How Janice Bryant Howroyd Turned $900 and a Rug Store Into a Billion-Dollar Company

In 1978, Janice Bryant Howroyd started a staffing company in the back of a Beverly Hills rug store with a phone line and a $900 loan from her mother.

Howroyd grew up in Tarboro, North Carolina, one of 11 children. She was the first Black student at her town's formerly segregated high school and went on to earn an English degree at North Carolina A&T State University. She has said entrepreneurship ran in her family long before it came with a license. Her grandmother sold barbecue from her dining room table.

Together with her savings, that loan put her starting cash at about $1,500. She opened Act-1 Personnel Services and kept building. Revenue climbed from $75 million in 1997 to $483 million in 2002, and she later became the first African-American woman to build and own a billion-dollar company.

One decision tells you a lot about her. A client once offered to buy her company's technology. Her brother urged her not to sell it, and she kept going, keeping the thing that made her business valuable.

Today, ActOne Group operates in 47 countries with more than 28,000 clients and 2,600 employees. It calls itself the largest privately held, woman- and minority-owned workforce management company in the U.S. The work spans three verticals: staffing, workforce solutions, and business services. Its newest product, Aria Agentic, is an AI offering that the company says keeps people at the center of key decisions.

Her values are on the record too. She lives by a mantra of Faith, Family, Fortune, in that order. She wrote two books, Acting Up and The Art of Work, and hosts a podcast called Ask JBH. She co-founded BH2STREAM, a charter school in her hometown of Tarboro, and in 2016 she was appointed to the President's Board of Advisors on HBCUs.

Here's what I take from her story:

• You don't need perfect conditions, just a clear offer and a phone line.
• Keep ownership of the thing that makes you valuable.
• Education and community are part of the business, not a side project.

Staffing, at its heart, is matchmaking: connecting people with opportunity. Howroyd has done that for more than 40 years. At IndeedBlack, we're trying to do our own version, connecting Black candidates with Black-owned companies.

Learn more about her company at actonegroup.com. Janice Bryant Howroyd, known as JBH, is the founder and CEO.