Marie Firmin is the President of the Black Biz Development Group LLC (BBDG), an organization teaching the principles of entrepreneurship to Black-owned businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs. Firmin and BBDG will be hosting the Black Biz Ball on Thursday May 12, 2022 at the Beauport Hotel in Gloucester, MA.
For tickets visit: https://blackbizball.com
Heather Atwood:
We are speaking today with Marie Firmin. She is the president of the Black Biz Development Group, LLC. And they are producing a ball at the Bellport hotel on May 12th from 3:30 to 8:30. Hi Marie, how are you today?
Marie Firmin:
I’m doing fine. How are you?
Heather Atwood:
Good. Can you give us some background on the Black Biz Development Group, LLC? Tell us the mission of this organization.
Marie Firmin:
Well, it all started when I was teaching entrepreneurship at a vocational school in Roxbury. And I was the teacher that took in the students who were hanging out in the hallway and they would come into my class and I would initially use a curriculum that had already been developed and found that… They just weren’t interested in entrepreneurship with this curriculum. So, I began to change it. And long story short from my educational experience in working with youth who were oftentimes incarcerated in and out of jail throughout my high school teaching experience. I knew that this course was something that they really were interested in because of what was happening in the community in terms of culture and in terms of hip-hop. So, I pursued teaching entrepreneurship until the school department said, “nope, we don’t want to do this course anymore. We want to do MCAST.”
So, I left the school system to start my own business, to learn more about entrepreneurship to actually develop something for these students so that they could self employ themselves or they could work in with entrepreneurial skills that are necessary in any job, particularly in jobs of today. So, I started. My first company was Elegant living home and business services that had a very strong entrepreneurship component. And then I changed the name a couple of years ago because of a person that I worked with wanted to volunteer to help me do the work that I was doing. So, we decided playing around one evening about what we were offering. We decided to change the name to Black Biz Development Group and decided to have a really strong emphasis on entrepreneurship and culture and community and literacy strategies. So, I started Black Biz Development Group, LLC. I had not been an LLC before, so I decided to be an LLC. So, I could get a little bit more attention from people.
Kory Curcuru:
It was like legitimize the title a bit, right?
Marie Firmin:
Yeah. It ended up costing me a lot more money than I wanted.
Kory Curcuru:
Yeah. I’m in the same boat.
Marie Firmin:
When you become an LLC, you have all these expenses and all these responsibilities, but anyhow, decided to do that for five years now, I gave a… First, I gave a really small event at a local venue to celebrate a business that had been in existence for over 60 years, a friend of mine. And…
Heather Atwood:
What was that?
Marie Firmin:
That was the Jazz Club, famous Wally’s Jazz Club.
Heather Atwood:
Oh yeah, I know Wally’s Jazz Club.
Marie Firmin:
You know Wally’s?
Heather Atwood:
Yeah, sure.
Marie Firmin:
Well, I decided I was given an event and I would celebrate Eleanor, who is the owner of Wally’s. And I also celebrated one of the representatives, Gloria Fox. That was my first event. Then my second event where I celebrated 12 businesses.
And then after that, I decided I was going to do the Black Biz Ball. I was going to do it at the convention center in Boston. I had these big ideas. I had zero money. So, I called the convention center and I met someone. This is during COVID, heavy COVID. And I met someone who said, “You know what? This is a fantastic idea. You should do it here and I’m going to help you do it.” Then COVID hit. And I said, “Oh my goodness, I’m not going to be able to do it because COVID, nobody wants to go outside.” So I said, “We’ll do it virtually.” So, we did. So, last year in 2021, we celebrated 28 businesses from Boston. And we did a virtual show and our speakers, all of a sudden became the mayor of Boston came, a Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley came, and a couple of other very prestigious business owners came. And they spoke only for five minutes, less than no… less than three minutes because this was about celebrating this wasn’t about a bunch of speeches.
So, but anyhow, we were able to pull off this wonderful online event during COVID. We got over 1600 people to visit our event. So, I said, “oh, this is important.” I mean, our businesses were suffering. They had lost a lot of money because of COVID. We were all struggling and holding each other’s hands to survive. So, I just thought this was going to be a great time to give some recognition to businesses, not only the businesses that we recognize but some of our local artists who performed at the event. And it just went extremely well.
