Monthly Highlights

Solomon Luke founded Strategia Solutions in 1989 to offer cutting-edge technology solutions to small businesses, non-profit organizations, entrepreneurs, and the Federal Government. Today, the company is expanding into European markets and offering more Managed Services Provider (MSP) and cloud-based services to small businesses. The Foray Into Information Technology I got...

Laurin Kelly is the CEO of Battle Plan Strategic Consulting, a career consulting and project management firm based in Silver Spring, Maryland. She’s bringing her corporate experience to help women on the career track, impact-driven small businesses, and nonprofit organizations build processes that support their healthy growth and professional development....

Rockville-based Calming Ground Interiors blends a design aesthetic that emphasizes tranquility with the cultural elements that make each client’s outcome one-of-a-kind. To deliver personalized, beautifully designed living spaces, founder and CEO Tarsha McCrae, Associate ASID, begins each project with a simple question: what makes you happy with design? I moved to Rockville...

Dexter R. Merritt, Sr. started his side hustle, Positive Black Images, as a mail-order catalog business in Dallas, TX in 1989. During the 1990s and 2000s, they recruited independent sales representatives (Positive Black Images dealers) to sell their art prints at home shows nationwide. Today, they are a nationally recognized...

Black Viking Brewing is Montgomery County’s first and only black-owned beer company. Led by BBD member Shaun Taylor, the company started in August 2020 and launched its flagship beer – Zingabier – in October 2021. Today, Zingabier (a play on “Zinjibier”–the scientific name for ginger) – can be purchased all around the...

Khaleshia Thorpe-Price is an “imagination cultivator,” who transitioned from performing artist to teaching artist to entrepreneur with her Montgomery County-based company, Dramatic Play. She has worked in the field of arts education for over 20 years.  I’m a theater teaching artist.  I teach playwriting, storytelling, and creative drama. I do...

Charisma Leigh is a medical doctor originally from Sierra Leone who founded Bailah Home Care to provide optimum-quality home care to seniors in the southern communities of Montgomery County, Maryland.  My company is named after my father, who is a physician, researcher, and eminent professor in Sierra Leone. I’m also...

Festina Manly-Spain founded FMS Advisory to help small business owners master the numbers behind their business, and go from unsure to unstoppable! I am originally from Freetown, Sierra Leone. I came here with my family at 6 years old, fleeing a civil war. It was a pack-what-you-can-and-run situation. We traveled...

In her approach to photography, Chloe Bovia wants to bring more softness and gentleness into the world. People need a soft place to be. The Bovia & Co. brand aligns with the idea that “I see you and you’re welcome here.” Chloe Bovia and Bovia & Co. Photography I started...

Jamaican-born Joan Beckford and her husband opened a Caribbean grocery store in Montgomery County after working in insurance for 15 years. The store added a restaurant a year later. And Island Pride has been busy building a respected, home-grown brand ever since.  Island Pride’s Humble Beginnings We came from Jamaica...