In a male-dominated market, POWERHANDZ, a Black woman-owned business, is breaking barriers to pave the way for future minority-owned companies.
Danyel Surrency Jones is CEO of the sports and fitness technology platform. She co-founded the company in 2014 with the mission to improve human performance, health and wellness in every community. She said the past eight years have come with a lot of challenges and responsibilities.
“Anytime you're the first, you always make sacrifices for the next,” she said. “My goal is to make sure that I'm not the last. With that is acknowledging the challenges that stand before us in order to make sure that others that come behind me have a smoother path.”
One of the biggest challenges she faced was “building with no blueprint.” There was a void in the mentorship and advocacy part of the business as she was the first in many cases, Surrency Jones said.
Another challenge Surrency Jones said she and other minority-owners face is with funding.
“We're wondering if this is a trend from an investment standpoint, or would it go back to what it was in 2019 — where we saw very, very low percentages of growth relating to the capital that is given to women-owned businesses and double minority-owned businesses,” Surrency Jones said.
She said it is all about access to opportunity when it comes to the success of minority-owned businesses.
Surrency Jones said many minority-owned companies discover brilliance “because of the lack of reach, a lack of capital and the lack of human capital and skill sets that will move the company forward.”
In July, POWERHANDZ and PH Innovation Holdings Inc., its operator announced it had received multi-million-dollar capital funding from Frisco-based Vanguard Holdings Group. In addition to the funding, Vanguard issued a private tender offer to purchase the outstanding shares from minority shareholders, providing liquidity to longstanding stockholders of POWERHANDZ and PHI. Specific financial details of the offer were not disclosed.
“With this tender offer, Vanguard group will purchase the majority of our outstanding shares that don't belong to me as a founder and our founding group,” she said. “They will also inject a multi-million-dollar capital funding into the business for us to scale streamline operations and create a better product line.”
To help promote diversity, equity and inclusivity of minority-owned businesses, Surrency Jones said leaders should start from within.
“We have to have a conversation with ourselves that says, what impact will I have to positively make everyone feel included? To make sure that everyone feels equity in (the things) that I'm around in (and in) the things that I'm involved in,” she said.
She said you also need to have “courageous conversations” with those within the business organization and the community.
“People need to have conversations to unveil the unconscious biases that exist,” Surrency Jones said.
Finally, she said you need to implement those conversations in the form of programming and policies.
“I am a firm believer of if you want to create something that is sustainable, then you put programming and policy around it,” Surrency Jones said. “You can't just have the conversation and let it sit and feel that that is the end.”
