelists Dobbins; Jozelle Booker, president and CEO of the MMBC Continuum; Kevin Kolhelm, owner of Groovy Greyhound Coffee & Creamery in West Memphis; and Cheonshae Brown, owner of Little Scholars Academy in Horn Lake, Mississippi.
Grit and grind before glitz and glam
The panel was moderated by Lori Spicer Robertson, who asked the panel early on to address the glamorization of entrepreneurship in the era of Instagram, TikTok and “boss” culture.
Brown went first, acknowledging that if you only look at her social media, you might assume entrepreneurship is travel, freedom and lifestyle. But the grind comes before the glamour, she said.
“You glamorize the freedom, but you don’t know what it took to get there,” Brown told the audience, describing long nights working until early morning, running the business with only herself and family on payroll, and learning the hard way that a business can’t depend on one person forever.
Her answer turned into a mini masterclass on systems. The goal, she said, is to build a business that can run whether you are present or not — and to train staff to lead so the owner doesn’t burn out.
“If I train them on how to do it,” she said, “then it takes the burnout off of me.”
Dobbins: A unified Memphis ‘would change the world’
Dobbins agreed but widened the lens. Beyond the grind, she said, entrepreneurs need people around them who will hold them up — and Memphis has a gap there.
“The tears, the prayers, the calling on your network, your friends — that’s the part that people don’t see,” she said. Then she leaned into the point that drew the audible response: “Black people do not support each other. We do not in the way that we need to.”
Dobbins urged the audience to “love on those people” who do support them and to intentionally build unity in a majority-Black city.
“If this city, that’s 70% African American, would learn to be unified,” she said, “we would change the world.”
Build a support network
The panelists were also clear on one point that often gets overlooked in entrepreneurship narratives: No one builds a sustainable business alone.
Booker echoed that sentiment from a support-services perspective, noting that many entrepreneurs struggle not because they lack ideas, but because they hesitate to reach out when challenges arise. “The most important thing that you can do is you have to ask for help,” Booker said. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Kolhelm dismissed the lone-wolf myth outright. “Entrepreneurship is not a one-man show,” he said. “You’ve got to lean on a lot of people, and a lot of people lean on you.”
And with multiple brick-and-mortar locations, Kolhelm gave an interesting perspective on the building he thinks of as an “employee.”
“The building is a breathing organism. It requires maintenance. It’s something you have to manage,” he said in the wake of the recent winter storm. “So yes, it’s another employee. It’s fun, it adds value, it adds color to the space — it adds everything. But it’s another employee.”
The ‘access to capital’ myth
Booker also challenged one of the most common and most misunderstood phrases in entrepreneurship circles — access to capital.
Too many first-time entrepreneurs, she said, believe grants are readily available to start a business, or assume “access to capital” is a single barrier that can be unlocked with the right connection. In reality, she said, capital is not a door — it’s a process.
“Capital is a word that … it’s broad,” Booker said. “If you’re starting a business, there are very few grants, if any. Banks are not going to loan you money to start a business. So people start businesses with retirement funds, credit cards, family contributions — their own money.”
What happens next, she said, is where many entrepreneurs stall.
When business owners do reach the point of seeking financing, lenders want proof — tax returns, income statements, balance sheets, and cash-flow projections — and they want owners who can explain what those documents say about their business and their industry.
“If you go to the bank, they want to know that you understand the industry you’re in,” Booker said. “They want to know that you know what the challenges are.”
That’s why she urged entrepreneurs to invest early in financial literacy. Workshops, seminars and training can build what she called “financial intelligence.”
“It’s not just capital,” she said. “It’s understanding capital. You have to know what working capital means, how much you need and how to talk about it. And depending on where you are in your business lifecycle, there may be an order to what you need first.”
Booker: Buying a legacy business is ‘a way to skip the line’
Later in the forum, an audience question opened the door to a lesser-discussed pathway into entrepreneurship — acquiring an existing business instead of starting from scratch.
“There are businesses where the owner lives here, but their children live somewhere else and don’t want the business,” she said. “Those owners are looking for options.”
Through the MMBC Continuum, Booker said her organization has begun hosting educational sessions on mergers and acquisitions, including bringing in bankers and attorneys who specialize in helping owners prepare businesses for sale.
In many cases, she said, buyers can avoid the riskiest startup phase by purchasing an operating business with customers, systems and cash flow already in place. Often, the seller remains on board for one to three years to help with the transition.
“It’s a way to skip the line,” Booker said, noting that acquisition, equity investment and even franchising can all be viable strategies, depending on the buyer’s experience and resources.
“If you’re going to buy a business, it helps if it’s something you know how to run,” Booker said. “And you still need legal and financial guidance so you’re protecting yourself.”
Support as strategy
As the conversation widened, panelists repeatedly returned to the same theme: success is rarely individual, even when ownership is. In Memphis, they argued, supporting Black-owned businesses is not charity — it is a strategy with tangible consequences for neighborhoods, employment and public safety.
Dobbins, who spoke candidly about burnout and the repeated fight for contracts and credibility, tied business outcomes directly to community outcomes — and to policy decisions that determine who gets access to government work. When small businesses are supported, she said, they hire locally, train locally and reinvest locally.
“If you take care of a business like mine, then we take care of the community,” Dobbins said. “If you grow Black businesses in these neighborhoods, those businesses create jobs, they create training opportunities, and they stabilize the area they’re in. But when government contracts and public dollars don’t reach us — even when we can do the work — that opportunity is taken away.
“If you want safer neighborhoods, stronger schools and more opportunity,” Dobbins said, “then you have to support the businesses that are already here doing the work. When we thrive, the community thrives. It’s really that simple.”
