Miss Jessie's

by Miko Branch

  The prosperity was sudden. We went from making do to being picked up from Poughkeepsie at the end of one summer in Daddy’s black four-door Mercedes-Benz. It was sharp and made him look even more like a million dollars. We took our first family vacations to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Redondo Beach in California. Our apartment in Queens even got a face-lift. Our mother chose a well-designed and expensive black modular couch, brushed silver plush carpet, and exotic tall plants placed along windows accented with Levelor blinds. We bought new dishes and silverware, and our father treated himself to an expensive stereo system with a Technics turntable, an Akai receiver, and powerfully clear speakers that played his music morning, noon, and night. He especially loved Frankie Beverly and Maze, Alexander O’Neal, and retro albums like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On?

  Titi was reaching college age and wasn’t decisive about which school to attend. I urged her to consider the University of Maryland. It wasn’t for the usual reasons, like academic excellence. The school caught my attention when I saw all of the excitement about Len Bias, who played on their college basketball team and was considered by many to be one of the greatest amateur players in the history of the sport. Everyone was buzzing about the University of Maryland because he had just been drafted to the Boston Celtics. I thought my sister could get a college education and not miss home too much because, for that reason alone, it seemed like a cool school.

  We both got out of Queens and went to college. At Maryland, Titi studied consumer economics. I attended junior college upstate, at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, New York, where I studied liberal arts. By that time it was safe to say we were looking for a fresher, more wholesome perspective on life—too many people in our world were dying.

  Being away from Queens gave us a healthy dose of self-awareness and self-esteem. Always pegged as “the dumb one” by our father, I began acing my courses. Being away from Daddy’s constant criticism inspired me to do well for myself, and I flourished in that environment. Titi the rebel also knuckled down, rediscovering her giant intellect and diving into the kind of formal education that could bring her closer to her dream of becoming a businesswoman.

  Then things took a turn. While Titi was away and I was in my last year of high school, the real estate market had crashed and, symbolically, our dad’s Mercedes got totaled. It wasn’t long before Daddy started reasserting his influence and direction. When we came back to Queens for the summer, he decided it was time for us to be put back to work. Not only did we have to get our real estate licenses to help him sell properties; the three of us needed to go into the cleaning business together.

  Well, not together, exactly. For Daddy, our going into the family business meant free labor for him. He filed the incorporation papers on Branch Cleaning Agency while we rolled up our sleeves and went to work. It was his way of making sure we didn’t have to work for other people. For our father, it was all about controlling his own destiny. Independence meant everything to Daddy, even if he had to sacrifice income and start all over again. It was how he was raised by Miss Jessie, who took fierce pride in being accountable to herself and never having to answer to a boss. This way, she never had to compromise her values.

  Titi and I didn’t question it. We thought, How hard could this be? We were no strangers to cleaning and always put our backs into it. We couldn’t imagine the cleaning supplies costing too much, either. We were up for the job if it meant that we would be part of a successful business with our father.

  ELBOW GREASE

  The agency occupied a small room in his real estate business, which was located in a building that he owned on Rockaway Boulevard in Queens. Titi and I scored Branch Cleaning Agency’s first job after canvassing Main Street in Flushing. The job was to deep-clean a dirty and unlivable two-story beach house in the Rockaways, top to bottom, for just forty dollars per floor. We scrubbed disgusting thick mildew in between tiles, cleaned mold and unfamiliar growths out of a refrigerator, scoured a rust-brown ring and film from a toilet bowl, purged out the urine smell that had seeped into the grout on the dirty tile floor. It was nasty, but the two of us worked our butts off and had that place sparkling clean. After we calculated time, gas, cleaning supplies, and labor, we realized we weren’t left with much.

  In the fall, Titi couldn’t wait to go back to college, because Branch Cleaning Agency was hard work, although she did feel somewhat guilty about leaving me to carrying the load. “You gonna be all right?” she asked me.

  I told her I’d be fine. I didn’t feel I had much of a choice. If I gave up so easily, my father would see me as a failure, and I could not bear the idea of him placing me into a category of people who liked to work for others (even though I was effectively working for him). This wasn’t just about living up to my father’s expectations. Making the enterprise a success was about my own pride and dreams for my future as a successful and independent businesswoman.

  By then my entrepreneurial fire was burning bright, and I was determined to make it work. Eager to present myself in a more professional way and no longer choosing to work on the cheap, I designed a brochure for Branch Cleaning Agency and created the service menu for our business. I learned how to lay out this art by working part-time with my mother’s graphic designer friends—a job I took to supplement my nonexistent income from our family business. I went door-to-door, handing out fliers in higher-income neighborhoods around Queens and Manhattan, and negotiated prices. It was all on me, because Daddy did not take this business seriously at the time; he was more preoccupied with reviving his real estate business.

  Learning lessons from prior mistakes, I brought in cleaning jobs that ranged in price from three to four hundred dollars. At this point, it was all about knowing the value of my work. I had no intention of laboring for hours alone in some four-room house or office building for peanuts. My initiative drew the attention of my father. He saw that there was money to be made. Ever domineering, he stepped in and started telling me how business was supposed to be run. “Do this and do that! Don’t do this and don’t do that!” he would tell me. In this case Daddy was a great armchair CEO, but it wasn’t going to fly this time, because I was the one who had to do all of the work. “Dad, I got this. Just let me do things this way—it works,” I pleaded.

  But he wouldn’t listen. He kept coming in, trying to run things, and he was doing a masterful job of taking over, even though it was hardly helping the business.

  I was frustrated. My success in college had given me a renewed sense of confidence, bolstered by all that I’d already accomplished in the Branch Cleaning Agency. I knew how to make money, and I did not agree with Daddy’s direction, so we bumped heads all the time. I stood up for myself against the most intimidating alpha male I’d ever known, my father.

  Challenging life experiences make you a better business leader.

  Contrary to the image I had of my father as a businessman, I was beginning to realize that he was not, in fact, the kind of businessman I wanted to emulate. He made money only to lose it again. He invested unwisely and missed all kinds of opportunities. He overspent and took too many risks. All too often his free-spirited approach to making a dollar lacked the necessary planning and organizational skills, which ultimately got in the way of his business sense. He had so much debt that our business had nothing to show for all the hard work. It was frustrating, and I felt defeated.

  I saw the path I needed to take, and it went in the opposite direction from my father’s footsteps. This was the first time I had a sense of who I was as a businesswoman. I knew what was true and what was not. Suddenly, I had an opinion about the manner in which I would operate a business on my own.

  BUTTING HEADS

  Not that Daddy was about to fold any time soon. He could be stubborn. Even though I was the one who had created the cleaning-business model from soup to nuts, Daddy would frequently take over my accounts, presuming he was in charge of the business I’d been building. He would negotiate lower prices with cl
ients, undermining my pricing system. Too often he would spend money on supplies at a job site that would cut our cleaning income by half. Even though he thought he was doing the right thing, his actions infuriated me. I was doing all the manual work and getting the jobs, and he was blowing it.

  This father/daughter tension dragged on for months. I could no longer abide Daddy’s “pretty and dumb” insults. I knew I had earned my position as a valuable player. Determined to prove my father wrong, I went out and got more accounts at even higher prices. I’d caught the entrepreneurial bug and was making the point that my time and service were worth something. As a result, the business was succeeding, but every dime went into the debt that our father owed: parking tickets, mortgage payments, rent, utilities, and so on. We saw no light in this situation.

  I became a prisoner of the business. Just twenty years old, I endured for no financial reward while missing out on my youth. I was completely cut off from all the fun our friends were having, partying and socializing. Culturally, times were changing; we were coming out of a Teddy Riley New Jack Swing era into a more grassroots, bohemian, open-minded and Afrocentric approach to rap and music. People traded in their gold chains and started wearing wooden beads. The Native Tongues—which included the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, and Monie Love, had become the sound of our generation. The music and culture were becoming more socially conscious and intellectual, and I was eager to be a part of them.

  Understand the sacrifices as well as the rewards of becoming an entrepreneur.

  The summer following the founding of our family business, Titi came home from school for good. What my sister saw shocked her, and looking at old pictures from that moment in time, I can understand why. I looked sad and worn out, with barely a flicker of spirit behind my eyes. Within a year, I’d gone from a trendsetting fashion plate to someone who lived in a cleaning uniform and sneakers. I even gained weight, turning to food to deal with the stress. Titi barely recognized her once cute and feisty baby sister.

  “Miko, what happened to you? Why do you look like that?” she asked me when she walked in the door.

  Seeing my older sister, ally and protector again, I felt a wave of relief. When you’re building up a business, you can get so deep into it that you start believing it’s all there is. But Titi reminded me there was a whole other world out there and that I was no longer alone in this.

  REUNITED

  We were a team again—a sister act. We fought with our father every day until we’d finally had enough. We left the business, which he eventually dissolved. By then, our parents had divorced and our father had moved out of the apartment. It was just me and my big sister, and it felt good to take charge of our lives. We were young women with our own ideas, more than capable of looking after ourselves.

  We valued what he’d taught us, including how not to be in business. Working with our father showed us that it was possible to build something of our own. He gave us the opportunity to run a business. It wasn’t in our name, nor was it something I would have chosen for a long-term career, but it sowed the seeds of self-esteem and ambition in me. It put us on a path.

  I got clear on something else: I needed to have an all-consuming passion for the business I hoped to build. Being an entrepreneur requires long, hard hours, and I would need to wake up every morning excited to do all that was necessary to make it succeed.

  To that end, I enrolled in FIT’s fashion and design program, a field in which I felt I could excel. It was time to unleash my creativity. Daddy’s lessons on maintaining financial independence were ringing in my ears. I worked while I studied, taking temp jobs as a receptionist to pay my portion of the rent. Titi landed a position as an assistant to the news director at WABC.

  You can be short on many things in business and still succeed, but you can’t ever be short on passion.

  Titi and I were finally coming into our own.

  Four

  YOUNG, GIFTED, AND BLACK-OWNED

  You seem to be connected to

  some universal creative stream.

  —KAREN AKEMI MATSUMOTO (MOM)

  I’ve always had a good sense of when to change gears, and I knew it was time for us to get out of Queens, where things were continuing their downhill slide. For over a year, all Titi and I had been doing was working to pay the rent on a building our father owned in Rockaway, and it wasn’t exactly conducive to socializing. It was 1991, and I was going to school at FIT and doing temp jobs all over town while Titi was working in the city. Where we were living required a long commute to the places we needed to be.

  Know when it’s time to make a change. Be alert to the right moment for making a leap, because nothing holds you back more than clinging to the safety of the status quo.

  When I was seventeen, I started hanging out in Brooklyn. I went to a place called Cellars in Clinton Hill a few times. I was exposed to the beauty of the area and could see we were missing out on a whole other life. Something about the place made a lasting impression on me. One morning, over breakfast, I mentioned it to my sister. “Titi, we need to change it up. Most of our friends have moved on, and there’s nothing for us here. We need to be in Brooklyn! Those neighborhoods are beautiful. They’ve got brownstones, tree-lined blocks, and culture.”

  “You really think that’s where we should be? Well, okay, if that’s what you want, I’ll get us there.”

  Titi made me feel good because she valued my opinions. When she made a move, it was always based on my input. She would take that direction, then follow through with her own thorough research—the executor of my vision.

  A few days after that conversation, my sister arranged for us to look at all kinds of apartments in Brooklyn. We had our hearts set on Fort Greene, which was ground zero for the hip crowd, but the rents were out of our reach. This was good in a way, because once again, it forced us to be a little outside of things—keeping us on the other side of the Flatbush Avenue divide. Our Atlantic Avenue loft was warm, spacious, and inviting, with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and exposed brick walls in every room. Even better, the rent was nine hundred dollars a month, something we could just about afford. Titi occupied the large master bedroom with the walk-in closet, and I slept in the small room to the right. Our father was nice enough to sand and refinish our wood floors, and we furnished it with affordable but stylish IKEA furniture. Adding a few thrift store finds we restored ourselves, we created our first real home—a place that felt like it was truly ours.

  WELCOME TO BROOKLYN!

  We loved our new neighborhood. Brooklyn, in the early phase of its gentrification, was becoming a hive of creativity and entrepreneurship, especially for young African-Americans, with celebrities, media types, and artists calling the streets home. As far as I was concerned, Spike Lee put this community on the map with films like She’s Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, and Mo’ Better Blues, which featured the borough of Brooklyn as a main character and highlighted how beautiful it was. This was a place rich in culture and history that sparked the imagination. Celebrity encounters were typical. In Brooklyn, extraordinary things could happen at any given moment. I even met Mike Tyson while walking my black chow chow, Rheggi Bear. We were in the right place at the right time.

  While Queens was the place where we absorbed music influences and honed our street smarts, Brooklyn was the place that refined us, helping us to become more worldly young women. In fact, living in Brooklyn was what prepared Titi and me to brazenly start our own business. The people around us were having a huge impact on how we viewed ourselves, making us realize what was possible. We witnessed the emergence of the gifted black entrepreneur (GBE), including such local talent as Salif Cisse, co-owner of the Senegalese restaurant Keur N’Deye on Fulton Street, hat designer and vendor Ray Hands, and storefront designer Moshood, who specialized in African clothing. Especially noteworthy among this group was Adolmole Mandella, owner of Kinnaps, who not only blazed a trail for natural hair, but also personified the B
rooklyn Renaissance. He was one of the first to package this Brooklyn movement of ownership and black pride through branding. We used to see various people walking the streets of Brooklyn in the famous branded black on black leather varsity jacket with the Kinnaps logo emblazoned on the back. It was a wonderful reference point for brand building while creating Miss Jessie’s.

  These innovators were proud, doing business on their terms. They were repackaging their own culture and making it chic, desirable, and accessible to everyone. Black culture was being commercialized. We loved the fact that they were young, like us, and lived in close proximity. Having peers and neighbors who were such movers and shakers made us feel like we could do it, too.

  Inspiration is all around you. Believe that if others can do it, you can, too.

  There was a positive energy to the streets, and that electricity seemed to crackle every time we stepped outside. Besides Mike Tyson, we had popular rappers like Jay-Z, who would drive through the neighborhood in his white four-door Lexus, and Lord Jamar of the hip-hop group Brand Nubian, who lived around the corner on State Street. We also had “Jesse,” from the soap opera All My Children. They were part of the fabric of the neighborhood. Bohemian Brooklyn was burgeoning, and Titi and I were bumping into all kinds of what we called “BOOMers” (Black-Owned and-Operated Media)—progressive, entrepreneurial, and fearless individuals who gave us something to aspire to. Suddenly, we were mixing it up with this successful, artsy crowd, circulating in the galleries, at poetry readings, and along the shop fronts of this cool section of New York City we now called home.