Holloway: Black business means one thing. Business in the black means something else. Which do you practice? That's our issue next on Black Issues Forum.

If you want to live in one nation, indivisible, what do you do daily to promote unity, particularly in your practice and patronage of business? Tonight we analyze the fundamental difference between so-called black businesses, traditionally considered business efforts in the American community to serve primarily African Americans, and business in the black, which economically means business profiting from quality good and services.

Tonight our guest is Ron Andrews. He is area executive with Black Pages, USA. And here's an example of your publication, Ron. He has several of these publications throughout the southeastern United States and several here in North Carolina. Welcome to Black Issues Forum. Good to see you again, buddy.

Ron: Good to see you, man.

Holloway: We talk about business in the black first. Let's just put that in context, here. Your publication - and you talked to me about it off air - what we're really talking about is segmented marketing and general market.

Ron: That's correct.

Holloway: Tell me what your business is all about and who you target.

Ron: Well, our business has started to be more of a segmented marketing project. But, being that we do have a lot of the major corporations, it kind of goes out into the mainstream.

Holloway: Now, when we say segmented, and we talk about business in the black, let's break it down. What do we mean by segmented marketing?

Ron: Segmented marketing means, basically, you can break it down into the Hispanic market. You're targeting a specific market such as the Hispanics, African Americans, the Jewish market, the Native American market. Throughout the country there are different segments. As a matter of fact, you have your own Hispanic television which is specifically - Toyota does commercials just for Hispanics. You see what I'm saying? So, it's actually a way that you target a specific market. It's segmented. And mainstream is where you're projecting a message or targeting all groups of people.

Holloway: Now, before we get into those details - in our opening we talking about one nation versus two nations and this report that came up several years ago talked about we either live in one nation, where everyone is created equal and liberty and justice for all, or two nations separate and unequal. And that's one of the fundamental concepts that we wanted to put towards our guests is, when you look at segmented marketing, are you promoting this one nation or two separate nations, rather?

Ron: Well, when we're doing it we're promoting one nation. Simply because we're promoting - we're giving information and knowledge to a community that would make them more productive in the mainstream system.

Holloway: You know, I saw also recently many persons, especially in the larger community, sometimes mistake self-help or empowerment as a racist or promoting hate. So what would you say? I mean, you have - and you're not the only business in North Carolina that segments to the African American community. How is that not considered promoting hatred or promoting two nations?

Ron: Well, actually, we can take that back to the mainstream.

Holloway: Okay.

Ron: Financially. With your major corporations, such as Pizza Hut and many other major corporations - they look at the bottom line dollars, what we as African Americans spend. So, I wouldn't call that a - when we're targeting African Americans - we spend over two billion dollars here in the Triangle alone. I wouldn't call that a racial type situation. I would call that an economic situation where it doesn't matter what color you are, the money spent is green and the companies want to increase their productivity.

Holloway: So you look at a marketing opportunity and what your specific pattern of, let's say the black consumer market is. It's a market that you said, in this Triangle area, spends over two billion dollars?

Ron: Two billion dollars estimated.

Holloway: And so that's green, that's the bottom line. And so you go after that market and you deliver that market to major corporations like Pizza Hut, who also may target that market?

Ron: That's correct. And actually, we spend more money worldwide than any other ethnic category period.

Holloway: When you say "we" you mean African Americans?

Ron: African Americans. We're the highest consumer of consumable goods in the world.

Holloway: Very interesting. Now, let's talk about your publication because some people may have heard about Black Pages, USA. Tell me about the Black Pages, USA first.

Ron: Well, I can break it down into two things. The first is the Black Pages concept. The Black Pages concept is a group of Black Pages publishers that are in every metropolitan city in the United States such as New York; Washington D.C.; Boston, Massachusetts; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Phoenix, Arizona; and as far as L.A. and San Francisco. And we also have an affiliate in Hawaii.

Wherever the African Americans are spending money in major metropolitan areas, there is a Black Pages. We are Black Pages, USA. We're the largest Black Pages in the Unites States simply because, well we're actually located in five states, 32 cities, and 12 markets. Where each on the others, like the one that's in Washington D.C. might not go over its boundaries of Washington D.C. Or the one that's in San Francisco does not go beyond its boundaries of San Francisco. But what we do is we tackle a larg e number of markets at one time.

Holloway: So, in North Carolina, you're in which markets?

Ron: We're in the Triad area, High Point, Winston Salem, Greensboro. We're also in Charlotte, we're in Fayetteville, and we're also in Wilmington and Raleigh Durham. All the major areas throughout the state, we're there.

Holloway: Well, very interesting. Black Pages, USA now, then, how long have you been in existence?

Ron: Well, Thomas McCant's Media has been in business since 1990.

Holloway: Thoms McCant's Media owns Black Pages.

Ron: Black Pages, USA. We have the federal trademark - we're the top of the industry. We're the, I guess IBM of the Black Pages industry.

Holloway: Interesting. Let's move now to an area of what value - what do you sell to persons actually wanting to buy the African American consumer market in North Carolina? I mean, you talked about what it was here in the Triangle area, but how large really is that and why would someone want to buy an advertisement, I guess they would buy in this publication, and what is it you're really selling?

Ron: We're actually selling viewership. Viewership that's not currently done period today. We're selling a long penetration type vehicle which is actually in someone's home for a whole year. We're actually selling them, I guess, the life blood of the black community at one time versus where if you look at other medias -television, radio, other print media - they might come out once a month or once a week or whatever, we're there for 365 days, seven days a week, 24 hours a day and we're right a t the fingertips.

We kind of use - when we say Black Pages we kind of use the concept of yellow pages, let your fingers do the walking. And basically, we also have editorial content, we also have FYI, it's also a mentoring piece, it's a lot of different things but what happens to say, for instance a corporate image like Wachovia - Wachovia you can get to the life blood of the black church and all these major cities with one buy versus them having to come up with a segmented marketing firm which would have to do radio, TV , and all this other stuff in each one of these areas, which will cost them a lot more money in the long haul.

Holloway: So are you really talking about economic empowerment within the black community and is this publication put together to encourage blacks to do business with each other? What is the real purpose for putting this kind of publication together?

Ron: The real purpose is to leverage our economic standing. Basically, as we spoke about the two billion dollars that is spent in the Triangle today, what we're trying to do is to gain respect for the spending that we do with major corporations, with anybody. But then, also, we circulate the monies throughout the community. Where we say that we would like to do business with our own, as a sense. I guess the attitude that came from the million man march. Before this publication came out, we c ouldn't necessarily do that. The only way that we knew about someone of African American descent being in business was to - a friend told me that a friend knew this person and a friend knew that person and they did business. We didn't necessarily have a directory that we could go to and say, "Hey this is a black business. Let's do business here, let's do business there."

Holloway: Is it feasible, have you found, though, that your readers will actually go out of their way to use your publication and do business with a black owner?

Ron: Yes. Yes, definitely. We've had some very, very, very appealing statistics that have come from people actually using the Black Pages. One customer, I won't give names, they earned $36,000 in the first quarter the book was out because of the patronage of the Black Pages.

Holloway: So, you mentioned in the million man march. Is this something, an attitude within the black community that has been growing nationally and statewide and maybe even in some of the markets in North Carolina where there's a growing interest in wanting to do business with other black business owners?

Ron: Yes, yes it is. I think that by - the area where my office is in Durham used to be called the black wall street of the south. And basically by being the black wall street of the south the people that were - back then during that time there were 150 black owned businesses in one corridor where you could buy everything that you needed in one place. Where now, as you know, we have to go to this side of town, to that side of town, to this side of town to get what we need. And what happened i s it was a real good economic base. You were talking earlier about the two nations. Well, what they're trying to do is to do business with themselves so we as a group can make ourselves more competitive in the general mainstream.

Holloway: You know, that's an interesting concept. We struggled with trying to tackle that at the beginning of the show and we brought it up again now. But, let's try to tackle it again.

Ron: Okay.

Holloway: I'm not sure if our audience is following, and I'm following it a little bit. How do you tie doing business with each other and promoting that as wanting to bring about one nation that is with liberty and justice for all as opposed to two separate nations. Now, I know there have got to be some persons in the audience that say, "Well, this is promoting segregation." How do you answer that, Ron?

Ron: That's a deep one. Well, we're not promoting segregation, we're just promoting what other ethnic groups have done over the years. We're promoting togetherness, we're promoting support. The Mexicans - you also look at the Jewish communities, the Asian communities, the Arabic communities, everybody works together. What we're trying to do in our community - we haven't worked together in so long, what we're trying to do is bring togetherness and to work together so that we can actually - ver sus having to ask for social programs from the government to help us to move forward like welfare and other programs - we're talking about we spend enough money locally and nationally that we can take our own money and push ourselves to a level where we can be competitive in an arena in which we might not have been competitive in the past.

Holloway: Very interesting concept. It's beginning to sound almost like politics in the conservative fiscal movement versus a liberal one. You know what I was also thinking about, you reminded me, and I've heard recently, someone talked about it moving toward business ownership. So in other words, the more black business owners, the more opportunities for African Americans to do business.

Ron: That's right.

Holloway: But recently I heard a statistic, and I cannot quote the source. I heard another media outlet quoting these statistics that one of every 11 Koreans or Asians own their own business in America. One in 28 European Americans, white Americans, own their own business. One in 64 African Americans own their own business.

So, looking at those statistics, wherever one may live in North Carolina, and if they're coming home and wanting to shop in a grocery store, I mean it's just - in pure statistics, how many African American owned grocery stores are there? And, you know, from where I work to coming home, I'd have to drive a long distance. And I think there's only one in Raleigh that's an African American owned grocery store. So we've got a big challenge here if we're talking about what you're doing.

Ron: Well, actually what we're doing - our main theme for the 21st century is promoting entrepreneurship in the 21st century. Our company's also on the Internet. We're in the process of doing pilot TV. What we're trying to do is get the message out that we as a collective group already have the funds. We don't have to go ask anybody for anything. We're already at the conceptual stages of being self-sufficient. But we have to get the masses to understand that, hey, through entrepreneurship y ou can do it.

But what has happened recently, with corporate down-sizing, we've had a lot of African Americans that had been doing number one jobs for the major corporations - they've been down-sized, they've lost their jobs. They have no other choice but to become entrepreneurs. So, what we're saying is let's teach our children to become entrepreneurs. Get the educational background, but not the education to go work for someone else, be their own entrepreneur.

Where you said that African Americans - and this is another good statistic - you're talking about grocery stores. African Americans in the Triangle spend over 200 million dollars in groceries and food alone. So, by us spending those types of funds, we do need that and there's someone out there in our audience who has the capability of having a grocery store chain or being a part of a grocery store chain. It's something to go into, it's very lucrative.

Holloway: Let's move into that whole entrepreneurship effort now and business ownership. When you say entrepreneurship, I'm using the synonym business ownership. Do you want to elaborate on that any further in terms of business ownership and explaining entrepreneurship?

Ron: They're basically one in the same.

Holloway: Well, what are the challenges then? This publication, as you mentioned earlier, lists many of the black businesses in the area in which you publish. You profile some of the successful businesses. On your front cover here you list several businesses here. And I would guess these are some of the examples of the successful entrepreneurs that you feature?

Ron: Well, the only way that you can actually become a candidate for the cover is to be a positive role model in the community.

Holloway: Now, who defines that?

Ron: We kind of look at your economical standing, your biographical sketch, who you are, we look at your business, how long you've been in business. It's not a pure money driven thing. You cannot actually buy your way on to the front cover. We keep it very democratic from that standpoint.

Holloway: So if they meet that criteria they're then featured. And, also, I guess you hope that in terms of role modeling, you would hope that whether it's in a classroom or somewhere in a community that a young person or older person thinking of going into business for themselves, becoming - the big word - entrepreneur, can look in this publication and see some positive examples that, "Hey, if they did it I can do it." That's what you're saying.

Ron: That's correct.

Holloway: Well, what types of businesses have you featured?

Ron: We have featured law firms, we have featured people, architects, we have featured, I mean the list goes on. I mean, we also have featured doctors. It's a lot of different fields in there. We've gone from telecommunications to people with architect, graphical backgrounds. I could talk to you all night about who I've contacted.

Holloway: Well, let me do this. What I want to do now is - some of our interns on this program have gone out and taken a look at a feature of a business person, or actually a young African American who started his own film production company, film making. As an example of this entrepreneurship, we want to take a look at that.

You know, making a profit from art has always been a risky venture, but in Hollywood film making, where movies regularly cost over 40 million dollars, the bottom line gets top priority. North Carolina makes movies also, and on a smaller scale than Hollywood. Local film makers are balancing their artistic vision against the business part of show business. Let's take a look. Clip from video:

Male: Raindance is a short, dramatic film that opens invitingly, slowly and then it slams in with the power and the graphic poignance of domestic violence. Raindance first premiered at the Haiti Heritage Center at the film festival. Secondly, we premiered it at the African American film festival here at the Carolina Theater. From that point, it received a lot of recognition as well as accolades and we caught the attention of Hollywood producers.

Narrator: People in Hollywood are watching David Merrit, an up and coming Durham film maker. Hollywood is also watching the state of North Carolina. Film makers have long known about the variety of locations here for shooting movies. Stephen Jones heard about film making in North Carolina while producing films for directors including Spike Lee. He recently got to know North Carolina when he joined the faculty at the School of the Arts school of film making. Jones: You can make any film within, I think, the next to four cities that I've been in. You know, Winston Salem, Greensboro, Burlington, Durham and Raleigh. There's a lot of set potential, plus there's a lot of studio space here. North Carolina School of the Arts will have a very large studio and, being here today, I've found several more large studios around. So, it has the potential of being - I think it's a quiet secret right now.

Narrator:

If trends continue, North Carolina film making will not be a secret much longer. New facilities like the film studio at Piedmont Community College in Yancyville are drawing film makers to North Carolina. The state has ranked number one in film industry growth since 1980. Films, TV movies, videos and commercial production have added revenues estimated at three billion dollars to the state's economy. But not all North Carolinians see film as a source of commerce.

Female: I definitely think that film and video can be tools of social change. And, in fact, that's one of the main reasons that I'm interested in it. Just, you know, for so many years the images that we see on television and film end up being the images that people actually have about certain racial and ethnic groups, unfortunately. So I think that the film and television media are very powerful media and if the right sorts of images are put on there, or if the right sorts of challenging mater ials and things that make people question things were put on there, they can affect social change.

Narrator: Like Spike Lee did in the 80s, young film makers see the independent production of films as a way to tell new stories that Hollywood does not tell. Many tarheels hope that films made here will be independent of the Hollywood system.

Female: Right now, North Carolina film making - I guess a lot of people think about Wilmington and the Hollywood industry that kind of shoots things down here, so there's a big connection to the Hollywood industry. I'd like to see the independent film makers in North Carolina grow and gain prominence and I'd like to see that community become as diverse as possible and address issues that are important to North Carolinians and to people all over.

Male: Independent film is the excellent media to represent black film. Because you're not dealing with a Hollywood executive board. You're not dealing with producers who are looking at the bottom line. You're dealing with independent film makers who want to make a statement. Independent film makers who want to make a difference. It's going to be up to us on a grassroots level to come together as a community. For us to master our representation and know what we feel good about when we look u p on that screen is going to take us having some input, putting some dollars in, putting some mental input as well as physical input to make those changes.

Narrator: For his next project, Time Bomb, David Merrit is staging community events to attract local investors. He financed his previous films by himself using some innovative strategies. Merrit: Using student loans. Using personal finances acquired through commercials. Doing corporate video and saving my monies. Also, friends have donated time and equipment and we all came together, for example, on the film The Raindance.

Narrator: Relying on their vision and persistence, these film makers want to add color to the American image that Hollywood has painted.

Male: I think there's enough film makers in all communities now that we know how to thread up a camera, basically do a good script and get it done. What we have to do is encourage potential investors to be able to put the real money up so we can do a film that is our film and stay at the table.

Holloway: Good luck to David. And I want to thank Matt and Conzuela, the interns who helped us produce that feature. And that's a good example, Ron, of what you're talking about - what it's going to take to be successful. And he happens to be an African American, but looking at general market in a new area, film is big in North Carolina. You were going to talk about how big the African American consumer market is in the Southeast and here in the area.

Ron: Well, throughout the United States, the African American market is worth over 400 billion dollars.

Holloway: Billion with a "b."

Ron: Billion with a big "B" you know. And 56% of that is spent in the Southeastern United States. And within the Raleigh Durham area, African American business - I guess the area for African American businesses rated number ten in the whole country.

Holloway: So, a person who happens to be African American gets their own business. Then they can get in your publication and let folks know where they are.

Ron: That's correct.

Holloway: Thank you so much. For all our posturing, the discussion reduces itself to this question: do you advocate and support one nation in philosophy and practice or do you advocate two nations? That question could cause to revisit, then, the late Dr. Martin Luther King's prophecy of choice. He said that we must either learn to live together here as brothers and sisters or we will perish together here as fools. Join us on the Internet for additional information and discussion on this topi c. And thanks to those of you who have contacted us. Join us again next week when we talk about leadership. Have a blest evening and a good night.