Nia Long shares the business lessons she learned from her grandmother
TheGrio...
The actress is encouraging Black business owners to embrace patience, build community and focus on what they can create.
Nia Long has spent decades building a career in Hollywood, but she recently turned her attention toward another kind of builder: Black entrepreneurs.
As part of a partnership with Intuit QuickBooks and Mailchimp, Long helped celebrate three recipients of the company’s Small Business Hero Program, each of whom received a $20,000 grant to support their businesses. The moment also gave Long an opportunity to reflect on the lessons about entrepreneurship she learned growing up.
For Long, that education started with her grandmother, a hairstylist who immigrated to the United States from Trinidad and was born in Grenada. Her grandmother began doing hair in the family’s Brooklyn kitchen before eventually opening a salon.
“She was a small business owner,” Long told BLACK ENTERPRISE. “I remember she would come home and her feet would be achy, but she would still make us dinner and make sure we were taken care of.”
That example shaped how Long views ownership — not simply as a way to make money, but as a way to create opportunity and strengthen communities.
“There’s a lot of pride in owning something and doing something that no one else is doing,” she said. “There’s growth, economic development within the community, and you’re inspiring your children to take chances on themselves.”
Long also understands that building a business can be a slow process.
At the July event, she offered entrepreneurs a reminder that success does not necessarily arrive on the timeline they want.
“There has to be a period of planting, a period of harvest, and so those things don’t come overnight,” Long said.
But patience does not mean ignoring the very real obstacles Black entrepreneurs face. The founders featured by BLACK ENTERPRISE spoke about challenges including limited access to capital, the difficulty of scaling and having to handle nearly every aspect of their businesses themselves.
Long’s advice is to remain focused on building rather than dwelling on what is missing.
“If we keep thinking about what we don’t have, then we’re spending less time on what we can build,” she said.
And her message to Black entrepreneurs is ultimately simple: “Keep going. You have to keep going. There is a lane for you, there is a place for you, and there is a purpose for you.”