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Let's talk about this, the rollback of DI, the rollback of corporate involvement with black organizations. You are in the crossfires of that because you work with a lot of corporations and you have a black event, right, Yeah? Has that impacted you? What's your thoughts on this? Because a lot of time people just hear this, but it doesn't
really matter if it doesn't impact you personally. So you, as somebody that's operating at a high level and have a lot of corporate relationships, what's your thoughts on everything that's been happening.
Yeah, you know, our business is over forty million in revenue. Half of it is aprotech, half of it is media. So on the media side, revenue is up. Like all these consumer advertisers are completely like cappin when it comes to D and I, like it's very much a political fodder. But when it comes to their bottom line and their top line, you have to invest in black audiences and consumers like we are where growth is, multiculturals, where growth is.
They already have the white consumers, so they can't put their foot off the gas and not advertise to us. Now how they advertise that shifts slightly. But actually the tariffs are having a bigger impact on the media business than the D and I executive orders really, So yeah, so the D and I executive order was basically saying
like you can't have preferential treatment. So all the programs and you know, these big commitments of we're going to spen one hundred million dollars on black old media, like they were honoring those anyways, So nothing really changed, Like you are already going to spend what you were going to spend with me, regardless of what you said you were going to do, so nothing changed from our end
for the tariffs. The tariffs require people to be more risk averse because they're not quite sure what's going to happen. And Trump is changed in his mind constantly, I mean literally Friday afternoon, like dude, what are you doing? You know, So there, when people become unstable, they become more risk averse. They become slower, you know, they slower with payment terms, They're slower with are we going to release this product line?
Are we not going to release this product line. Advertising is tied to campaigns and launches, so things get held up because things are stuck in the ports or whatever. That impacts how much they're willing to spent on advertising those products and services.
That's interesting, I mean, and the other side of it, and we've seen it as well, especially in media, when there's uncertainty, when people are unsure, then they go to trusted sources for news. Have you seen an uptick obviously in your space during this I don't even know this one hundred days, yeah, right.
Exactly, traffic stuff. I mean, media companies do well under Trump because these chaos you kind of have to you have to stay involved, and because people know they can't trust mainstream media anymore. They're looking for alternative platforms, Like y'all. I mean, I'm sure your traffic on your YouTube is probably skyrocketing. I saw Martin.
He's good for business.
He's good for business. He's not good for society, but he is good.
Things. Thank you, thank you for drawing that line.
But I do think I mean, even Roland Martin, I think that like three hundred thousand subscribers in like ninety days. You know, these are crazy numbers, but it's because people are looking for reliable sources and people they trust that they know they're going to get the truth from.
Yeah. I saw that you began investing into the stock market at the age of thirteen, which I think is amazing.
What lessons from investing so.
Early have you taken into your media empire?
Mmm?
Cash is king. You know, the more cash you can sit on, the more you can take advantage when the moment strikes. You know, I've done three acquisitions in the last you know, five years of black owned businesses. The only reason we'll be able to do that is because we had cash waiting for a moment that made sense for us. And then the other thing is like when it comes to investing. And I've also raised venture funding, which you know, you guys have talked about quite a bit.
So I raised over twelve million dollars. You got to treat every dollar that you get as your last and you gotta figure out how you're gonna flip it. That's the same thing with investing. When you get those moments where you have unreasonable games, you got to take some chips off the table for sure. Do not get greedy, okay, And if we had listened to that, we all will
be doing really well right now. If we had sold in November December being like this is looking pretty darn good, and now that money would be worth basically sixty seventy percent more because the stocks are down. So you sold at the high, plus you're getting everything at the low. That's a double win.
So can you walk us through, like some of your acquisitions that you made, Yeah, for sure companies.
Yeah. The first one I bought was Traveloir So Travenoor was an Instagram brand. They had group trips, which was amazing. They did trips in Bahia and Johannesburg and Almafi Coast with little you know, Grandma's cooking pasta and stuff, and they had no media brand. Well, what we know is that black travelers have huge discretionary income and are like really growing because millennials and Gen Z we spend on
experiences way more than our parents did. So I was like, all right, how do I build out Blavity in a way where we're off of interest groups not just being black, but like what black people are interested in, and travel is one of them. So we bought Travel Noir that was like twenty seventeen. I talked about it in my book Rewriting Your Rules. And then the other brand that we bought was Shadow and Act, same but for entertainment
in Hollywood. You know, black people watch more TV than any other demographic in the country, and we just love TV and we love watching TV as an activity with other people, which is different. So that was the second
brand we bought. And then two years ago I bought a brand called R and B House Party, which is a traveling party series, so that we could build out blavity Fest, which is our new festival which will be in Atlanta at the end of May with two chains and Kirk Franklin and all types of programming around black wealth. So just starting out our experiential business on the blavity side, which is super important for our business.
Yeah, you reference the book, rewrite your rules, let's talk about it. You said, master yourself, master your method, master your growth. Break that down for us.
Yeah, you know, I'm from Saint Louis originally, and nobody really told me the game. What they told me was you work hard, you get a good job, you go to school the best education you can get, and like it should all work out. And that's just not true. Like there are so many people watching this where it's like you did all the things you like, had the good job, and you did all the things that you did what was right. And we're watching a system, more
so today than ever before. We're the people who are making the rules. They're making them for all of us to follow, but they're not even following them. So what do you do? You know, you have to decide for yourself how you want to interact in that kind of system. So this book is basically a framework to help you figure out, well, if success is it? Like do all these things and then you died this golden eag at the end, what is my definition of success? And how
do I get there? What is the strategy and the frameworks that I need to have in order to do it. So it really is a workbook and a playbook for people to be able to do that, you know, leveraging all the ups and downs with blavity and the things that I've done. But more importantly, like whether you're a career nine to five or an entrepreneur, like you can do what you want to do, but you have to define it for yourself.
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