Sisters in charge: innovative women entrepreneurs

Ebony, March, 2002

She points out that the software program and others have helped ACT*1 take advantage of technology to remain current in helping clients with the bottom line.

Bryant Howroyd has an 18-year-old daughter, Katharyn, at the University of Southern California and a 17-year-old son, Brett, in high school. Both helped their mother get ACT*1 off the ground. Her husband, Bernard Howroyd, is also an entrepreneur who runs his own company in the L.A. area.

Eighty percent of Bryant Howroyd's time is spent outside the office cultivating and expanding her business relationships. She has received numerous business awards from various organizations and wants to use the attention lavished on her to encourage Black youngsters to focus on education.

The business is far more competitive than when she first entered it, she recalls. But she manages to keep ACT*1 at the forefront. "I always surround myself with the best people." Now, she spends both professional and personal time pushing Black youngsters to focus on education.

Looking back on her 24 years in the business, Bryant Howroyd says family and education helped her most, and that she believes those factors can help other women to achieve their goals.

Deryl McKissack Greene McKissack & McKissack of Washington Washington, D.C.

SHE was making a lot of money as executive assistant to the president of Howard University. But when she left to start her own architectural firm, Deryl McKissack Greene made only $3,000 during her first year of business and had to use her parents' credit card to buy groceries. "I cried every day," McKissack Greene recalls. "I had a bottle of Visine in my glove compartment because I didn't want my employees to see that I had been crying."

But hard work and persistence paid off in the end, and now McKissack & McKissack of Washington is a $20 million operation that handles more than $3 billion worth of projects within the Washington, D.C., area. A product of the famous McKissack family, which has run the Nashville firm of McKissack & McKissack since 1905, McKissack Greene has taken a family tradition started nearly a century ago and built one of the most prominent architectural firms on the East Coast. "I'm glad I did this by myself," says the company's president and CEO. "This is all mine. I can do what I want to do with this."

After graduating from Howard University with a civil engineering degree in 1983, McKissack Greene worked as an engineer and a construction manager before returning to Howard in 1988. As executive assistant to the president, she managed the 133 buildings and facilities on the university's Washington, D.C., campus and a capital budget of $200 million.

When she left Howard in 1990, she received a number of job offers, but none of them excited her. That's when she decided to start her own business with just $1,000. Though her background was more in engineering than in architecture, she banked on her family's reputation, which goes back five generations, to the pre-Civil War 1800s and rural Tennessee.