Janice Bryant Howroyd: Biography from Answers.com Mobile

Janice Bryant Howroyd

human resources manager; entrepreneur

Personal Information

Born Janice Bryant ca. 1953, in Tarboro, NC; married Bernard Howroyd (a business owner), 1983; children: Katharyn, Brett
Education: Earned degree from North Carolina A&T University.
Memberships: National Association of Women Business Owners; Urban League of Los Angeles, board of directors; Greater L.A. African American Chamber of Commerce, board of directors.

Career

Worked for the American Red Cross and the National Academy of Sciences, c. 1975-76; Billboard magazine, temporary secretary, 1976-77; ACT*1 Personnel Services, Beverly Hills, CA, founder and president, 1978-; founded other companies since 1978 including: firm that provided background checks and drug screening for employers; a travel agency; an electronic records maintenance company; two continuing education schools.

Life's Work

In 1978 Janice Bryant Howroyd founded ACT*1 Personnel Services, a temporary employment agency, in the Los Angeles area. Twenty-five years later, Howroyd's company was the largest of its kind owned by a woman of color in the United States. Howroyd started small, with just herself and a phone as the firm's only assets, but by 2003 had a company that took in revenues of $483 million from clients that included Ford Motor Co., Cingular Wireless, and the Gap. Its success, noted Denise Hamilton in a 1997 Los Angeles Times profile, "has been fueled in large part by the force of Howroyd's personality, which infuses every aspect of the business, motivating her staff with a zeal more common to the pulpit than the boardroom."

Howroyd was born in the early 1950s and grew up in Tarboro, North Carolina, as the fourth of eleven children in her family. The entrepreneurial streak in her family stretched back to her grandparents, who ran a makeshift barbeque restaurant out of their home. She later said that she learned much about running a business from her parents, who ran the 13-member household with efficiency and discipline. Her father was of Irish and Cherokee ancestry, and worked as a factory foreman; her mother was African American. As a teen, Howroyd was the first black student at her town's previously segregated high school. "On the first day of class, I listened to my teacher explain why Africans were so well suited to slavery and how we'd be much poorer as a society if we went any further with this affirmative action," she recalled in an interview with Black Enterprise writer Tamara E. Holmes. At home that night, she wept and begged her parents to not force her to return the next day. Her father, she told Holmes, informed her that she had three choices: he would go to the school and confront the teacher himself, she could enter the all-black high school across the street, or she could go back. Howroyd decided to return.

Howroyd landed a scholarship to North Carolina State Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, and earned an English degree from it. Her first jobs were with the American Red Cross and the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1976 she traveled cross-country to visit her sister, Sandy, in California. She liked it there and decided to stay, and her brother-in-law gave her a job in his office at Billboard magazine. "I started out as a temporary worker and they never wanted me to go," Howroyd told a writer for Ebony. "They were fascinated that I knew what needed to happen in an office." Someone suggested that she might turn this talent into a career, and Howroyd decided to start her own employment agency. While at Billboard, she realized most of the support staff were entertainment-industry hopefuls, and had taken the job simply to do some networking. Howroyd decided to start an employment agency that placed permanent workers who were not aspiring actors or screenwriters.

With $987 of her own savings, and $533 borrowed from her mother and brother, Howroyd rented a small office space with a Beverly Hills address for her ACT*1 Personnel Services and set up a telephone line. Her first client was Billboard, but she soon found others by calling businesses and offering to send them the right employees, and even promised to refund their money if her choice didn't work out. She also deployed what she called the WOMB strategy, as she told Ebony: "I call it WOMB because it's 'Word Of Mouth, Brother!'" Her small company grew quickly, and in 1981 she opened her first branch office. In 1984 she began taking on non-show business clients, and when widespread layoffs hit the entertainment industry, she moved into the temporary-employment field, which provided workers under contract on an as-needed basis. Ultimately, ACT*1 expanded into four divisions that provided temporary workers--engineering, entertainment, technical, and clerical.

Howroyd moved her company's headquarters to Torrance in 1990, and a decade later had offices in 75 U.S. cities. Its clients included automakers Ford and Toyota, as well as telecommunications giant Cingular Wireless and Sempra Energy, the largest utility in Southern California. Her company ventured into other service areas in the 1990s, most notably as a provider of e-business solutions. In a deal with computer-maker Silicon Graphics of Mountain View, California, for example, Howroyd's company created a time-keeping system that utilized swipe cards for all the temporary employees there, not just ACT*1's, which gave Silicon Graphics executives an accurate snapshot of their current staffing needs and costs. Howroyd also started a firm that provides background checks and drug screening for employers, a travel agency, and an electronic-records maintenance company. ACT*1's success even led to the establishment of two continuing-education schools that provide corporate training and distance-learning. "Our revenues come from various areas," she explained to Cassandra Hayes in a Black Enterprise interview in 1998. "Many people are determined and have the true grit attitude to run their own businesses, but that is not enough. At a certain point you must design your business and have a long-term plan."

ACT*1 grew steadily throughout the 1990s, at a rate of ten percent each year, but later that decade enjoyed phenomenal growth, as the need for high-tech workers increased with the booming economy. Moreover, temporary workers became an increasingly large part of the American work force, especially after the economy worsened in 2001. Revenues at Howroyd's company went from $75 million in 1997 to $483 million in 2002. Her headquarters now employs a staff of 300, and has 65,000 temporary workers under contract. She employs several family members, all of whom came to the company with their own skill sets in the corporate world. Her husband Bernard Howroyd, whom she married in 1983, owns his own staffing agency, and Howroyd's detractors sometimes claim that she has benefited from his business. "I was doing over $10 million in business when I married my husband in 1982," Howroyd pointed out in an interview with Hayes. "It's just hard for people to believe that an African American woman and her family can develop systems and do what we do on our own."

The Howroyds have two children, and the son and daughter own 49 percent of ACT*1; Howroyd holds the other 51 percent. For years, she balanced work and home by sleeping just four hours a night, as she told reporter Denise Hamilton in a 1997 Los Angeles Times profile. "I get jet-lagged if I get any more than that," she claimed. Her role models have been her mother and Madam C.J. Walker, the early-twentieth-century hair-care mogul. In Southern California, she is involved in the Los Angeles Urban League and various social charities, including a mentorship program at a school district. On her own, Howroyd has created an endowment fund for college scholarships for high schoolers in her hometown back in North Carolina, and chaired a capital campaign at her alma mater, North Carolina A&T State University.

In a 2003 Black Enterprise article about the growing number of African-American women running companies, Howroyd's company was No. 3 on the magazine's top black-owned Industrial/Service companies in America. The magazine put the dynamic CEO on its cover, with the caption "She's the Boss," for the August feature story. Her company's credo has always been "Keeping the Humanity in Human Resources," and she expanded on this idea further in an interview with San Diego Business Journal writer Eric Forst. "Never compromise who you are personally to become who you wish to be professionally," she asserted. "That means you only do business with a company you'd send a relative to, and you look to work with companies you can get repeat business from.... One-night stands don't work in personal lives, and they don't work in business either."

Awards

Minority Enterprise Development Week Achievement Award, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1992; AT & T Entrepreneur of the Year, 1994.