MBA PhD

r Carlton Brown is a unique individual.

He is an academic, an entrepreneur and the host of the annual UK Black Business Entrepreneurs Conference. As author of The Black Entrepreneur Report 2021, he put his academic expertise to use by looking at the facts and shedding light on the challenges faced by Britain's Black business community.

Having delivered profitable growth for over 20 years, underpinned with over 25 years ’ in selling and sales management in FTSE100 companies, Carlton is well placed to champion this cause, doing so by bringing a pragmatic, diligent and an engaging approach. However, its not all theory and corporate as he is also an entrepreneur who, along with his wife, Marvely, runs a successful business in the luxury food space.

That extensive experience comes with the academic underpinning of an MBA and a PhD in Business which means he can understand, diagnose, prescribe and assess solutions to deliver more for us.

Tell us a little bit about your background. Who is Dr Carlton Brown?

And what's his journey to now?

When I left college, first and foremost, I wanted to be a lawyer or a social worker Those were my initial aspirations.

My father is originally from Jamaica and he wanted me to go and get a trade I said to my mother, "I don't want to get a trade, I wanted to do something entirely different, to become a lawyer or a social worker "

But neither of those things happened, and when I left college, I started to do politics I was doing my Politics and English A level and thought, "I don't want to do this "

So I went and got a job as a training manager in retail and I got a car

And I thought, life is really good and for about 5 years I became a trainee manager and eventually became a manager in retail.

After a period of time, I felt, that there was more to life than just doing what I was doing. I enjoyed it and I earned a lot of money

It was good, it was fun and I had a good social life.

But in reality it wasn't what I what I wanted.

I met my wife in in 1988 and I was looking to to do something different She was in London and they had the Evening Standard on the Thursday evening with the job sections.

I wanted to get into sales and marketing. And she said there's a job here And she helped me to do my CV. (I still have my CV for this job)

I got this job working for Rentokil, which was a large corporate doing sales and marketing and it turned out that this job actually was career defining for me and I ended up staying there for 16 years and I worked my way through from the sales and marketing right through to becoming a regional director for the South of England and Northern Ireland.

Then I got headhunted to work for another corporate and ended up being a national sales and marketing director for The Davis Group a

And then with your studies, your MBA and your PhD, were you studying for those while you were in those roles?

Well, we talk about this glass ceiling stuff where you think that you ' re in a career and things are not really happening for you and you question why. I wondered if it was because I stopped doing my A levels, because I wasn't thinking of anything nefarious at this point, I'm just thinking why is it that I'm not getting promoted within the organization. Especially since at this point I was outperforming quite a lot of my contemporaries

But yet still things weren't necessarily happening So, I thought maybe I need to go back and study again So I went back and did a post graduate Level 7 which is equivalent to a Masters degree in Leadership. Then after that I went on to do an MBA in Business starting our own washroom business

So, we did We did things such as sanitary bins, hand dryers, air fresheners, nappy units It wasn't considered a sexy business, but actually it was a very good business And so from the third floor of our wedding shop, we grew the business to a few digits and we ended up selling it.

We had about 12 staff and our single biggest client was the Canary Wharf Estate.

And I thought, let's go back and do my PhD because I'm going to go back full time now and back into consultancy at this stage

So when I'm pitching to a client I can say, well, I've got 20 odd years of corporate experience, with profit and loss responsibility having £25 million revenue with 300 members of the staff

I'm also quite academically robust. So that was the rationale for me going back into academia.

Was there an ambition for business before all of that or did it just journey its way along?

I think I've been surrounded by entrepreneurs and my mother, (bless her soul, rest in peace) she was a real matriarch

My mum ' s from Linstead in Jamaica and they didn't really go to the coast, so she would organize trips even then, they'd go to Montego Bay & Ocho Rios and she would sew clothes and sell

And then when she when she came to the UK She was the the person that did the pardner She did the coach trips to Skegness, Blackpool, Barry Island, Littlehampton all of those places

She was the one who did the dances. She got the steel bands on stage and she got a sound system. You know Jimmy Cliff, you name it That was in our house. There were Blues party in my house when my mum ' s serving curry goat and rice and peas Selling beers That was who Mama Brown was.

You've got all of these skills and you ' re now sharing it to support primarily, business and entrepreneurs, but really looking at diversity issues. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Here I was in 2017 I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a consultant and I'm a part-time academic And I'm always curious and I have that curiosity and the academic side wants to know what's going on here.

So, in 2017 I wrote a chapter in a book about corporate social responsibility and diversity within the supply chain and I'm looking at the overall cultural issues that were going on around diversity, but then we had the lockdown, and I got more into it

What was going on with Black entrepreneurs?

The data was indicating that if we want to grow our business, we need funding We were the least likely to get access to funding In that case access to finance was an issue.

We had lack of mentorship. We had lack of social capital; that is a lack of access to people, resources and opportunities. So there were lots of systemic and structural things that were not happening to us specifically as it happens to other communities.

But when we started to drill down and get underneath, Black and African Caribbean diaspora (BACD) were the most affected, so there were so many disparities in wealth creation. Similarly, even when we finish university, we were 25% more likely to earn less than our counterparts who have just completed their same degrees. Only 36% of Black people, African Caribbean diaspora owned properties in the UK So, if you look at education, you think about poverty, you think about health outcomes, there are so many structural and systemic issues going on within our community and I was just fascinated, particularly about entrepreneurship I think if we need to get out of that particular situation, we have to do something differently for ourselves. How do we do that?

I think access to the supply chain is one of those areas in which we can do that

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Just go drill down into that and explain the opportunity for us and why accessing the supply chain is so important?

So if you think about it this way. Dr Glenn Laman, who wrote a book called, ‘Jamaican Entrepreneurship, said that there are two reasons why people go into business or become entrepreneurs. One is about out of necessity and one is about opportunity.

And I think when we think of ourselves. As a culture, as a community, often we don't have the opportunity So, we do things out of necessity, because we have to We have to make things happen.

And we are innovative. And what I also discovered in the research was that Black and African Caribbean people are 8% more likely to be more innovative than other counterparts and other ethnicities

So, if you think about business and entrepreneurship, it's about innovation It's about solving problems. And if you ' ve got a group of people that are innovative and creative, you know they're going to solve problems for you, they’re going to come up with new ideas, ideas you may not be accustomed to

Therefore, entrepreneurship is a key thing for us. It's about getting access to those opportunities

With that in mind, I looked at the disparities in access to opportunities. The public sector spends about £2 9 billion per annum in procurement Within the SME markets (small medium enterprises), ethnic minorities represent 16% of the market.

But yet still only less than 1% of the expenditure from that 2.9 billion goes to ethnic minority businesses

So that's why we think it's really important that we look at the supply chain and how we get access to those supply chains

And that's exactly what you ' re doing on the 13th of July - hosting the Black Business Entrepreneurs Conference in London. What can we expect?

Well, first of all, it's just coming together of our community and that's really important and having that opportunity to network. But equally important is sharing success stories because often we learn from what we see vicariously.

It's all well and good as talking about Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and all of those individuals, but they're very successful entrepreneurs in this country, which are Black, African, Caribbean, so let's celebrate them and let them share their stories with us. So you'll hear stories which are often untold

Secondly, we have great speakers talking about entrepreneurship, so people like Lord Michael Hastings will be one of the speakers Eric Collins will be one of the speakers this year, as he was last year.

We also want to understand our history in terms of entrepreneurship As Marcus Garvey once said, “A man who doesn't know his history is like a tree without roots”

So, we also have David Olusoga, who will be talking about the history of Black entrepreneurship in the UK,

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We also have a women empowerment room, because if you ' re an entrepreneur, you ' re more likely to be female

In our study, The Black Entrepreneur Report, 58% of our cohorts were female. When the Federation of Small Business did their study on entrepreneurship, they recognized it was 52% So, females are really important and integral because they very much lead the way on entrepreneurship, and we have sessions on Women Empowerment When I go back and think about my mother, I think about my wife, they're all entrepreneurs

I think about my mother-in-law They were matriarchs, they were entrepreneurial. There are lots of female journeys to be told

And our third room we have what we ’ re calling Pitch for Success. The whole thrust, is to give us access to opportunities So, Tesco's will be there, a buyer from Selfridges, a buyer from a UK wholesaler called Cotswold Fayre, The Black Farmer, in his capacity as The Hatchery and we also have Wakuda, which is a black online Amazon platform in the UK

So people will have the opportunity to pitch for real life opportunities.

That's really, really important for us to be able to say, "Here are real life opportunities."