Business success by 30 - young entrepreneurs who have made early breakthroughs

Ebony, March, 1991 by Douglas C. Lyons

Butler didn't stop with beer. The very next year he bought a tobacco and wholesale food services firm in Houston. In 1986, he sold both businesses - at a tidy profit - and bought a chain of fast food restaurants in San Antonio. The next year, he sold his restaurant chain to become president of the Central Life Insurance Company of Florida, a Black company.

In 1989, Butler sold his stake in the life insurance company to buy WLTH-AM, an NBC affiliate, for $900,000.

Besides running the station, he produces syndicated radio programs, chairs the board of a public radio station in upstate New York, and searches the country for new business opportunities. "You don't have to be a millionaire to be successful in life," he says with a laugh. "You just have to have cash flow."

Juan Armando Minniefield developed his own "cash flow" problem seven years ago, when he was fired from his job at a Los Angeles clothing store.

For an employee whose weekly sales figures averaged around $4,000, the dismissal was hard to take. He convinced the store's owner to keep him, but learned an invaluable lesson. "At that point, I realized that I would never move up in the company," he says. "So I decided to learn everything I could about retail [for myself]."

Using his middle name exclusively, Armando began moonlighting, buying suits, ties, wallets and eventually mink coats from wholesalers and selling them to customers from the trunk of his car.

Armando made between $250 and $500 a day, and he used most of it to buy more merchandise. At one point, his sideline venture became so good that it threatened his main job. "It got so big that customers would come to the store and say, `Hey, you got my coat?'" he says. "The store officials thought I was stealing."

Armando quit his job in 1984 and used $10,000 he made from moonlighting to open Armando's Clothing Collection on a dead-end street in Inglewood, a Los Angeles suburb.

Imitating the posh retailers of Beverly Hills, Armando saw his customers by "appointment only" in a studio-like setting decorated with art posters, classic sculpture and African carvings. Many of his customers followed him to his new locale. But there were many days when business was just downright slow. "If I hadn't had credit cards and money saved up from my days of moonlighting, I probably would have gone out of business," he says.

He also had to win the trust of creditors. When he started the business, Armando paid his largest supplier in cash. After three years of timely payments, the manufacturer gave him a $100,000 line of credit, he says.

His trial by fire is apparently over. Last year, Armando's store grossed more than $500,000, and he opened his second store in the city's Baldwin Hills section. To hear him tell it, it's only the beginning. "There's that line from the movie Wall Street that has stuck with me," he says. "Money never sleeps."

PHOTO : Owning a thriving business came early in life for Lorenza P. Butler, the 30-year-old owner of WLTH-AM radio in Gary, Ind., and Yvonne E. White (below), a 28-year-old caterer and party planner in Los Angeles. Both have enjoyed heady success at a young age.