This week on The Urban Business Roundtable, UBR contributor Renita Young speaks with home decor and design company CEO Tina Shoulders, founder of Laidback, about how she took her products from boutiques in Brooklyn, N.Y., to shops in Japan.
Laidback is known for pillows, bedding and home accessories inspired by pop culture, featuring funky styles for urban living. Shoulders launched her company in 2007 and her designs have appeared on television shows including MTV’s Real World: Brooklyn and ABC’s Ugly Betty. In addition to producing popular home decor products, Shoulders has made her mark as an entrepreneurial innovator, aggressively using the Internet and social media as marketing tools and pursuing opportunities to export her offerings to global markets.
READ: Tina Shoulders’ “4 Steps to Taking Your Business Global”
Also on this week’s edition of The Urban Business Roundtable, our Executive Producer TaQuoya Kennedy speaks with Nikita Johnson about what business owners need to do to stay on top of filing their taxes. Johnson, a certified public accountant who holds an M.B.A. from DePaul University and a PhD in educational leadership from National Louis University, is a finance and operations expert as well as an entrepreneur herself. As co-owner of the floral design and event decor services company Panache Events Inc. Johnson joins the roundtable to share how entrepreneurs can get through tax season with fewer headaches and more tax breaks.
In addition, every week on UBR, you’ll get motivation and inspiration from author and entrepreneurial icon Farrah Gray, a weekly wrap-up of business news from USA Today Business Correspondent Charisse Jones, our Patient Investor Report from Ariel Investments and key economic intelligence for small business owners from our UBR Economists Derrick Collins and Rasheed Carter. And finally, I’ll share what I learned when I spoke with Randal Pinkett and Jeffrey Robinson, authors of the new book Black Faces in White Places: 10 Game-Changing Strategies to Achieve Success and Find Greatness, about the game-changing strategies Black entrepreneurs will need to succeed. I’ll also be sharing a special discount code that will allow UBR listeners to knock more than 50% off of the cost of registration for the Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference, slated for May 22-25, 2011 in Atlanta.
If you have a question you want answered or a topic you want addressed on The Urban Business Roundtable, send me an e-mail at edmonda@blackenterprise.com or to me at Twitter or Facebook.
Alfred Edmond Jr. is the senior VP/editor-at-large of Black Enterprise and the host of the Urban Business Roundtable, a weekly radio show, sponsored by Ariel Investments, airing CST Wednesdays at 8:30 a.m., Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 9:30 a.m. on WVON-AM 1690, the Talk of Chicago. You can also listen live online at WVON.com. Check back each Wednesday for The UBR Morning Post, which features additional resources, advice and information from and about the topics, entrepreneurs and experts featured on the show.