“I had to make my own living and my own opportunity. But I made it! Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them!”
— Madam CJ Walker
There are entrepreneurs who inherit businesses, entrepreneurs who spot opportunities and entrepreneurs who create opportunities where none seem to exist.
Madam CJ Walker belonged firmly to the third category.
Born Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana in 1867, she came into the world just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. Her parents were formerly enslaved people who worked as sharecroppers on a cotton plantation. She was orphaned while still a child and had very little formal education.
As a young woman, she worked as a laundress, washing clothes for other people for a meagre income. Yet within a few decades, she would build a beauty and hair-care business, employ thousands of women, become a prominent philanthropist and be recognised as America's first self-made female millionaire.
Her journey from the wash-tub to a business empire is remarkable. But the more interesting story is how she got there.
Walker did not begin with a grand business plan. While living in St Louis, where she worked as a laundress, she developed a scalp condition and suffered hair loss. At the time, African-American women had relatively few products specifically designed for their hair and scalp needs.
She began experimenting with treatments for herself.
That experience eventually introduced her to Annie Turnbo Malone, an established African-American hair-care entrepreneur. Walker worked as a sales agent for Malone and learned an invaluable lesson: a good product was only the beginning. You also needed to understand customers, demonstrate the product and build a distribution system.
In 1905, Walker moved to Denver and began developing and selling her own hair-care products. She adopted the name Madam CJ Walker and launched what would become the Madam Walker brand.
Her famous product, Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower, was not simply something she put on a shelf and hoped people would buy. She demonstrated her products, trained women to use them and built a network of sales agents.
She had found a market that was largely being ignored — and then built a business around it.
This is perhaps the most modern aspect of Walker's business story. She did not want merely to sell bottles of hair products. She wanted to build a network of women who could earn their own money by selling them.
Walker trained thousands of women as sales agents, often called “Walker agents”. Her organisation eventually had a network of about 20,000 saleswomen.
At a time when economic opportunities for African-American women were severely restricted, this was transformative.
The women who joined her organisation were not simply employees. They became salespeople, hair-care specialists and, in many cases, small business owners.
Walker understood something that remains central to successful businesses today: a product becomes much more powerful when customers can see themselves inside the business built around it.
One of Walker's most memorable descriptions of her life came in 1912, when she addressed the National Negro Business League.
“I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South,” she said. “From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.”
The phrase “I promoted myself” captures Walker's philosophy. Nobody had handed her a career ladder. She had effectively built one herself.
She eventually established a factory in Indianapolis and expanded her business into a range of beauty products and training programmes. She also created opportunities for women to learn hair-care skills and earn incomes of their own.
Walker did not see business success simply as a way to become wealthy. As her fortune grew, she became increasingly involved in philanthropy and social causes. She supported educational institutions, scholarships and organisations serving African-American communities. She also contributed to the YMCA and the NAACP and supported campaigns against racial violence.
Her philanthropy reflected another dimension of her business philosophy: economic independence could give people the power to influence the world around them.
She once said: “I am not satisfied in making money for myself. I endeavour to provide employment for hundreds of the women of my race.”
Madam CJ Walker died in 1919 at just 51. Her life was short, but her achievements were extraordinary. She had started as an orphaned child born to formerly enslaved parents, worked as a laundress and eventually created a business empire that generated more than $5,00,000 in annual sales in the final year of her life, according to historical accounts.
But perhaps her greatest business lesson is contained in that simple sentence: “I had to make my own living and my own opportunity.”
For entrepreneurs, opportunity is often imagined as something that arrives — a lucky break, a generous investor, the right contact or a favourable market. Walker offers a different way of looking at it.
--Sometimes the opportunity is hidden inside a problem you understand better than anybody else.
--Sometimes the market is the group of customers nobody has bothered to serve.
--And sometimes the first person who has to believe in the opportunity is you.
Don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them.