ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray interviews Ty Woods, a serial entrepreneur, business coach and consultant who specializes in grants and wants to use her expertise to lift up small-business owners.
Asked about what got her into the grant game, Woods described humble beginnings.
“Being broke motivated a lot of things,” she said. “I always tell people, before you start your business, if you can work in the industry before you actually go out into the business, you will get free or paid- I call it ‘paid training.’ So I was working for the Boys and Girls Clubs and a couple of other nonprofits before that, but the last one that I worked at, the Boys and Girls Clubs, I was an executive director by that time. (...) I started learning about how the Boys and Girls Clubs was also winning all this money because they had, like, a $20 million budget, and I was like, ‘What?’ (...) For some programs I’m like, ‘ They’re not even doing nothing with this program,’ I know because I was working there and we wasn’t really doing a lot with those kids at that time and they was getting millions of dollars of funding. I’m like, ‘We can do way better than this,’ so I started learning about grant writing while I was working there, listening to the grant conversations or reviewing the grant applications as they submitted, and then the last big job that I did before I left, the big task was I helped them with was a $2.5 million grant that they won. So I was like, ‘OK, I can do this now. I could do this on my own now,’ and I started writing the grants for our organization and little by little, we started winning.”
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Woods is launching an initiative called “One Million, One Billion,” which strives to help 1 million small-business owners acquire $1 billion in grant funding. She said that it would be the vision moving forward for BusinessGrants.com, of which she recently became the new CEO.
“It’s about having, ‘What’s my vision statement?’ My vision statement for BusinessGrants.com is this division; 1 million small businesses, we will help them secure over $1 billion worth of funding. That’s the vision I see. Now, how are we going to get there? That’s the plan. We’re working it out, we’re working it out. But you need to have at least a vision statement,” she said.
Hear the full interview and more in Season 6, Episode 3 of “Black Men Sundays.”
Black Men Sundays talks about building generational wealth. Check out every episode in the media player below.