ORLANDO, Fla. – Experience shows that it can pay to have a business partner, but the person you choose — whether a family member, an old friend or even your former NCO — better share your dreams.
This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray interviews Denzel Mosley and Brandon McClain of the Nemiro Global Foundation administrative team.
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McClain, the Nemiro Global Foundation’s international president, described it as the social impact arm of its sister company, Nemiro. While Nemiro focuses on the movement of money as a FinTech (financial technology) platform, McClain said that the foundation seeks to use the same business model in a nonprofit space, providing direct services to minorities and veterans.
“When I got out of the military in 2018 right before the pandemic, I went to school, the world shut down and there was heavy emphasis on resources, veterans; food banks were in full swing, if you guys remember everybody every two, three times a week was getting food outside of church. Everybody needed resources everywhere, and every time I picked up the phone to call a veteran organization or the VA, the waiting times were long, resources were scarce,” McClain said. “...My father told me a long time ago if there’s a organization or business that doesn’t exist that’s doing what you need it to, then make your own. So we — me and Denzel — started volunteering, and we got into the nonprofit space together when we were in Texas.”
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Fast forwarding past the worst of the pandemic, McClain and Mosely wound up in Central Florida as Brandon applied to grad school at UCF and Denzel followed him, realizing their mindsets matched.
“I ended up meeting my fraternity brother, and he has a banking background. He started telling me about his platform and the movement of money in the minority community and he started spinning me up,” McClain said. “...There was just a lot of similarities between his endeavor and our endeavor, there was a lot of intersectionality, so we decided to merge our two business models and go after, you know, that demographic. Nonprofits and most businesses struggle because of funding, so if we can hitch a money-making apparatus to our nonprofit, not only we can generate our own revenue, but we can reinvest it in ourselves and the organizations that we partner with.”
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Mosley serves the Nemito Global Foundation as its marketing and community relations director.
Before any of this, he and McClain met as military men often do: years ago, and in character.
“Brandon was my first NCO when I joined the military, and we got the funniest story. You know, I’m in processing (...) When you in process, you really don’t have to show up to work, but you just got to check in and so I was — you know, I had my family with me — so I was in and out of the office and he needed me to come back. I didn’t answer my phone when I should have and they finally get a hold on me, I got to come back to the office. Mind you, I got basketball shorts on, tank top, gold chain on and everything, so I come into the office and he lit my ass up man, made me start doing push ups, sit ups, have me sweating,” Mosely said. “...So it was our first encounter, but after that he gradually just took leadership on me, so he’s been a mentor — I think I joined the military when I was 20 years old, I’m 29 now so I’ve known him for a while — and he’s been a mentor of mine the last 10 years of my life.”
It was that partnership that drove the pair’s success, the source of enough motivation to transplant their idea from Texas to Orlando for fresher soil, as it were.
“When he was going through his journey — grad school, moving from El Paso to here — I was doing the same thing,” Mosley said. “...Any time you want to try to, you know, take over the world or do something, it’s easy when you do with somebody, and that’s a fact, too. I try to teach it to the younger men in my life. You don’t got to do it by yourself (...) I needed that immediate mentorship and impact of being with another man, another Black man who’s gonna move with me at the same pace, and then the trust. You’re gonna get in what you put out, so I knew coming here with him would be more beneficial than than any other choice out there especially. I’m retired now too, so I had to jump, and I decided to jump with my man Brandon.”
Hear the full interview and more in Season 2, Episode 24 of “Black Men Sundays.”
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