to answer the question, African Americans (AA) are NOT taking advantage of digital opportuniies in entreprenuership (myself not included) because we simply do not know what is out there. All of my clients are AA small businesses and each one of them are extremly smart, talented and visionaries however they do everything the “old school way” and when I attempt to introduce them to a product such as SmartVault to keep up with documents or Expensify to make tracking and paying expneses easy I get alot of resistance. The idea of digial businesses never enters their minds. I think it’s because of lack of education on the idea and of course the fact alot (if not all) of the bigger digial companies I’ve been researching and working with are owned operated and funded by Caucasion men (even women are underrepresented in this field). Thus how can AA expect these companies to acknowledge the tremendous opportunity in our entrepreneuralship community and ensure we are able to take avantage of this great new trend?

My solution? start with me, my knowledge in small businss bookkeeping and finance and find a creative, innovative way to bring digital business management right to them. 1 way is by linking with a minority owned tech company who specialized in teaching techonology to minorities and 2. work tirelessly in developing my company and product. I have learned very quickly in this journey though that I have to go to the “big dogs” with two dissadvantages going for me already: 1. I’m Black and 2. I’m a woman. However another thing I am finding is that these same companies, though they don’t reach out to AA, they are starting to open up contests and competitions to find new talent so we must position ourselves to know where these opportunities are and apply!!