40 | THE VOICE MAY 2023
News Feature
Being young, Black and female is my superpower Entrepreneur Bianca Miller-Cole on her business journey, and how she’s giving back. By Vic Motune
T
HE STRANGE thing about BBC hit show The Apprentice is that it ends just as the real story begins. It’s one thing completing business tasks assigned by Lord Sugar in front of a camera for the hit TV show. But it’s quite another to launch a profitable business from scratch. But that’s something former contestant Bianca Miller-Cole has proved she can do with great success. While millions of TV viewers remember the calmness under pressure and determination that took her to the final of the 2014 series, it often surprises people to learn she was already an accomplished entrepreneur before appearing on the show. Miller-Cole was still only in her early 20s when she founded The Be Group, a company that provides personal branding consultations to professionals at different stages of their careers. The business now has an impressive list of clients including HSBC, Accenture, Facebook, Google and BT to name a few. Finishing runner-up on The Apprentice, as Miller-Cole did, might be viewed as a disappointment for some contestants — they miss out on a £250,000 investment from Lord Sugar. But it made little difference to her seemingly unstoppable progress towards becoming the successful businesswoman that she
SUPPORT: Bianca MillerCole has mentored over 500 entrepreneurs (photo: Saagorph Photography); below, with husband Byron with whom she has co-authored two successful books (photo: Getty Images)
is today. The idea she pitched to Lord Sugar during the final — a hosiery brand with a diverse range of skin tones — became a reality when the Bianca Miller London hosiery range launched online in November 2015, and then with Topshop and the Morleys Group in 2017. Although she says she enjoyed The Apprentice, and only realised after it was broadcast what a big deal it was to be the only Black woman in the final, she struggled with the aftermath of being perceived as a reality TV celebrity. “That was not what I wanted,” she recalled. “I wanted to be perceived as a serious business person. So I almost had to rebrand and remind people that I had a business two and a half years before I went on The Apprentice. I’m not just a reality TV person, I’m actually an entrepreneur.”
PROJECT
Her latest business project is one that is particularly close to her heart. Miller-Cole is expanding her product range with a new skincare solution called Hian Skin aimed at busy women struggling with issues such as hyperpigmentation, fine lines, dark marks, anti-ageing, skin imbalance, and skin texture. What makes this launch different from previous ones is her decision to document every
stage of the process and turn it into a YouTube series called From The Ground Up: Building A New Business. The series, which includes episodes on building a social media presence for a new product, display advertising, and developing a sales strategy, is aimed at aspiring entrepreneurs who may be still hesitant about setting up their own companies. “I think what often happens is that entrepreneurs often don’t share the journey of how a business is created until it’s successful,” she says. “The ups and downs are never shared. So I wanted to create a video diary of what it’s like to create a new brand. “I was approached by Fiverr to work with them on a project but I pitched them this idea instead. I suggested we use expert freelancers on their platform to help me build this new brand and showcase how anyone can use Fiverr to build a business. Thankfully they loved the idea. “For me it’s about sharing as much as I can so that people who are nervous about starting a business can feel encouraged like they can do it too.” The encouragement of her entrepreneurial drive she got at a young age from family members
was pivotal to her later success. As a five-year-old she would sell her paintings to anyone who would buy them, which on most occasions would be her parents. As a 12-year-old she turned her love of dance into a business by launching a dance school. And by the time she was 17, she was organising under 18s parties and earning herself a decent profit. “I grew up in an entrepreneurial household with parents who ran their own businesses,” she recalls. “My dad was involved in property, while my mum was a selfemployed makeup artist for who worked with musicians such as So Solid Crew and Mis-Teeq and on TV shows such as Ant and Dec. Growing up around parents who didn’t have non-traditional nine-to-five jobs meant that I was exposed to entrepreneurship from an early age. “But even though the desire to set up my own business was always there my parents definitely wanted me to go to university, so I happily obliged and I was the first in my family to do so.” After obtaining a degree in Business and Management Studies, Bianca accepted a role as a Human Resources People Advisor for Accenture in 2010. It was this role that provided
the inspiration for the launch of The Be Group. “I was tasked with preparing graduates for promotion and helping them to find heir goals” she recalls. “But I soon noticed that, even though many of them were academically intelligent, they struggled with understanding how their personal brand, which involves things like networking, communication skills, and dressing appropriately, can influence their career prospects.”
CHALLENGES
Like many entrepreneurs she faced a number of challenges during the early years of the business. “As a young black woman who probably sounded a lot older than I was on the phone, I’d turn up to meetings and people would be very surprised. I couldn’t work out if it was because of my gender, my race or my age. They’d ask ‘you’re going to instruct our directors on how to build their personal brand?’” She continues: “I remember speaking to my dad and saying, ‘this is hard, it’s not going to work’. And he said, ‘Bianca, you are young, Black, and female, that is your reality.’ But
then he gave me a list of other qualities I had; he told me I was intelligent, knowledgeable, confident, and so on. He then asked ‘What are you going to do about it?’ And that’s when I suddenly realised that being young, Black and female was part of my superpower.” Now, as a successful entrepreneur and motivational speaker, she has mentored over 500 entrepreneurs, helping them scale their enterprise to six and sevenfigure profits. Most recently her passion for helping others has taken her along a new path as a critically acclaimed author. After co-authoring two critically acclaimed books with her husband Byron, a third, Rich Forever, is due out in October. “The book will focus not only on how people can build their financial well-being, but create generational wealth. “Unfortunately, we in the Black community are not as tapped into some of the steps we should be taking to ensure that all the work we are doing, and our parents did, is actually going to work for us in the long term, and for the next generation. It’s really important for us to focus in on how we build sustainable wealth.”
