The Art of the Entrepreneur

Carmen Jones turned her personal knowledge of disability into a tool to help corporations market products, services, and jobs to people with disabilities.

By Rob Ingraham

Carmen Jones says getting a mentor, in or outside the disability community, is essential to gaining insight into business success.

After ten years in operation, it’s probably safe to say that Carmen D. Jones and her company, Solutions Marketing Group based in Arlington, Virginia, have succeeded. Jones attributes part of this success to a very supportive spouse and the fact that, “I didn’t know what I didn’t know.”

“I wish I had formulas and models to offer, but it’s probably not in my nature anyway,” Jones says. “If I had adhered to all these business principles and checked it out against the Harvard Business Journal or something I would never have done it.” Further, much of what fuels an entrepreneur may seem, to an outsider, like an almost mystical certainty. “This really was something that I believed I was born to do.”

Reorientation

Jones sustained a T-12—L-1 spinal cord injury in a car accident during her junior year of college and spent 6 months of rehabilitation reorienting to life with paraplegia. “Before my accident I might have had some entrepreneurial glimmers, but it was never something that I knew I wanted to do,” she said. The revelation came after she had been working at Evan Kemp & Associates as a vice president of marketing for its durable medical equipment and van conversion division for a few years.

An ideal mentor, Evan Kemp, who contracted a rare form of muscular dystrophy as a child, founded Washington, DC-based Evan Kemp & Associates in 1993 after serving as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President George H. W. Bush. He was one of the primary architects of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and also helped establish Invacareâ„¢, a company that later became one of the largest manufacturers of wheelchairs in the world.

“I’m black and I’m a woman,” Jones says, “and while I know that companies targeted me in both of those categories, they weren’t targeting me as a consumer with a disability. Once I reflected on that, I realized that they’re really missing an opportunity. If companies have to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act anyway, why not take the opportunity to build and obtain additional business? To sum it up, SMG was born out of seeing a need—companies were not reaching our community.”

“Starting out, I really was winging it,” she continues. “There weren’t any loans; my husband pretty much carried our household. I withdrew some money from an investment club and that was really the seed money for the business. What worked in my favor in the beginning was that my first client was American Express. If you want a good first client, American Express is the one because it lent a lot of credibility when I went to other companies.”

A Large Mission

SMG believes that part of its mission is to transform the culture. “My company’s focus is on reaching mainstream companies to have them include people with disabilities in the diversity equation. Initially, it was solely focused on marketing but, in helping companies, employment is a critical link in our service delivery. What my company has evolved to is really helping to transform the culture and part of that is having employees with disabilities who work there.”

Jones targets a common weakness in companies that attempt to help firms market to, or hire, people with disabilities. “The thing that I’ve discovered is that you really have to understand business. The driver for a business is how much money they’re going to make. It’s not all corporate social responsibility, it’s not all philanthropy. It’s really how much money they’re going to make, and I think that’s a paradigm shift for our community.”

She said the hardest part of her business is getting companies to understand that people with disabilities are part of the larger world of diversity. “They may be phenomenal in diversity, they may have won awards, and they ‘get’ diversity. But for some reason there’s this disconnect with disability. For example, there’s a company where I’ve been doing awareness training for employees and I’ve been doing it three or four times a year since 2003. And only within the past 6 months have they created an employee networking group. And this is a company that has federal contracts—they even have a chief diversity officer—and they’re regularly featured in Diversity Inc., and they’re only just getting it. And that’s frustrating.” Jones added that “There aren’t enough people who are disabled in the company that can be the voice inside the company. I think black people and other minority groups and the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) segment have made strides because people were in the company rattling the cage.

“Everything has been an evolution. When I started, I came armed with my marketing experience that I primarily got at Evan Kemp and I thought we’d be an ad agency that helps companies develop the services and the products and the messaging for the segment. All the services I’ve added that go beyond typical ad agency work—like market research, strategic direction, training and education, grass roots communications-those were things that I never initially thought we would include. A lot of the services, especially the training and education, were born out of our experience. I saw that if the culture was going to be impacted, we had to impact more than just the diversity department or the marketing department.”

SMG has a somewhat unorthodox business structure whereby Jones is the sole full-time employee and recruits a variety of other consultants that she handpicks for each different project. “I have a group of subcontractors that work with me and they assist as their ability permits and as the project permits.” Jones works from home and has no immediate plans to rent office space and hire regular employees. “Right now it seems to work because we have the benefit of having people devote full time to a project without having to deal with all the employment-related issues and it gives them the freedom to work on other projects. I like the fl exibility I have working for myself because it allows me to go on field trips with my children and to work around certain things. If people want that same sort of flexibility then it creates a win-win.”

Lightning Strikes Twice

Three years into building her new company, Jones’ life took yet another unexpected turn; she gave birth to a child with a disability. “Lightning has struck twice in our home,” as she describes it. “In 2001 I had my first child and my son had signifi cant medical problems. He spent about a year in the hospital. He had a myriad of issues that we still deal with now, but back then it was the day-to-day experience of wondering whether he would live.” She explained that the boy was developmentally delayed and required the use of a trachea tube. “During that time frame, I really didn’t think I could do work and do family and keep things afloat. The business was unofficially on hold. I had some clients that I maintained, and I pretty much stayed in town and worked from here. I couldn’t travel because his health was critical.”

Asked to describe the personal strengths that have contributed to her success, she said, “The God-inspired belief of knowing that this is what I was born to do and recognizing that, in some
small way, I provide a voice for a segment that goes unrecognized by companies.”

She also noted that “an ability to manage relationships” has been important. “A lot of my business is built on relationships. If you have a good experience with one client, they will refer you to another client. It provides additional opportunities.”

Another strength is “my personal experience as a person with a disability and also the mother of a child with a disability. It can be very lonely to have a child with a disability because you have friends with kids of the same age and you start comparing. And I never ‘got’ that before. So, from that perspective, my son has helped my business, because there’s another whole segment of people I can bring to companies.”

Advice for Others

Regarding advice to budding entrepreneurs in the disability community, Jones said, “Get a mentor, in or out of the disability community, because you want to gain insight and have a sounding board from someone who you respect. I’d also suggest reading as much as you can.” She cited two business books that had a significant effect on her approach: U R a Brand! How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success by Catherine Kaputa (Davis-Black Publishing, 2006, ISBN-13-978-0891062134) and
Value-Based Fees: How to Charge and Get What You’re Worth by Alan Weiss (Pfeiffer, 2002, ISBN-13: 978-0787955113).

Jones explained that reading encouraged her to look at how she presented herself. “It requires some hard-core self-examination: How you talk. How you present yourself. You have to open yourself up to criticism. Ask a friend, ‘How do I come across?’ ‘Do I seem knowledgeable?’ You are the only thing that you’re going to present. You are the only person doing it and if you don’t have a tight presentation that’s going to speak volumes to the company.”

“I would also advise people that, when you have a business, it’s your reputation that’s on the line, and not to take that lightly. Let your word be your bond, operate with integrity.”

Rob Ingraham is senior editor.