NY Amsterdam News: Inspiring moments at HBA’s ninth annual Economic Summit
By HERB BOYD and DANIYA L. SANUSI
Derek Dingle is a con-summate storyteller who gathers his inspiration mainly from legends of the past—notables such as the late John Johnson, the founder of Black Enterprise magazine, A.G. Gaston and Earl Graves, where Dingle has been mainstay and ed-itor-in-chief. “Sometimes you have to look to the past to find your inspiration,” Dingle said, taking full measure of his panel’s theme, “Inspiration.” Dingle, introduced by Maria Gran-ville, followed welcoming remarks from Walter Edwards and Regina Smith, chair and executive director of the Harlem Business Alliance, re-spectively, hosting their ninth annual economic summit. There were also opening comments from Henrietta Lyle, chair of Manhattan Communi-ty Board 10, and Khalil Gibran Mu-hammad, director of the Schomburg Center, where the event was held. His long association with Black En-terprise, Dingle continued, gave him the entrepreneurial impetus to co-found Milestone Media Comics and set the stage for Black superheroes. “What we have to learn to do is to le-ve•age our properties and proper-ly market them,” Dingle said. And having a few resourceful business partners doesn’t hurt, he chuckled. Partnership, which would ring like a mantra throughout the sessions, was certainly a point stressed by Ember Media’s Clayton Banks during his time at the podium. Banks, like Dingle, is a very impressive speaker with tons of information about how to survive in business. in fact. he came armed with a Pow-
Derek Dingle at the podium; Clayton Banks and Maria Granville seated (Herb Boyd photo)
erPoint presentation that listed his “10 Commandments for Small Busi-nesses.” “Thou shall not work for free,” Banks intoned on the second of the commandments. Once you start doing this, he warned, you’ll be on the way to selling yourself cheap and reaping what your talent says you should earn. The second half of the Harlem Busi-ness Economic Summit jumped into high gear with panelist Julian Rob-erts of the JRSportBrief, a self-styled sports guru and host of one of the fastest growing sports vlogs (a video blog) on the Internet. Roberts started the vlog on You-Tube in 2009 as a way to express his thoughts and opinions on hot sports topics and to interact with other sports fans.
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