Hundreds of business leaders gathered at the Time Warner Center last week, for the 2018 Business Opportunity Exchange, an annual event held by the New York-New Jersey Minority Business Council.
The membership group, focused on promoting diversity and partnerships between minority businesses and corporations, is making a renewed effort to help constituents.
This year, the council called on André Taylor, chief executive of Manhasset-based Taylor Insight Worldwide LLC, to deliver the luncheon keynote.
Taylor, an entrepreneur with decades of experience, and a popular keynote speaker delivered a message that both challenged and uplifted those in attendance.
“This is a very different marketplace on multiple levels,” Taylor said. “While demographics suggest that a focus on diversity and partnering with minority business is a sound strategy for large corporations, there’s less emphasis today on this from a policy perspective and certainly less emphasis in political circles.”
He urged corporate leaders to recognize the inherent opportunities in working with diverse businesses that “may have a better read on changes impacting your industry.”
Taylor also pushed minority businesses to get better: “Remember, entrepreneurship is a game of connecting with the market — and most markets reflect favorable numbers in terms of end-user growth, the range of potential customers, and their increased preference to engage and buy from diverse providers.
That means it’s about raising your skill level in terms of sales and marketing, your personal motivation and work ethic, and your ability to innovate to meet the market need.”
The NY-NJ Minority Business Council is part of the National Council which has 23 affiliate regional offices across the country and more than 12,000 minority businesses as members.
The objective of the group is to certify minority businesses, confirming their capacity to support corporations as vendors in a wide range of categories and then facilitate engagement and vendor relationships from more than 1,750 corporate members across the country.
Major corporations like Apple, Major League Baseball, MetLife, and this year’s host, Time Warner, are members of the council.
More information about the group can be found at nynjmsdc.org.
