1996 Ad

Black Enterprise, June, 1994 by Alma Hill

CYNTHIA JONES IS ONLY IN HER early thirties, but she's already won the contract of a lifetime. Olympic organizers selected her company, Jones Worley Design Inc., to help design graphics for the Summer Games. Her company is part of a team designing all the graphics related to the 1996 Olympics, including the medals, the Olympic torch, staff uniforms, banners and signage for the Olympic Stadium and various smaller competition venues.

And so, when the world descends on Atlanta for the 1996 Centennial Games, every visual Olympic image they see will be a partial product of her African-American-owned design company. "Defining |The Look of the Games' is one of the highest expectations we could set for the firm," says Jones, 32, an Atlanta native who co-founded Jones Worley Design in 1990.

BLACK BUSINESS IN THE GAMES

Jones Worley Design is one of many African-American firms--including several construction and manufacturing companies--awarded lucrative Olympic-related contracts. With the start of the Games two years away and several projects yet to be started, aggressive, qualified African-American businesses could still garner gold from the world's most prestigious athletic event.

The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) seems committed to ensuring that African-Americans receive a share of Olympic business. Through its Equal Economic Opportunity Program, ACOG more than doubled the rate of minority-owned businesses it contracts with. Over the last year, purchases with African-American females and businesses owned by minority males jumped from $7.2 million to $14.2 million. However, no African-Americans have received prime contracts.

Still, the Games haven,t been the cash cow vendors initially thought they would be. There are several reasons for this: Business opportunities are limited; ACOG doesn't advertise upcoming contracts; preparing a bid can cost a company more than $25,000; and negotiating a deal can take months. The committee seeks companies with a strong track record in their respective industries, sterling references and solid financial footing. ACOG also insists that all interested businesses be listed in its database. Because of the sheer volume, competition is stiff. As of late March, the computer listing contained 8,360 vendors, of which 1,806 were minority or female.

Some young start-up companies have found the myriad of requirements and selection criteria to be daunting, keeping them on the outside looking in at the bidding process. Rather than contracting directly with ACOG, many of these young companies have a better chance of subcontracting with a vendor who has an ACOG contract. "Getting through the system seems to be very difficult if you don't know your way through or have someone on the inside to vouch for you," says Atlanta Business League Chairman Nathaniel R. Goldston III, CEO of The Gourmet Companies., a 19-year-old BE 100s catering company based in Atlanta.

Mike Ajhar, ACOG's director of procurement and contract administration, agrees that it's sometimes easier for smaller companies to align themselves with larger ones. "If I were a printer and I wanted t o know about printing contracts, I would talk to the senior buyer," he says. "Once you do that you begin to establish a rapport and credibility. If you just sit back and wait for the call, it's probably going to be a long time to find that job."

ATLANTA TRIES HARDER

Since the 1990 announcement that Atlanta had beaten out Athens, Greece, for the right to host the Games, African-Americans have lobbied for a fair share of the billions of dollars expected to be generated by the first Summer Games in the United States in a dozen years. Atlanta officials have tried to avoid a repeat of what happened at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, where only a small portion of the money generated benefited minority contractors and African-Americans openly charged that they were prevented from sharing in the wealth.

From 1992 through March of 1994, the committee awarded $23.9 million in contracts to architects and engineers, with $10.7 million going to minority-owned companies. "Over 60% of the minority contractors were black," says Michael H. Rose, ACOG's construction division's senior project manager for minority- and female-owned businesses. "These kinds of numbers are absolutely unheard of in the private sector."

Minority contractors have been involved since the start of the massive Olympic construction project. The first construction contract ACOG awarded was for the Olympic Stadium; it was valued at $10.8 million for the early phases of the project.

Atlanta's Herman J. Russell, the country's largest African-American general contractor, was part of the team that won the $209 million Olympic Stadium contract. His BE 100s company formed a joint venture with another African-American owned company, C.D. Moody Construction, and with majority-owned Beers Construction. The team submitted a company profile for ACOG's database (a requirement for all interested businesses) almost a year before bidding on the project. It took another four months to negotiate the stadium contract, for the largest arena ACOG plans to build to stage the Games.