While growing up in Oakland, California, Nicole Cober-Johnson witnessed her father — “the first entrepreneur I knew” — run a liquor-and-convenience store in her neighborhood during the 1980s. He also belonged to a group of fellow Black peers who owned convenience stores, who came together to talk shop and socialize.
“It made me so happy to see that,” says Cober-Johnson, 53, now of Fall Church, Virginia. “My DNA is about entrepreneurship, is about collective procurement, is about Black people.”
Following in her father’s footsteps, Cober-Johnson, a lawyer by training who runs her own private consulting business, is now the founder of BOW Collective, a network of Black women entrepreneurs who have successfully built their companies, some to over $1 million in annual revenue. Many have overcome long odds to do so, including lack of access to capital. Starting in 2022 with just 50 women, BOW Collective has now grown to 200 members from over 25 industries across the country.
While there are other organizations, like the National Black Women’s Network and the U.S. Coalition of Black Women Businesses, Cober-Johnson created BOW for women to work and grow together by using their own resources to buy and sell products and exchange goods and services with each other.
“You really cannot be in business successfully without peers, without people that are invested in your success,” Cober-Johnson says. “I’m super proud that we were able to create this powerful network of the nation’s top 1% of Black women who are small business owners, and replicate them and have them work with each other [and] have them mentor each other.”
According to the Office of Advocacy, Black business owners run 3.5 million businesses and employ more than 1.2 million people in the U.S. As a group, Black women are an important driving force, making up 37.2% of all Black-owned business owners, Brookings Institution finds.
Black women are also the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S., owning 2.7 million businesses across the country, and generating $98.3 billion in revenue between 2019 and 2023. Yet, they still face many systemic barriers, especially in funding. For example, Black women business owners encounter a rejection rate that is three times higher than their white counterparts, and they only received 0.34% of the total amount of venture capital spent in the U.S. during 2021, according to the World Economic Forum.
In today’s politically divisive world, some efforts to assist Black women entrepreneurs have been met with backlash. Most recently, The Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based venture capital fund for Black women, was forced in September to permanently shut down a grant program for Black women as part of a year-long court battle with the conservative group American Alliance for Equal Rights. Cober-Johnson calls that discrimination lawsuit “bullying” and says she is fighting a good fight, like her Fearless Fund peers, and learning how to “build a better mousetrap.”
What Members Say
Several BOW members have witnessed firsthand the impact the network has had on their businesses, including Sharon W. Reynolds, 65, of Nashville, Tennessee, founder of DevMar Products and DevMar Manufacturing LLC. The companies are named after her two sons Devon and Marco and supplies safe and environmentally friendly cleaning products.
Reynolds says BOW has provided several benefits, including “B.I.G. BOW Mondays,” which are monthly meetings devoted to business development opportunities, and the BOW Knows Business Podcast, where members share their stories of growing their business to the top. In September, some members traveled to Washington, D.C., for the BOW Collective Advocacy Day, where they met with lawmakers to discuss challenges and ask for policy changes. Members also traveled to a NASDAQ event in New York last year to represent Black women business owners.
But one of the best benefits for Reynolds is the sisterhood.
“It feels like I’m at home,” says Reynolds, who estimates 200% growth for her companies in 2025. “We [Black women business owners] go through some of the same challenges but we’re not always around each other…to share our victories, to talk about our defeat. It lifts you up in ways that you couldn’t even imagine.”
Another BOW member is Jandie Smith Turner, 58, of Ellicott City, Maryland, who launched her event-planning company Acuity International 20 years ago. After learning about BOW from a fellow Black woman business owner, she went through the application process, which included providing a profit-and-loss statement and a $300 fee, and officially joined the organization in 2022. Smith Turner says she was able to grow her business in less than one year thanks to BOW resources. She also recently became BOW’s event planner, which “brought her a tremendous amount of joy.”
“I try to create events that speak to us as Black women — that speak to an environment of psychological safety —- where people are comfortable, where people are heard, [where] they’re understood,” Smith Turner says. One of these events include BOW’s annual conference, which this year took place in February at a hotel in Destin, Florida, and featured several speakers and 200 attendees. She draped the space with green, a color that symbolizes money.
The conference isn’t just about business topics, Cober-Johnson says. Black women talk openly about their faith while focusing on their physical and emotional well-being.
“We spend four days really just replenishing and restoring our members so that they can go out and slay the dragons, get the contracts, get the money, but do it in a way that they don’t feel isolated,” Cober-Johnson says.
With a booming network under her belt, Cober-Johnson has no plans to stop. In addition to leading BOW Collective, she is the CEO of BOW Enterprises, a business consulting and procurement firm, and also is a principal managing partner for Cober Johnson Romney, a law firm in Washington, D.C. She still recalls the first time becoming an entrepreneur, running a day spa with two locations in the early 2000s, which lit her “up from the inside,” she says.
Since launching, BOW has received funding from other companies, including a $100,000 sponsorship from MassMutual to help members grow and secure contracts.
Through BOW, Cober-Johnson aims to continue the legacy of her father, who died in September at age 82.
“That literally brings me so much joy knowing that I was the recipient of — and still am — of such a good person,” she says. “The things that I do, I know that they honor my parents’ legacy, but most assuredly, my father as a small business owner.” ◼️