Go.Be. is a growth accelerator in southeast Louisiana. The company focuses on helping businesses “go beyond,” or succeed in the growth stage.
In this interview, former Executive Director Hermione Malone shares Go.Be.’s mission shift, its name change, and the realities of doing business in the region.
What is Go.Be.’s origin story?
Go.Be. was started in 2001 by a woman named Phyllis Cassidy. She was a CPA and an accounting instructor, and small business owners would often come to her with accounting questions. The more she worked with these business owners, the more she realized they could probably use a little bit more than accounting help. That was the birth of what was then called the Good Work Network.
For a lot of its history, the Good Work Network focused on supporting microenterprises: the target market was super-early-stage mom-and-pop businesses, mostly brick and mortar, often lifestyle businesses. These kinds of businesses are critical to a community. Then came Hurricane Katrina. Phyllis saw an opportunity to take a lot of the same resources she was using to help microenterprises and apply them across the board to get other businesses back on their feet.
I came to the Good Work Network in 2016. I wanted to learn as much as I could about Black entrepreneurship in New Orleans. Entrepreneurship is a linchpin in creating wealth, much more than going to work every day and collecting a paycheck. And there is a massive wealth gap between White families and Black families in New Orleans and across the country.
It turns out the city has an extraordinarily rich history of Black business; but there was this interesting dynamic. With the exception of a handful of families – which everyone in town knows – Black businesses would rarely pass down generations. Someone might start a successful business, but their son or daughter would not take it over and instead start a whole separate business. So, you’d see families where the common thread was entrepreneurship, but there was not a continuing growth in value or wealth created.
I wanted to figure out how we could tap into that rich history of entrepreneurship but do so in a way that would create wealth from generation to generation.
In 2017, our team at Good Work Network got to work on a strategic plan. We found that in our market of Southeast Louisiana, there were so many resources for startups generally, but fewer resources for people who had started a business and were struggling to continue the business’s growth trajectory.
So, we decided to focus on that. We renamed the organization Go.Be. in 2021, as a shorthand for “Go Beyond.” Our vision was to work with people who had already done the really hard work of building something, and who had bright visions of what that business could ultimately be. We viewed our work as a leg up in that desire to go beyond startup to success.
How does Go.Be. work?
At the center of our work is a tool called a Growth Wheel, which is a way of looking at a business across 20 specific areas of focus. We begin with every client by asking them to evaluate themselves on the wheel: How strong are you in areas A, B, and C? The idea is to start with what they perceive to be their strongest assets, most urgent needs and their areas of greatest opportunity from a business growth and development standpoint.
Ninety percent of our time and effort is spent on one-on-one coaching. We also offer a program called Level Up!, a three-month program that prepares high-potential, minority-owned businesses for accelerated growth and expansion. By the time business owners get to the end of the program, they have a complete growth strategy plan to propel and grow their business for the next couple of years.
We've seen this strategy work to great effect here in the New Orleans market, where you have storms that can disrupt a business significantly for a period of weeks or months. We've also seen this work well for people during the COVID-19 pandemic, where they could use their strategy to think really clearly, and not reflexively, about what they're doing with their business. We’ve already had a lot of clients who said Had I not taken this class before COVID-19 struck, I’m really not sure what state my business would be in right now.
For instance, we had one client who owned a childcare business. Pre-COVID, she saw that the market demand for her service was growing; but according to state law, you can only have so many kids in one space. So as we worked with her through Level Up!, we helped her come to the conclusion that she needed to open a second location, and to do the calculations around what she needed from a real estate perspective, in terms of a supply pipeline, and the volume of parent clients that she would need to launch a new location.
Then COVID-19 hit. Childcare was one of the trickiest industries to navigate during that time. Putting a bunch of kids from different households into one workplace was really challenging. But she had mapped out her growth plan already. So, she focused her attention on mastering COVID safety protocols in the first location, and then that gave her the confidence to open the second one. Although a lot of childcare centers were closing, she was not only able to keep hers open, but added a second location. She was successful because everything had been thought out and accounted for with the help of Go.Be.
What is Go.Be.’s long-term vision?
Our vision is a diverse, equitable, inclusive economy that ensures entrepreneurs of color and women's small businesses have equal opportunity to grow and to create sustainable intergenerational wealth.
Since the beginning of Go.Be.’s existence, we’ve served close to 3,000 businesses and created or sustained 2,200 jobs. Last year, we served 106 clients: 87% were women and 96%? were entrepreneurs of color. Historically, our clients have largely come from Southeast Louisiana Orleans parish and Jefferson parish. Last year, we were able to grow our client base to include businesses across 11 different states. Louisiana still represents the majority, but we are seeing interest from folks outside of the region.
Our goal for our companies is that they go beyond survival. We want them to go beyond this notion of bootstrapping – we want them to thrive. We want them to go beyond others' expectations of them. We want them to go beyond limitations that even their friends and family may have set for them.
I remember an entrepreneur telling me Look, I've been down this road before: y'all come up with these diversity initiatives and the city does this, that or whatever, and ultimately it doesn't change anything.
But I think the more of us who are committed to doing the work — the Resource cohort is such a good example — there are such amazing organizations that are trying to remove barriers and create access and opportunity for people… So, if folks can even go beyond the limitations of what is “for them,” that would be amazing.