Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, the entrepreneurial spirit was implanted early in the life of Danielle McGee.
“My mother really instilled in me being able to go out and make things happen for yourself and equipped me with the skills to be able to do that, but my father really instilled in me how important it was to have a hustle and to have hustle about yourself to be able to go out and make something happen. So, me and one of my closest friends growing up started a dog-walking service when we were 11 or 12. We would go around the neighborhood asking people if we could walk their dogs because we just wanted to make some money. Me and her came from households that didn’t have a whole lot of money. So, to make our own money to go to the store of go to the mall was important to us.”
She would grow up in Chicago to have a spa for five years as one of her entrepreneurial endeavors, but when she was accepting a job transfer to Nashville, she was ready to move on from that field.
“When I moved to Nashville, I really decided to focus on my career in and step back out of entrepreneurship.”
While entrepreneurship wasn’t an immediate thing Danielle wanted to pursue here in the Music City, it eventually found her. And after she attended and taught a class that ignited her entrepreneurial spirit, she then came up with the idea of Black Business Boom website.
“I’ve tried for years, as I have had all these different businesses, to figure out what my passion was and I couldn’t figure out what my passion was. So, eventually it finally hit me that my passion was helping other business owners and talking about their businesses and helping their businesses to grow. The business kind of came together as a marrying of my love for helping business owners and my love of marketing. So I went home one night and was laying there and was thinking ‘I have to find a way to help Black business owners that are struggling like I have struggled’ and it literally just came to me late one night. “
The website features a breakdown of what Black Business Boom is about, how you can support the movement and how businesses can be a part of the website so your business can offer coupons and things of that nature, but the absolute biggest feature is the Boomin app that accompanies the website.
The app allows you to discover local and nearby Black-owned businesses along with save money with coupons for Black businesses, earn bonuses for being a loyal Black business supporter and can even let you know when you are near a Black business with Blasts on your cell phone.
While McGee more of the services of the app are tailored around brick and mortar businesses, she also does have over 100 online businesses so you can download the app and get coupons for online businesses. And rest assured, this app will be expanding to cities near you says McGee.
“We will quickly be expanding to other cities. We just had to get all the kinks worked out here in Nashville (test market). We will be expanding literally to ten different cities by the end of this year. We are currently looking at Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, D.C. and St. Louis right now. Those are kind of the top right now on the list. But we are letting our consumers drive that and really looking at where our users are.
And for those that would like to assist in growing the brand with Danielle, she has something for you too.
“We are also recruiting what we are calling Boombasadors. Those Boombassadors will help us to bring the app to their cities. So, for example, if they are able to go out and identify maybe 20 Black-owned businesses that may be interested, then we will work with the to actually pay them to help us expand into that city.”
Danielle’s main goals with this venture are to not only get more people to spend Black but also help Black-owned businesses to have a digital marketing strategy.
To find out more information about Black Business Boom, please check out the www.blackbusinessboom.com . As far as the app, Boomin, it is available on Apple app store, Google Play or www.boominbiz.com .
