This special episode was recorded live at the “Get Your Bag Back Financial Literacy Summit” presented by the Omega Community Development Corporation (Omega CDC).
Tune in to hear from a panel of four dynamic local leaders — Jackie Gamblin, Brandon Smith, Clarece Richardson, and Christian Jay Calloway — who each share their personal journey of starting a business, building financial stability, and using creativity to turn challenges into opportunities.
- Jackie Gamblin is the Founder & CEO of JYG Innovations, a nationally recognized Woman-Owned Small Business.
- Brandon Smith, also known as “Uncle Boof,” is the co-founder of The Ugly Duckling restaurant in St. Anne’s Hill and the creator of Uncle Boof’s World Famous Pancake Mix.
- Clarece Richardson is the Founder & CEO of Rich Taste Catering Services and Co-Owner of RF Food Group.
- Christian Jay Calloway is a massage therapist and the Founder of Preventive Maintenance LMT.
Listen Now:
Episode Transcript:
David:
Good evening everyone. Welcome to the Creating the Future podcast. You are part of it. My name, as Sean said, is David Bowman. I am joined by Evelyn Ritzi with a live microphone this time.
David:
So we are here with four amazing local entrepreneurs today, before we dive into questions, we’d love for each of our panelists to just introduce yourselves a little more, tell us a little bit about yourself, a brief explanation of what you do, how you got started, and we will start with you, my good friend, Jackie. No pressure.
Jackie:
Good evening, everyone. I’m Jackie Gamblin. I’m the founder of jyg innovations, and we are an information technology professional services company. So we offer services in the areas of software development, cybersecurity and mainly in the Department of Defense market. So I started the business. We just celebrated 16 years so, and it has been a labor of love, and really just happy to be here today. Thank you.
Brandon:
How y’all doing today? My name is Brandon Smith. I’m from Northwest Dayton, Ohio, Dayton View, born and raised here, I got my, like you said, I got my own pancake mix and a co owner of a restaurant. I like to consider myself a serial entrepreneur, always looking for new opportunities and looking to start a new business, just looking to ways to make some more money. To be honest with you,
Clarece:
Good evening. My name is Clarece Richardson. As they mentioned, I’m the owner of Rich Taste Catering. We are a full service catering company, so your big galas, and as he mentioned, the snazzy events and lots of weddings, we provide services for over 300 weddings per year. And we’re also a food service provider for UD athletics, Dayton Dragons and school lunch.
Christian:
How y’all doing? My name is Christian Calloway. I am also born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, the hope zone that they talked about. I think I touched all 17 neighborhoods since I’ve been here, I’m newly, I want to say New. I’ve been in business for about five years. It’s just me. So I don’t have any corporation or anything, but my business is preventative maintenance. LMT, I am a medical licensed massage therapist, so I basically go around to different hospice. I travel whoever is in the need of in the health or, you know, muscles are hurting or anything. I’m the guy you call on
David:
All right. Well, thank you so much for being with us today. We’re here today talking all about financial literacy. So let’s kick things off and have each of you share a financial lesson or practice that’s been most critical as you started and are growing your business.
Brandon:
Start off, I might say one important thing financially on my journey would really kind of be saving more than you spend, and also not being afraid to invest in yourself. I see sometimes, you know you could, you know, be down to your last, or down to, you know what you would think but your last. But if you putting in the effort and the dedication to what you, you know, believe in I just think that it’ll always come back to you double for real, for real. So I think, like I say investing in yourself and also saving more than you spending for real, for real.
Clarece:
That’s great. I would say knowing your numbers, and I say that from a personal perspective and a business perspective, so knowing your numbers personally is just checking your bank account and being comfortable knowing where you are, what you have to save, what you have to spend, and moving accordingly. And then, from a professional standpoint, I think knowing where you should be, what your profit margins are, how much you should be. Spending and investing within your business as well.
Christian:
I would say, for my business, what I’ve focused on is just basically reframing failures into success. So my business has seen a lot of failures, but I just keep successfully, keep, you know, looking at my numbers, seeing where I can impact them the best. Like I said, I’m hopefully to be a big business soon, but I’m just, you know, working the numbers as they come, and, you know, being available and spending my time the best way I can.
Jackie:
And I think my last comment would really be just focusing on your personal finances before you even think about starting a business, making sure that you’re managing debt. I don’t people realize the impact of debt, and I always say understanding compound interest. I tell everyone, compound interest on your investments, which is a good thing, and on your debt, which is a bad thing. We’ve all had credit cards and those percentages and paying the minimum payment, understanding, you know, getting out of debt is really what’s going to set you up for success if you want to start a business. That’s great advice. Great advice.
David:
Something a lot of new business owners struggle with sometimes is funding, right? So how have you navigated access to capital and built financial stability with your business?
Christian:
I got to say, pass the mic to me, because I’m the freshest business up here. I would say I’m still in the avenue of experience in that seeing where funding is available, seeing where my health market is able to get funding. So I’m just continuously learning, trying to see, you know, if those are things that apply to me and my business, since I’m not like a corporation and different things, but at the same time, I stay in the library a lot, if not, you know, massaging or doing anything I’m in the library and, you know, like the Omega CDC, I just learned about this honestly. But it’s different avenues out there that, if you don’t know, there is information out there that can, you know, make your business succeed as you, you know, go into this entrepreneurship,
Clarece:
I would say, before funding, utilizing resources such as the Hope Zone, Omega CDC to find out what you can learn and do with your own money, prior to reaching out to banks and other avenues. I’ll be honest and transparent. I was very scared of funding, initially, the fear of funding, the fear of making sure that you appropriate funds correctly, and that things are going well within your business, and then once you get over that, I think it helps to the business to grow. That’s how you scale. But initially, understanding the resources and what you can do without other people’s money is always essential.
Brandon:
This is a good question, right here. I got kind of a good answer. I say, like about so this is our first official year at our location, at the Ugly Duckling. We started off at a smaller place on Springfield Street, and it was like, probably can only fit by like, 25 people in there. But we did a really good job in the community of like, welcoming everybody, making everybody feel at home in our restaurant. People have seen, like, just us being out in the community, and we did a little bit of we hit a we had a spot in our business about two years ago where our landlord was kind of trying to sell the building where we was at, and we needed to make a move, and we kind of didn’t have enough money to just buy a new building or rent a new building, so we had to do a little unorthodox way of funding, which was crowdfunding, we would say, and start up a kind of a GoFundMe, and let people know that also gave people incentives, that you did donate money, that you got a free coffee for a year, and it took off real well. Like, I know sometimes people kind of relentless about like, starting go funds means because of their egos, or they don’t want people to, like, see it like that, but I think crowdfunding and doing like, doing that way is like, is pretty much acceptable. And we raised like, $18,000 in like two days. Was really like, and it really like showed us how much the community cared about us, and, like, how much our customer base really supported us, and it like pushed us to the next level in this right here. So I think just, you know, I think crowdfunding and asking, like your supporters, in a way, and they offer them something too, like just don’t ask for money and not offer nothing back. But I think that’s a good way to.
David:
If you’ve eaten at The Ugly Duckling, you know that it was worth every penny of that 18 grand.
Jackie:
I think the only thing I would add is, really, you know, what I’m hearing from my other panelists is, is understanding your own business, right? Knowing what your goals are, what your dreams are, and not comparing yourself to anyone else. I think where we get in trouble is, you think I got to keep up with someone else that they’re doing this. I need to be doing it, and for us. You know, I just started off with me sitting at my kitchen table, and I said, Okay, it’s me, and I want to build a business. And so what expenses can I cut? Because I know income is really, you know, at a premium now and then. Where can I offer services to try to start to build and build the business just one step at a time, and never letting anyone else tell me how they define my success, right? So whether it’s one person, whether it’s just you, whether it’s 100 people, it doesn’t matter. It’s really It’s your dream, it’s your vision. And so just staying true to that as you build your business,
Evelyn:
You know and pursuing your dream, starting a business, takes a ton of bravery and risk, financial risk. What would be one piece of advice you might give to folks in Dayton about pursuing a bold, creative idea while staying financially grounded?
Jackie:
I would say, use your community partners. I mean, when I started again, I’m a startup, I didn’t have past performance. I didn’t have no one knew who JYG innovation was, so I had to find other people who were doing something similar, and saying, Hey, how can I help you? Can we work together? Can I do this little, small part with you, and just really using those partnerships to build your business? You know, we don’t have to do it all by ourselves. You just heard someone just went out to the community and raised $18,000 in two days because he used, he used his network. So use your network, use your friends, use your family, you know, use people you work with. You know, don’t try to do it all by yourself. I think that’s just the key when you’re trying to build.
Brandon:
I can definitely piggyback off what she said, and just finding people that you know what your strength, what your strengths are, you know I mean finding people that stronger than you in them areas, like you say, using your friends. I’m lucky enough to be business partner with your friends. Like, don’t listen to that stigma and not start business with your friends. Like, just be transparent and communicate. And do you know, build good relationships with people and things are going the right direction.
Clarece:
I agree with both of them. I have the very hard job of sharing a business with my husband, and we enjoy working together for the last 10 years. But as Jackie said, we started with just us, and as you’re growing the business using your community, I remember when we started, we needed a commercial kitchen. And to pay for a commercial kitchen the very beginning is very expensive if you don’t have consistent work. So there was a chef, an award winning chef, Ann Kearney, that has since moved to Florida to open up something really big in Tampa, I think it is. And she had an article in Dayton Business Journal about what we’re seeing right now. Business was going a little slow, and she could use some assistance. So we approached her and said, Hey, if we pay you $300 a month, can we use your kitchen during your closed hours and 300 sounds, you know, high for us, starting off and low for her, but she was open to it, and that’s how we started. We stayed at her kitchen for about a year until the store actually closed, and then we moved from there. So using your resources, your resources and your network aren’t always the people that are sitting next to you right now. We had never met Ann Kearney. We had to go to the restaurant to ask her for that, and just know that people are willing. We’ve offered the same to people in the position that we’re in now, and so you just consistently build on that. I think to sum it up is basically just be a good story to your resources.
Christian:
I started in my friend’s barber shop with my chair massage. I’ve been to just multiple places, just popping my chair massages up, going to different events like this. You know, we just had the Black Cultural Festival a couple of days ago. I popped my chair massage there, not looking for any income or anything, just basically being a resource to the community, providing back. And actually, it comes back to you tenfold as you go out there and not look for, you know, always making money all the time, just go out there and support the community, and the community will support you if I can,
Clarece:
I’m just going to add to that, because I think that was just really powerful. I put tons of proposals out, and most of my yeses have been the very quick conversations with people and people that you don’t know. One of the things I think is true too, is I.
David:
I think it’s pretty unique to Dayton, right? Is, don’t be afraid to ask people for help. This is a city where there’s not a lot of strangers, right? There’s about one degree of separation in Dayton, Ohio, and we talked to a lot of people on our podcast, but that’s a theme you hear again and again, is people want to make connections, and they might not be able to solve your problem, but they definitely know someone who can. Everyone at omega Community Development Corporation certainly is connected, and that’s what they’re about, right? Is connecting people to those resources. So if you’ve got things you’re afraid of questions, don’t be afraid to make me your friend, right? I’m happy to help people. Evelyn, the panel Omega, like, don’t be shy in this city, because it’s a place where people want to lift each other up just more of a comment than question.
Evelyn:
Yeah, one of the best pieces of advice I ever heard was, if you don’t ask, the answer is always no, so you might as well ask. But you know, we talk about resources, wondering if there’s any books or podcasts or motivational quotes, any resources that you would recommend to other entrepreneurs or leaders in the audience?
Jackie:
I say, me personally, is just getting outside and like, kind of getting inspiration from things that you see on the day to day, like and like, not seeing things as negative and kind of seeing more things as positive. For real, for real. Kind of seeing art and inspiration and kind of everything for real is a lot easier than going out and searching and listening to people for real, for real. Yeah, my favorite quote, and this is really what I base my business on. You know, I’m in the technology field, which is ever changing, right? I mean, every year is something new. So it’s hard to just find people who always have everything you want, right? Do they have this skill? Have they worked with this technology? But I just go with the thing of higher character train skill. If you find people who have the character and want to learn and are willing that pays off more than anyone who’s an expert in something, because if they don’t come in with the right attitude, it really doesn’t matter. And we’ve just found some just phenomenal employees because we just gave them an opportunity. That’s it. They just needed an opportunity. So with our hiring managers. That’s what I’m always trying to really preach to them, is just give someone a chance. Don’t don’t come with an immediate no because their resume didn’t have everything we were looking for on it. You know, bring them in, meet them, talk to them, find out what they’re really about, because you’ll just be, you know, pleasantly surprised with some of those hidden gems that you’ll find when you really just focus on, you know, higher character and willing to train and invest in people.
Christian:
Not that I don’t have any quotes.
Christian:
I’ve seen a lot, but basically, I just have a formula that I use with almost everything I do. The formula is 24 hours. It was at one point, I was working for eight hours, sleeping for eight hours, and then I put eight hours into my business. And it took quite a while, but my main goal was to gain the 16 hours to put in my business and sleep for eight a lot of people doing this entrepreneurship don’t feel like you’re out of place if you still working a job, but you still got the idea to want to do something outside of the box, I call it, and gain that 16 I mean, you live your life to gain that 16 hours to put into your business and hopefully sleep For eight, like my man, with the amount of things you can do nowadays, you don’t even want to sleep for eight hours. You want to sleep for five and you up thinking about the next thing to do. So most thing I can tell you is, like, don’t give up. Like I said, we all said it use your resources. But at the same time, like I said, working a job is not the worst thing, but as you work in that job, put your mind towards your business that you really want.
Clarece:
For the purpose of this summit, I will say, make more deposits than withdrawals, and that is to you into you, and not necessarily to the bank, just making sure that you are reading, that you are going to Summit, that you are investing in yourself, not necessarily financially, but just educational resources. Many of us that are employed, you have the opportunity to take the free resources that your job. I think I have 10 licenses from my past job, I have a chemical dependency license of all these things that were free, and a lot of people just don’t look at those resources and realize that they can help you later. I also want to say that entrepreneurship is not the only way. If you want to work somewhere and you want to make a difference in that way, that is just as powerful. But it still takes you making deposits.
Brandon:
I’m going to work right after this, seven o’clock. I gotta be at eight o’clock. Gotta be at work. I work at the airport, really, for the benefits of flight for real. So finding a job that benefits you for real life is important. Just don’t let nobody work you. Right? You know, I mean for real.
David:
So entrepreneurs, business leaders, they need to be creative to be problem solvers. So can you share a time with us when creativity sort of opened a new path for you or for your business?
Jackie:
I think for us, I will go pre covid. We get our senior leaders together, and we talk about kind of strategic planning. You know, who do we want to be, where do we want to go with the company? And I had my management team in a conference room and and I said, What do we what’s important to us? And the number one thing that came up was quality time, because we were in this grind mode as a company, and we’re like, what are we chasing? If it comes down to it, where people aren’t spending time with their families, they’re getting burned out. So we said, Well, how do we give back more quality time to the business? And what we came up with is we wanted to come up with a hybrid work schedule. We said, hey, what if we let people work from home two days a week, you know. And this is the people in our back office, you know, finance, HR. And we said, let’s, let’s give it a try. So we said, well, you know, we probably need to probably define some policies so people understand what they can and can’t do, and it’s a benefit, it’s not a mandate. So we put together this whole telework policy, and we put together this whole communication strategy, and guess what? Then we had a pandemic, and we already had it figured out, my customers were calling me, going, now wait a minute, how do you guys do this? And it was such an odd thing, because we had no idea anything like that could ever happen, but the benefits we gained on how to operate and how to really move forward as a company were just invaluable. Now, the flip side of that, we also learned because as you were hiring people during a pandemic, we realized those people who were coming into that hybrid work environment, they were missing something right, because they had never worked with everyone every day, like all the people before. So we had to come up and try to be creative again. Okay, how do we get these people really kind of orientation, so they understand how to how to move in this environment. So, you know, I like to take credit, like, Hey, I was ready for covid. I knew it was coming, but, but it really was beneficial and so, the thing is, listen to your your workforce, listen to your team. Talk about things you don’t always have to do what everyone else is doing. So if it works for you, that’s all that counts.
Christian:
She just brought back some memories, because I went to massage school as Covid hit, like the middle so I was working for Pepsi. I was driving trucks and putting up merchandise and stuff like that. So I was making good money, but I just had this idea of not being in a box anymore, and I decided to go to Dayton School of medical massage. So I would say probably, like, three months in covid hit and now to us in massage school, it’s over for our career, because we can’t six feet apart. We couldn’t do clinicals anymore. We couldn’t do anything. So it’s like, I made this big decision to be a massage therapist, and now, like, you know, y’all like, hey, that ain’t the right way to go. So I had to think outside the box, because I’m going into school thinking I’m going to have this elaborate career in massage. But it kind of like turned me around, like I have to think about something else. I might have to get back into seeing if Pepsi hire me again, or something like that. But as everything worked out, I had to think differently. That’s when I turned to online, going online and making up care baskets and different things like that. Still staying focused to my goal is being a massage therapist, even though, you know, I got that curve ball thrown to me. But sometimes in entrepreneurship stuff get a little sticky, but at the same time, I maintained it during that covid time, and once covid got released, it was like my business was ready to go. At that point.
Clarece:
Business growth is solving a problem. So I think being creative is about solving the problem. If you’re thinking about going into business, think about what problems Dayton has. What can you solve if someone else is catering, if someone else is making pancakes, you can too make pancakes. There can never be enough. And I think that is part of that creativity is. Not only when you’re in business, but also in the initial concept.
Brandon:
My pancake mix really was a pandemic business I started. I started to Pam the pancake mix when I moved back home from Day in. I was living in Charlotte for for after I graduated from Central State for about 10 years, and Charlotte, I had a clothing brand. I sold vintage clothes. Kind of still a serial entrepreneur. I really never had a job. While I was in Charlotte. I was just, kind of just just picking up entrepreneur. We had our own clothing brand. I was really good, really successful, but when I came home, I wanted to do something different, not necessarily more creative, but a little more easy, receptive, easy to collab with other people, something I could just put on a shelf and it just sell itself. So we just came up with a pancake box. Really. The boxes were really the idea of what I wanted to sell. I wanted to sell a box to people, you know, I mean, the pancake mix is, I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, but it’s more I’m trying to sell a box basically, if that makes sense,
David:
I’m in marketing, so it makes perfect sense.
Brandon:
It is premium. It is premium pancake mix, though I’m using the best of the best ingredients stuff, but the box is I really love the like, the art of the box, though, for Uncle Boof’s, World Famous Pancake Mix, yeah. So we just, we just signed a lease to a new place to do our manufacturing and distributing. I started off in Dayton view, right at my at my home. It was a cottage business. I probably sold over 2000 boxes out of the out of the house, but I ended up renting out the condo, starting up this restaurant. And now we getting back to the pancake mix. We literally just signed a lease like last week. So we about to get back into Jim City Market, all the Dorothy Lane markets, Tony and Pete’s downtown, and then it’s a lot of different local grocery stores, and since we had a commercial location, I can start expanding out the state. My next goal is to get into jungle gyms and then continue all around
Evelyn:
Well, we’re manifesting that for you. Thank you so much to each of you for joining us and sharing your stories, your advice. We always close our podcast with one final question, and that is, what is the future you want to create?
Jackie:
The future I want to create is legacy. It’s really about generational wealth. My daughter works for me, my sister works for me, and it’s really my nephew has a company that I’m mentoring him. So it’s really about, how do we pay it forward? You know, how do I let this be just a one time thing? So that’s the ultimate goal. So I said, if I’m successful with that, I want to come back here and tell you guys about it.
Brandon:
Ditto on that. Everything about legacy, also big on community. I want a building downtown, like a corporate building downtown, where uncle boots, world famous, like I wanted a buildings downtown. That’s my future. And I want to employ, like, you know, I mean, employ as many people as I can. We started off with just two people in my crib. Now we got probably, like 22 employees now like so
Clarece:
I think the future that I would like to create includes equity, and that is equity for people that look like me within our industry. So working in hospitality and catering, you typically don’t see caterers doing what we do that look like me, and I think that’s important, as well as other vendors for myself, legacy is also important. I want my kids not necessarily to want this business, but to want something just because of the work that they see me do.
Christian:
My legacy will be basically for my son, for he can see, you know, how I ushered into this entrepreneurship. I think my main goal is to actually have like, I know y’all have seen like massage chairs in different places. I want to own a plethora of massage chairs with my logo on it, and hopefully I can get into, like, airports. So I’ma holla at you, if I can have a whole bunch of massage chairs just placed in different, like, jump zones. And I know they got some, but I just want to enter the market into, like, getting massage chairs, and y’all seeing my logo all over the place, just to go hand in hand on what I actually
David:
Well, thank you again to our panelists for their insight and inspiration tonight. Thank you to everyone here, y’all who came out tonight. Can we give a big round of applause to our panelists? And thank you to the Omega Community Development Corporation and the sponsors of this event this evening for all you do here in the Hope Zone and across our community, and for just everything you do, it’s so special.
